Situationism

V

version

Well-known member
dilbert1 said:
This is happening in extreme proximity to me this coming Sunday. I’m a fan of Russell’s writing as evidenced by how much of it I post here, but attending might be a bridge too far even for me

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Do these sorts of events not feel really odd, like attending a medieval reenactment society?
 
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V

version

Well-known member
That John Barker piece made some good points re: secretive groups like the Situationists and Tiqqun,

It is not so extraordinary to see the trial as one of the few achievements of the AB and acheived precisely because the AB was no longer clandestine. For democratic communists wanting the mass democracy of a knowledgeable, critically intelligent citizenry, secrecy is a contradiction in terms, exactly that Bolshevik-Bakuninist bullshit we detested in everyday life. The courtroom was made into an open forum by defendants defending themselves and the jury did me a massive favour, ten years instead of the allotted fifteen. It was before the first IRA bombs in London, true, but the jury saved me five years bang-up. After he'd given the verdicts and acquitted half of us, the nervous foreman stood up and said clearly that the jury asked for clemency on our behalf. Some fucking moment. It felt like a vindication of the politics, the critically intelligent citizenry in action even if I was sick to be going down at all.
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The many and various people who did AB things were not very comfortable with clandestinity, which is inevitably elitist when it doesn't come out of a mass movement. Looked at now this conclusion seems inescapable.
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sus

sus

Moderator
And I quote

"I don’t know if I can bring myself to go to something like that. Also @sus as far as meeting up IRL with an online friend, I’m already not inclined, but if I were to we’d need more rapport. Feels like you’re rushing things a bit ☝️😐"
 
shakahislop

shakahislop

Well-known member
@dilbert1 how often do you go to honey moon. coz now we know where you live. i went there once and it was quite striking, the usual coffee shop thing but not post-gentrification or even gentrification that had bedded in, but right up to the minute gentrification, happening right now, the exact edge of the rising tide. i hadn't exactly seen that with my own eyes before, that kind of outpost, i'd only seen it after the process had been going on for a while. that place had the added awkwardness you get in anywhere that has a bookish theme as well.
 
V

version

Well-known member
Sometimes it just feels like playing around with language and little more...

www.artforum.com

GUY DEBORD’S GAME OF WAR AND THE RADICAL SOFTWARE GROUP

IN APRIL OF THIS YEAR, an original silver-plated edition of the Game of War, a military-strategy board game released in 1977 by the founder of the Situationist International, Guy Debord,…
www.artforum.com www.artforum.com

In The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (2007), a book investigating the mechanisms of control in computer and biological networks that Galloway cowrote with Eugene Thacker, the authors advocate a shift from the concept of resistance, which is described as a “Clausewitzian mentality,” to “hypertrophy,” which they connect to a decidedly different persona from Debord—Roland Barthes. They quote Barthes: “There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present-day society: to retreat ahead of it.” Seen thus, the concept of resistance implicit in détournement may be less effective than a “hypertrophic” forward escape through those very technologies that the Situationists would presumably have scorned. Rather than working within the system by detourning cultural artifacts and drifting through a cyberspace defined by Internet protocols, the hypertrophic user becomes a programmer, working above content in the space of code. The point of contemporary opposition, according to Galloway and Thacker, is “not to destroy technology in some neo-Luddite delusion but to push technology into a hypertrophic state, further than it is meant to go.” If one accepts this argument, then RSG’s detourning of Debord would serve to point to its own futility.
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How can you push technology "further than it is meant to go"? Surely it goes however far it can be pushed? Why do these people think the things they suggest are subversive?
 
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