Situationism

[DannyL]

There's that astonishing sequence in De Palma's Hi, Mom! where a bunch of white liberals agree to take part in this radical black theatre troupe's performance and essentially get assaulted to the point you're unsure whether it's a performance at all then do an interview afterward saying how incredible it was and how they're going to recommend it to all their friends.

There's a bit in one of the Adam Curtis' docs where he talks about encounter groups and how angry black guys used to respond to white liberals trying to get in touch "the other" which is pretty hilarious.

 

[version]

That story about Atomwaffen Division being mired in infighting due to alleged infiltration by Order of Nine Angles was pretty funny.

Satanism Drama Is Tearing Apart the Murderous Neo-Nazi Group Atomwaffen

‘How do you allow [in] people who explicitly say they are satanic doomsday cultists who infiltrate right-wing groups in order to press their agenda?’ one frustrated neo-Nazi asked.

www.thedailybeast.com

"Atomwaffen’s satanism-heavy reading list has apparently driven away some former members who were only in the group for the Nazism."

😂

Reminds me of the story about Nazis getting a showing of Scorpio Rising pulled by the Hollywood vice squad because they thought sticking the swastika next to a bunch of gay bikers made them look bad.

 

[Clinamenic]

The comedic value of the Situationists is definitely one of the most underrated things about them.

Could make for a good show, in the vein of What We Do in the Shadows.

 

[william_kent]

That story about Atomwaffen Division being mired in infighting due to alleged infiltration by Order of Nine Angles was pretty funny.

Satanism Drama Is Tearing Apart the Murderous Neo-Nazi Group Atomwaffen

‘How do you allow [in] people who explicitly say they are satanic doomsday cultists who infiltrate right-wing groups in order to press their agenda?’ one frustrated neo-Nazi asked.

www.thedailybeast.com

"Atomwaffen’s satanism-heavy reading list has apparently driven away some former members who were only in the group for the Nazism."

😂

Reminds me of the story about Nazis getting a showing of Scorpio Rising pulled by the Hollywood vice squad because they thought sticking the swastika next to a bunch of gay bikers made them look bad.

I'm always stunned how the Order of the Nine Members has made such an impact

although how has David Tibet / Current 93 gained a free pass for featuring ONA member Christos Beast ( Richard Moult ) on his recordings?

 

[version]

Could make for a good show, in the vein of What We Do in the Shadows.

Definitely what Debord would have wanted.

 

[version]

I'm always stunned how the Order of the Nine Members has made such an impact

although how has David Tibet / Current 93 gained a free pass for featuring ONA member Christos Beast ( Richard Moult ) on his recordings?

Nick Land was promoting them for a while too.

 

[version]

Stories like the one I posted above are funny, but there's an uneasiness with the right wing stuff I don't feel with a group like the Situationists.

 

[DannyL]

Those C4 programmes in 88 were really significant for me - a whole slew of great movies plus proper documentary stuff ranging from roots of Baader Meinhof to Chicago 68, demos at American Embassy, Paris obviously but also lots of Situationist influenced things. There was a big conference at LSE that had all sorts from N Irish politicians, SE Asian experts all trying to work out what it meant twenty years on…it’s fifty something years on and we’re still asking the same question.

The other book is throw into this discussion is Lipstick Traces the Greil Marcus book ostensibly about punk but it’s as much about Situationism as anything else.

Reading Danny’s post made me nostalgic for all those Vague days…

Amazed bby your recall of them Jenks. I have next to no memories, which maybe means I knew they were on but didnt watch them. I probably couldn't get access to the telly cos my mum was watching Coronation Street.

 

[craner]

Debord was an idiot but he was also a superb polemicist and could be a beautiful writer, particularly when he was writing about things he really, really hated or really, really loved (less so when he was trying to be the most important Marxist in the world).

Two of my favorite Debord interventions are his response to Godard's Sympathy for the Devil ("This is the work of cretins and Godard is the most cretinous of them all") and this paean to his one true passion:

After the circumstances I have just recalled, it is undoubtedly the rapidly acquired habit of drinking that has most marked my entire life. Wines, spirits, and beers: the moments when some of them became essential and the moments when they returned have marked out the main course and the meander of days, weeks, years. Two or three other passions, of which I will speak, have been more or less continuously important in my life. But drinking has been the most constant and the most present. Among the small number of things that I have liked and known how to do well, what I have assuredly known how to do best is drink. Although I have read a lot, I have drunk even more. I have written much less than most people who write, but I have drunk much more than most people who drink. I can count myself among those of whom Baltasar Gracián, thinking about an elite discernible only among the Germans — but here he was quite unjust to the detriment of the French, as I think I have shown — could say, ‘There are those who got drunk only once, but that once lasted them a lifetime.’

Furthermore, I am a little surprised, I who have had to read so often the most extravagant calumnies or quite unjust criticisms of myself, to see that in fact thirty or more years have passed without some malcontent ever instancing my drunkenness as at least an implicit argument against my scandalous ideas — with the one, belated exception of a piece by some young English drug addicts who revealed around 1980 that I was stupefied by drink and thus no longer harmful. I never for a moment dreamed of concealing this perhaps questionable side of my personality, and it was clearly evident for all those who met me more than once or twice. I can even note that on each occasion it sufficed but a few days for me to be highly esteemed, in Venice as in Cadiz, in Hamburg as in Lisbon, by the people I met only by frequenting certain cafés.

At first, like everyone, I appreciated the effect of mild drunkenness; then very soon I grew to like what lies beyond violent drunkenness, once that stage is past: a terrible and magnificent peace, the true taste of the passage of time. Although in the first decades I may have allowed only slight indications to appear once or twice a week, I was, in fact, continuously drunk for periods of several months; and the rest of the time, I still drank a lot.

An air of disorder in the great variety of emptied bottles remains susceptible, all the same, to an a posteriori classification. First, I can distinguish between the drinks I consumed in their countries of origin and those I consumed in Paris; but almost every variety of drink was to be had in mid-century Paris. Everywhere, the premises can be subdivided between what I drank at home, or at friends’, or in cafés, cellars, bars, restaurants, or in the streets, notably on café terraces.

The hours and their shifting conditions almost always retain a decisive role in the necessary renewal of the stages of a binge, and each brings its reasonable preference to bear on the available possibilities. There is what one drinks in the mornings, and for quite a long while that was the time for beer. In Cannery Row a character who one can tell is a connoisseur proclaims, ‘There’s nothing like that first taste of beer.’ But often upon waking I have needed Russian vodka. There is what is drunk with meals; and in the afternoons that stretch out between them. At night, there is wine, along with spirits; later on, beer is welcome, for beer makes you thirsty. There is what one drinks at the end of the night, at the moment when the day begins anew. One can imagine that all this has left me very little time for writing, and that is exactly as it should be: writing should remain a rare thing, since one must have drunk for a long time before finding excellence.

I have wandered extensively in several great European cities, and I appreciated everything that deserved appreciation. The catalogue on this subject could be vast. There were the beers of England, where mild and bitter were mixed in pints; the big schooners of Munich; the Irish beers; and the most classical, the Czech beer of Pilsen; and the admirable baroque character of the Gueuze around Brussels, when it had its distinctive flavor in each local brewery and did not travel well. There were the fruit brandies of Alsace; the rum of Jamaica; the punches, the aquavit of Aalborg, and the grappa of Turin, cognac, cocktails; the incomparable mescal of Mexico. There were all the wines of France, the loveliest coming from Burgundy; there were the wines of Italy, especially the Barolos of the Langhe and the Chiantis of Tuscany; there were the wines of Spain, the Riojas of Old Castille or the Jumilla of Murica.

 

[jenks]

Amazed bby your recall of them Jenks. I have next to no memories, which maybe means I knew they were on but didnt watch them. I probably couldn't get access to the telly cos my mum was watching Coronation Street.

Like i say, there were incredibly influential - i gorged on the whole season of shows (it was my final year of my degree and i should have been studying) - i think 88 felt so far away from those heady revolutionary times - it was a glimmer of potential in a grey world of thatcherism and the sitautionists and their slogans just seemed so exciting and radical by comparison.

 

[version]

"I never for a moment dreamed of concealing this perhaps questionable side of my personality, and it was clearly evident for all those who met me more than once or twice. I can even note that on each occasion it sufficed but a few days for me to be highly esteemed, in Venice as in Cadiz, in Hamburg as in Lisbon, by the people I met only by frequenting certain cafés."

Debord making a spectacle of himself.

 

[craner]

Debord making a spectacle of himself.

Spectacularly.

 

[john eden]

The comedic value of the Situationists is definitely one of the most underrated things about them.

“As an interesting corollary to the many purges, Raspaud and Voyer have compiled an index of those who were insulted in the pages of [the 12 issues of] International Situationniste. They number 540, but Raspaud and Voyer add the consoling statistic that a further 400 persons were mentioned in the magazine without insult.

The terminology of S.I. abuse has a certain curiosity value. At the bottom of the scale are the routine expressions of disapproval which come most easily to hand: ‘braggart’, ‘cheat’, ‘cretin’, ‘hypocrite’, ‘idiot’, ‘impostor’, ‘liar’, ‘mafioso’, ‘nonentity’, ‘pimp’, ‘scoundrel’, ‘traitor’, ‘upstart’. Next comes a more precise group of epithets: ‘anti-Semite’, ‘deist’, ‘lapassadist’, ‘mentally deficient Buddhist’, ‘militarist’, ‘mythomaniac’, ‘necrophage’, ‘plagiarist’, ‘royalist’.

Political invective also has its scale, from the simple to the more complex, starting with ‘argumentist’, ‘confusionist’, ‘integrationist’, ‘reformist’, ‘Trotskyist’ and proceeding to more sophisticated aberrations such as ‘anarcho- Maoist’, ‘anti-Boumediennist’, ‘Bourguibist’, ‘sub-Leninist’, ‘stalino- surrealist’.

At the very top there are maledictions which reach poetic heights: ‘coagulated undertaker’s mute’, ‘monogamous police hound’.

The lavish nature of all this surrealist abuse leads one to think that either the libel laws must be rather lenient in France or else that the magazine did not circulate very widely among the 540 insultees.”

From “Asger Jorn - The Crucial Years 1954-1964”

 

[john eden]

There's a great story about Debord responding to a letter from some revolutionary admirers in the Angry Brigade. He decided to travel to England to meet them, but when he showed up at their flat he found two blokes sitting on a sofa, drinking beer and watching football. Furious, he stormed out swearing at them in French.

Probably apocryphal, but too good to disbelieve.

Apparently a myth, but one happily repeated by the two blokes (David and Stuart Wise of King Mob / BM Blob).

 

[martin]

From Vague #21

 

[Clinamenic]

Definitely what Debord would have wanted.

Recuperation (politics) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[version]

"These American journalists are strangely disinformed. I truly do not see how there could be a reciprocal influence between me and extravagant Baudrillard. I once met him for several minutes, while between two doors; I did not say a single word to him; I have never read him. Only for the last few years has he been recounting to journalists that he had been a situationist. But this is obviously a mendacious pretension: the idiot had been a Maoist."

 

[catalog]

Basically French before French. Can totally see where genet, foucault et al came from. Like a really rougb dissensus board, essentially.

 

[catalog]

Alright alright fucking sherlock

 

[catalog]

He looks like a coder except before coding