Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Debord, g20, general ludd, protest, spectacle
New signs of negation are proliferating in the most economically advanced countries. Although these signs are misunderstood and falsified by the spectacle, they are sufficient proof that a new period has begun. We have already seen the failure of the first proletarian assault against capitalism; now we are witnessing the failure of capitalist abundance. On one hand, anti-union struggles of Western workers are being repressed first of all by the unions; on the other, rebellious youth are raising new protests, protests which are still vague and confused but which clearly imply a rejection of art, of everyday life, and of the old specialized politics. These are two sides of a new spontaneous struggle that is at first taking on a criminal appearance. They foreshadow a second proletarian assault against class society. As the lost children of this as yet immobile army reappear on this battleground — a battleground which has changed and yet remains the same — they are following a new “General Ludd” who, this time, urges them to attack the machinery of permitted consumption.
Guy Debord, Thesis 115 from Society of the Spectacle (trans. Ken Knabb)
A question, for anyone who doesn’t instantaneously foam at the mouth with moral outrage upon reading this country’s national press: has the anti-G20 movement shot itself in the foot through misjudging the media’s capacity for irony? I’m referring to the whole hang-a-banker thing which, it seems, has been understood as an aggressive threat from ‘the usual’ joyless SWP-types and nihilistic anarchists, rather than a theatrical and ludic gesture from people quite aware of the disjuncture between the media’s characterisations of protestors and the actual people concerned with these issues who don’t necessarily fit into any of the stereotypes but are alienated by traditional – supposedly dead-end – protesting.
Secondly, will police violence disguised as pre-emptive self-defence (I take this to be inevitable, judging on personal experience, but perhaps it won’t be the case: if I’m proved wrong, I apologise) serve to derail the event and brush it rapidly under the mat of history, or will it provide what could become a symbolic moment for an emergent movement, a moment of manifestation of a new struggle that addresses today’s problems?
I don’t know the answer to either of these questions, of course, nobody knows what will happen on Wednesday and how it will be represented by the media (event and representation being two very different things). It is exciting to experience first-hand these events that one can imagine being depicted in future history books as signs of a growing social restlessness; but with a history of demonstrations that are imagined to be ineffectual (of course they’re not), lazy conservatism and docile passivity do look set to triumph again.
Filed under: detournement | Tags: detournement, English Surrealism, humphrey jennings, julian temple, london can take it, mass observation, punk can take it, uk subs
So you’ve seen Humphrey Jennings’ London Can Take It! (1940), right? Classic of the British documentary movement, produced (jointly) by ‘the only real poet British cinema has yet produced’, and so on and so on. Well, anyway, I just found out about Punk Can Take It (1979), by Julian Temple with the UK Subs, which detournes Jennings’ film to fantastic effect. Punk detournement is pretty common: what is interesting here is the inescapable cycle of resistance-recuperation reflected in the choice of source material for the punk film. Even though by 1940 Jennings was producing this propaganda for the MoI and had returned to his natural conservatism, in the years previous he had been involved with both the English surrealist movement and Mass-Observation, both of which had strong anti-authoritarian (albeit communist rather than ‘77 punk nihilist) drives and both had shared with punk a rallying against a particular motif of the oppressive order of the old world: the monarchy.
Anway, Punk Can Take It:
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Debord, Housmans, situationist international, SOciety of the Spectacle
This at Housmans looks interesting…
Debord and the ‘Society of the Spectacle’
Wednesday 22nd April – 7pm
Guests from the cutting-edge artist-run Elevator Gallery present a discussion on Specatacle and Simulacra, with reference to the Situationist International.
‘Life used to be directly lived, but has since receded into representation’ – Debord, ‘The Society of the Spectacle’.
How do we understand a world saturated by media images? Do we live in a Society of the Spectacle from which authentic life needs to be recovered? Or, as Jean Baudrillard claimed, is there no reality to speak of, except a hyperreality of media representation? An introduction to these problems, involving screenings of a selection of Debord’s films, to discuss how art can communicate outside of the dominant commodity culture of globalised capitalism, and how political resistance can remain possible in a world where the Gulf-War might not have really happened.
For more information about Elevator Gallery please visit: http://www.elevatorgallery.co.uk
I know that pointing out the unreason of the call centre/automated post/general facelessnes of modern service provision is rather like shooting fish in a barrel, but I had to share this gas bill that arrived today.
We’d already paid the substantial estimated amount, so this is them just chasing up the discrepancy between the estimated bill and the actual bill. Which is a penny. Presumably, sending this to us along with five more pages of indeterminate verbiage has cost British Gas more than a penny. So they’ve lost money in sending me this bill.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Fantastic Journal on the aestheticisation of poverty (austerity chic?). It seems to me that the most positive action to take in our daily lives in relation to green living/credit crunching is to simply consume less. But I guess this is an inherently unmarketable proposition.
Hal Foster on the SI in the LRB. Someone somewhere must already have thrown out the old ‘recuperation’-'fetish’-’spectacle’ firebombs towards the seven-volume publication of Debord’s letters, right? Principia Dialectica?
Infinite Thought, various posts on next week’s Communism conference at Birkbeck. I really hope – but greatly doubt – we’ll see a Zizek-Badiou-Hardt-Ranciere-etc version of Big Talk: ‘Communism. Come on, boffins, lets sort this out once and for all’.
Hackney Rose. Late on this one, it seems, but if someone knows what it’s all about, please tell. Maybe I’ve overlooked something, but I’m assuming it’s to do with the new Iain Sinclair. I haven’t got a copy of Hackney: That Rose-Red Empire just yet, but I saw Sinclair speak a week ago, when he summed up the Olympics intrusion very well in saying that, about the site, what is lost cannot be quantified, but what remains cannot be measured.
Current reading. Absolutely right-on to someone like me who likes anything associated with the idea of negativity. Incidentally, can any readers out there point me towards anything on the affinities between Adorno and Debord? There must be a paper or similar on those two somewhere.
New Morrissey. S’ok. The cover’s the best bit. Whatever contradictions and hypocrisies are implicit in my adulation of Morrissey alongside criticism of any ‘culture industry’ are more than made up for in seeing him on every train station platform, decked in Fred Perry and holding a grinning baby. Being a shameless fanboy never felt so good.
