Situationism

[dilbert1]

“It is true that I have tasted pleasures little known to people who have obeyed the lamentable laws of this era.”

including enough alcohol to give yourself polyneuropathy

 

[version]

Finished it earlier. Bizarre book. I had to stop and think what, if anything, I actually learned from it. The very particular translator's notes and printing instructions in the back are intriguing too, as well as his usual thing of claiming there's some sort of hidden meaning or message within the text based on what's been left out, how it's arranged and every sentence having multiple meanings.

 

[dilbert1]

@version from the essay I attached

Debord’s embrace of aristocratic cultural fragments aptly draws its inspiration from that constellation of thinking so central to Walter Benjamin, in which a seemingly unrelated and anachronistic assortment of various details together gives meaning to a whole.

I think he was mostly stylistically aping Italian Renaissance figures, an extreme egotism and acculturated disdain, a penchant for the grandiosely historical, erudite obscurantism, etc. Specifically, as the author points out, Baldessarre Castiglione and Baltasar Gracián. There is also his preoccupation with the 17th century Baroque, which the essay discusses in its (I think) most interesting part.

A kind of formalized snobbery is weirdly coherent when considering the centrality of ‘play’ to the situationist project.

It is with [Johan] Huizinga particularly that we discover a dimension to Debord’s sensibilities inseparable from the ‘play instinct’ of ceremony and other forms of aristocratic conduct. For Huizinga, all human culture arises in the form of play through which society expresses for itself an interpretation of the world. Conduct of chivalry, braggadocio, costume, etiquette and ritual in the 14th and 15th centuries of France and the Netherlands, for example, had an unmistakable quality of play about them. ‘This is not the ordinary world of toil and care, the calculation of advantage or the acquisition of useful goods’ (Huizinga, 2016: 60). Within such a world, there was a tendency to give style to almost everything, with a certain dignity of ritual to be found in the most mundane activities, themselves saturated by a plethora of formalities yet now raised to the height of a sublime dream. Exclusively allotted to the leisure of an aristocratic class, we nevertheless find here an effort to decorate life with ‘an epic or idyllic colour’ (Huizinga, 1924: 30) in order to showcase its exemplariness. Poetical admonitions on the idea of true nobility were given ceremonial consecration that overflowed with aesthetic value. Even meals were dignified ceremonies on par with liturgical observance, a far cry from any chicken and fries readily available. These flamboyant elements of the aristocratic legacy, always strengthened by their exaggeration, denoted a rich adornment of life, scrupulously observed and, to our eyes, almost childlike in its ludicrousness, yet nevertheless conducted against a vicious and barbaric social existence, veiling a cruel reality under an apparently harmonious life construed as an artwork itself.

 

[IdleRich]

“It is true that I have tasted pleasures little known to people who have obeyed the lamentable laws of this era.”

I always forget who said that, was it Jimmy Saville or Fred West?

 

[version]

He's got a few zingers in his Lebovici response.

'Their enumeration of what I "hate" only proves more clearly my lucidity and my good taste.'

 

[version]

That paper @dilbert1 posted about Debord's aristocratic pretensions drastically reconfigured my view of him. His writing makes so much more sense from that perspective.

 

[craner]

More people should read Johan Huizinga.

 

[version]

Yeah but, like, why?

 

[dilbert1]

@version Glad you found that essay illuminating. A couple years ago Russell published a book on Debord, Spectacular Logic, based on his PhD dissertation, probably more philosophical but corrective of the fact that the Hegelian aspect of Debord’s thought seems to go underappreciated. I’ve yet to read it but will at some point.

The independent journal Russell started a few years back, whose various contributions mingle the thought of Debord, Adorno, Lasch, Freud and Marx, is also very worth checking out. Probably above all a paean to Adorno, though. The entire second volume could be looked at as an epic mixtape of Adorno citations. The journal is premised on the idea that everyone today is ‘illiterate’. A nice review of that volume can be found here: https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/re...-john-russell-eds-reviewed-by-benjamin-crais/

 

[version]

I read an old Hussey article on writing his biography of Debord and the back and forth with his widow and various ex-Situationists was Pythonesque. One minute they were sending him threats, the next they were inviting him round after he published a positive review of Alice's poetry.

Alice wrote to me to tell me that an article I had written defending these "exiles" was so bad that she was surprised it had not caused my computer to crash. All communication stopped. I was now an enemy, an "agent of the spectacle".

the guardian.com/books/2001/jul/28/biography.artsandhumanities

 

[dilbert1]

Such drama queens. And the idea that suicide is a ‘revolutionary act’ is so utterly lame. The entire bohemian, antinomian, anti-social character of Debord and the SI is perhaps the most relevant but to me least interesting aspect of their thought. For all their puffed up pearl clutching and attempts to preempt the distortion of their work, this entire flashy self-important attitude and contrived air of mystique invited as much. That Debord and his ilk were masters of insult and denunciation certainly bears on the substance of their intellectual project, but I’ve always been curious above all about the philosophical pedigree of their arguments. They deserve a serious interlocutor like Russell, but only just as much as they do supposed ‘recuperators’ like McLaren or Hussey. I’ve never read that thing Debord wrote on Lebovici which you linked, will have to check that out.

 

[version]

His response re: Lebovici's interesting as it's a given you can't trust the press and they probably were chucking all sorts of shit at him, but Debord himself isn't exactly reliable. You're left with this odd rant that leaves you none the wiser as to what really happened and operates more as a sort of case study of Debord's relationship with the French press.

 

[version]

Such drama queens. And the idea that suicide is a ‘revolutionary act’ is so utterly lame. The entire bohemian, antinomian, anti-social character of Debord and the SI is perhaps the most relevant but to me least interesting aspect of their thought. For all their puffed up pearl clutching and attempts to preempt the distortion of their work, this entire flashy self-important attitude and contrived air of mystique invited as much. That Debord and his ilk were masters of insult and denunciation certainly bears on the substance of their intellectual project, but I’ve always been curious above all about the philosophical pedigree of their arguments. They deserve a serious interlocutor like Russell, but only just as much as they do supposed ‘recuperators’ like McLaren or Hussey. I’ve never read that thing Debord wrote on Lebovici which you linked, will have to check that out.

The infighting, threats and posturing I find funny in short bursts, but irritating and just noise, really. The thing that pulled me in was the idea of The Spectacle and the thing that's currently keeping me interested is Debord's prose. I like the compression and elusiveness of it. Similar to what draws me to DeLillo and Beckett. Short sentences. Cryptic imagery. Flashes of lucidity. A strong voice.

He'd probably take issue with it as it doesn't seem to have been his intention, but I thought of him reading this from Baudrillard.

Cipher, do not decipher. Work over the illusion. Create illusion to create an event. Make enigmatic what is clear, render unintelligible what is only too
intelligible, make the event itself unreadable. Accentuate the false transparency of the world...

The absolute rule is to give back more than you were given. Never less, always more. The absolute rule of thought is to give back the world as it was given to us -- unintelligible. And, if possible, to render it a little more unintelligible.

 

[DannyL]

He's got a few zingers in his Lebovici response.

'Their enumeration of what I "hate" only proves more clearly my lucidity and my good taste.'

Sounds like a quote from Thirdform

 

[version]

When they appeared before a sympathetic audience at the London ICA in the 1960s, a Belgian situationist with poor English made an incomprehensible speech, ending on a characteristically menacing note: you think you have come to judge us, he warned his listeners, but we have come to judge you. "But what is situationism?", a hapless member of the audience wanted to know. That was it for Debord. "We didn't come here to answer cuntish questions," he said, and stormed off to the pub.

As a young man Debord scratched Ne Travaillez Jamais ("never work") on the wall of the rue de Seine - now regarded as an early opus in the Debord canon - and in the usual sense of the word, he never did. Before becoming a successful copywriter, the formidably intelligent Michelle Bernstein supported them both by writing horoscopes for racehorses. Dining chez Debord some years later, a guest noticed that Debord's equally formidable second wife seemed to do all the washing-up. "She does the dishes," Debord explained simply. "I do the revolution."

 

[dilbert1]

There’s plenty to say here about reifying the oikos/polis dyad, and the ways in which subsequent developments in the Italian New Left (the feminists of Autonomia) exposed the degree to which a regressive sexual politics held sway in radical social movements. But immediately I am reminded of an account I read recently on related impasses of the George Floyd rebellion in May 2020, as reported by a female participant:

Protesting became labor, thus naturally, it largely reproduced the sexual division of labor. Almost automatically, we found ourselves doing ladies’ auxiliary shit. We mixed and packaged endless batches of sudecon, we bagged hundreds of lunches, we procured and distributed medical supplies, we cooked huge meals for the protest corps when they got home from their tough worknight posturing in front of a precinct. All the critiques we’ve made here, we made then; we tried to share them with our friends and coworkers who had been sucked into this political theater and pointlessly risked incarceration (and indefinite surveillance) for months after the insurrection died. But of course, we were just girls who read too much, thought too much, and talked too much, party-poopers who didn’t get the importance of their militancy, or maybe just didn’t have the balls for it, and should stay in the kitchen and ‘help the movement,’ or shut up and go away.

[…]

What happened to our coworkers is precisely what party-people view as the ideal outcome of a struggle, and simply wish to see repeated on a larger scale: formerly apolitical proles (delinquents, felons, non-voters) were ‘politicized’ — they acquired political understanding… But “political understanding is just politicalunderstanding because its thought does not transcend the limits of politics. The sharper and livelier it is, the more incapable it is of comprehending social problems” (Marx). This political doubling of proletarian consciousness was not an issue of individual ‘upward mobility’ out of the class; our coworkers’ real social situation remained unchanged — we all still work in the same shitty warehouse — but they started living in an illusory political world over and against it, in which the busyness of their dutiful activity and the imagined might of their revolutionary will served to distract from, obscure, and compensate for, their own ongoing daily humiliation [and] impotence…

 

[version]

Debord would be proud of this one on Negri,

"There is no need to refute Negrism. The facts do all the work."

 

[dilbert1]

@version are you reading This is not a Program? I don’t know what Debord thought of Negri, but I know on the whole he was unenthusiastic about the situation in Italy in the 1970s, which Tiqqun shits on him for, as though his being so prevented the outbreak of worldwide revolution.

 

[version]

@version are you reading This is not a Program? I don’t know what Debord thought of Negri, but I know on the whole he was unenthusiastic about the situation in Italy in the 1970s, which Tiqqun shits on him for, as though his being so prevented the outbreak of worldwide revolution.

Read it the other day; reading Introduction to Civil War now. And yeah, they seem to think people should focus on '77 rather than '68.

Not particularly convinced by them, but they have their moments. I preferred the second essay in TINAP where they talk about The Apparatus and how stealing makes you aware of your environment and snaps you out of being Bloom:

There is nothing mysterious about why Blooms submit so overwhelmingly to apparatuses. Why, on certain days, at the supermarket, I don't steal anything; whether because I am feeling too weak or I am just lazy: not stealing provides a certain comfort. Not stealing means completely disappearing in the apparatus, means conforming to it in order to avoid the violence that underlies it: the violence between a body and the aggregate of employees, surveillance personnel, and, potentially, the police. Stealing compels me to a presence, to an attention, to expose my bodily surface to an extent that, on certain days, it is just too much for me. Stealing compels me to think my situation. And sometimes I don't have the strength. So I pay; I pay for sparing myself the very experience of the apparatus in all of its hostile reality. I pay with my right to absence.

I can see why some people really don't like them. They're very 'angry young man' sort of stuff. Everyone else is a sheep. We're going to war. Etc. I read a particularly negative review where someone called them fascists and compared them to Fight Club and I could kind of see their point. They weren't keen on the use of Schmitt and Heidegger either, for obvious reasons.

Apparently they're some form of insurrectionary anarchism, which makes me question why you'd write inscrutable philosophical tracts. How you gonna end up at a non-hierarchical thing when you set yourself up so only a handful of people understand what you're on about?

 

[dilbert1]

@version I **was** **particularly** convinced by their stuff for a while, but the tapestry of inscrutable philosophy stuff is what really sucked me in and then eventually left me a bit cold. The patent corniness was always something I tried to look past, as the deluge of literary references and provocative Foucault citations convinced me that they must be deeper than something like Crimethinc. I don’t necessarily mind a bit of esotericism, but since that time and after a lot of reading I recognized their thought and politics as for my taste (which certainly evolved as a result of this investigation) far too antinomian, antisocial, atavistic, illiberal and ‘ethical’… pretty much all the worst aspects of the New Left, which their sardonic dunking on ‘68 and embrace of its further degeneration in the following decade only proves. The bit at the end of The Coming Insurrection with the rocket-launcher attack, along with so many of their other base appeals to nihilist exuberance, really brings to mind the hopelessly self-righteous guerrilla group in Children of Men.

Don’t get me wrong, as I wrote here recently, as a kind of aesthetic document of y2k cultural and political inertia (in the same way you might look at Crass or Throbbing Gristle in their moments), I find the journal beautiful and intriguing. I really prefer the first issue; “What is Critical Metaphysics?”, “Silence and Beyond,” “Theses on the Imaginary Party” and “Theory of Bloom” are some of the more interesting theoretical excursions. “The Cybernetic Hypothesis” I found disappointing, just watch The Net by Lutz Dammbeck.

If you’re curious at some point, I would really highly recommend reading these two critical pieces which highlight the rather under-appreciated religious motifs and eschatological logic of Tiqqun’s project.

The first is a general critique of the journal immediately subsequent to the release of the first issue, focusing on the Heideggerianism and nihilism, but it also delves deep into the Kabbalist aspect. It is written by other Frenchmen and so the tone is amusingly similar in its polemics, but its coherent, and the best and most comprehensive critique I’ve ever read of their stuff (I’ve read every critique/commentary I could find on them), and on the level of thought rather than picking apart the Tiqqun “type” (which the article also just happens to identify as “bullshitting college kids” lol).

Avant-garde and Mission

D. Caboret — P. Garrone Avant-garde and Mission 1999

theanarchistlibrary.org

This second article, very recent, focuses solely on the Kabbala stuff, but in much more detail (and more sympathetically). Apparently around the time of the journal the group would summon their metaphysical shoplifting powers to procure pasta for Agamben to cook them, as over dinner he discussed Jewish mysticism’s influence on his contemporaneous book project, The Coming Community.

Jewish Esotericism in the Theories and Practices of Emancipation: The Case of the Ephemeral Journal Tiqqun (1999-2001) - Jews, Europe, the XXIst century

In the early 2000s, a radical left-wing magazine referred to the Kabbalah tradition and took a Hebrew name: Tiqqun. The magazine only had two issues, but it constituted the matrix of the Invisible Committee (collective author of The Coming Insurrection) of which Julien Coupat, arrested during...

k-larevue.com