Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Aberdeen, aesthetics and politics, Black Mask, Charles Fourier, detournement, Guy Debord, Jorgen Nash, king mob, Marquis de Sade, Oz, Recuperation, Rethinking Complicity and Resistance, Roland Barthes, situationist, situationist international, Spur, Tom Vague, Up Against the Wall Motherfucker
Below: my paper from the fantastic ‘Rethinking Complicity and Resistance’ conference at Aberdeen last weekend (abstract).
‘The existing images only reinforce the existing lies’: The Situationist International in and against visuality.
Still from ‘In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni’ (1978)
‘The existing images only reinforce the existing lies’.
This statement, from the voiceover of Guy Debord’s 1978 film, ‘In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni’, is striking not only for its absolute denial of the radical or emancipatory potential of the image, but also for its melancholy, its despondency. Though we might imagine that Debord was ruminating on his failure to discover a visual language that could destabilise what he had identified as the spectacular order of modern capitalism – the society of the spectacle – he had actually shown signs of having lost faith in the image as early as 1952, when his first film, ‘Howls in Favour of Sade’, had consisted of a black screen with no accompanying sound, interspersed periodically with nothing more than a white screen and some fragmented voiceover. ‘Howls…’ contained nothing of the visceral Sadeian exuberance suggested by its title and in its imagelessness it discarded the fundamental unit of the cinema. By contrast, ‘In Girum…’ was far less absolute, far less cynical. (more…)
