I just reread a couple of old posts and was quite frankly embarrassed at my failure to spellcheck. Rather than actually revise any posts, I’ve tried to justify this blog’s rough-round-the-edges and often rather rushed appearance with a new About page, containing a suitably evasive quote from Walter Benjamin.

She’d drunk Coke in a hotel room in Rome. She’d drunk Coke in a bar overlooking a palace in Granada. She’d drunk Coke in a chalet bar up a mountain in Switzerland. She’d drunk Coke on several aeroplanes. She’d drunk Coke in a hotel bar in Nice on the Promenade des Anglais, across the road from a group of drug addicts on the stony beach. She’d drunk Coke in the air conditioning of a restaurant in a rich suburb of Colombo, through the front windows of which she had seen children living in a derelict tower with rags hanging from the holes where its windows should be. She’d drunk Coke in a filthily expensive bar in Cape Town. She’d been down a dirt track in Ethiopia in the middle of nowhere where there was nothing but scorch, nothing but flies, nothing to eat, nothing to farm, nothing but an old tyreless truck and some standing shacks, and the thin and always smiling people who lived there had welcomed her in, given her everything they had, which was almost nothing, then they’d swept her into their ramshackle bar like she was a whole festival and they’d presented her to the Coke machine, in front of which several of them had argued and nodded and clubbed together and shouted for more people until they eventually found enough money and let coin after coin drop into the slot until the can thudded into the dust-covered mouth of the machine. I am posting this from the airport, she wrote on the postcard home. Just to let you know I just drank my last ever Coke.

Ali Smith, The Accidental (2005)

The vast majority of Icelanders couldn’t be happier. After all, economic crisis notwithstanding, this country’s food production is, by most standards, exceptional. In purely gastronomic terms, the abandonment of the McDonald’s franchise should be a vast improvement. Iceland was one of the last western countries to open a McDonald’s – the first one opened in 1993. Prior to that, most Icelanders were fairly proud of the fact that this symbol of American multinational domination had yet to plant its golden emblem on Icelandic soil. So when McDonald’s finally did open, it felt a little bit like we’d lost our innocence.

The Guardian (27/10/2009)

Kristin Ross – something of an academic heroine of mine – spoke at Tate Britain last Tuesday, delivering a paper that she introduced as a response to the question, ‘Are you a democrat?’ ‘Democrat’, here, is democrat, rather than Democrat: the question asking not so much for Ross to place herself on a political spectrum, but instead to investigate what the concept of democracy means in modern society.

Using the example of Ireland’s initial No vote to the Lisbon Treaty, Ross argued that democracy – Western, representative, liberal democracy – as it actually exists is essentially an oligarchical democracy, which is geared towards wealth and towards the inevitable emergence of the middle and upper classes. At the same time, this oligarchical democracy respects democratic rituals, assured that its favoured results will always emerge. That Ireland’s No vote was harried until it became a Yes vote is testament to the fact that democracy has come to function as ‘voiceless assent’. Governability is the logic of a political process that evades democratic accountability, focussing political power safely ‘elsewhere’.

Ross looked at two alternative understandings of ‘democracy’: Ranciere’s Classical interpretation as ‘the capacity to do things’; and Blanqui’s rejection of the term as hollow and a tool of ‘schemers’. Ross traced some historical instances of when, how and by whom the term ‘democrat’ has been used. During the 1830-40s, in France, the term was used by a wide range of far leftist groups, yet by the time of the Second Empire, the term was increasingly allied to bourgeois and centrist ideologies. The Communards then rarely called themselves democrats, despite the fact that they established a number of what we might now recognise as directly democratic political processes and measures.

Ross, beautifully, used Rimbaud’s ‘Democracy’ and ‘Clearance Sale’ (both from Illuminations) as poems that capture the moment when imperial power claimed the term ‘democracy’ as its own, as a means of governance rather than an emancipatory principle. Democracy as the right to buy. The Cold War, finally, came to be understood as the moment when this elitist democracy (now inextricable from the free market) conquered its opposition, communism.

Right at the end of her talk, Ross pointed towards some avenues whereby questions could be asked of the hegemony of the dominant understanding of ‘democracy’. A double movement was proposed, firstly to recognise the contemporary nonexistence of democracy, and secondly to reconfigure the term, reinvest it with meaning. Quite what this newly configured democracy might look like remains unclear, though it seems that Ross was less interested in (what she posited as) Badiou’s sense of democracy being inextricable from parliamentary representation and capitalism, and more inclined towards Ranciere’s understanding of democracy as a total politics (and an embryonic communism). What we do have, where we can begin our reconfiguration of the concept of ‘democracy’, are democratic moments like the Commune; moments which contain momentum.

Ross’ proposals should not sound unfamiliar. Badiou and Zizek, most prominently, have both attempted to semiotically disrupt notions of ‘communism’, to remove the stained signifieds of Stalinism and totalitarianism and reinvent communism as a philosophical principle. The idea of communism. Likewise, the Invisible Committee, in The Coming Insurrection, argue for a communism that simply ignores the meanings that the term has accrued throughout the Twentieth Century. Communism as ‘the basic unit of partisan reality’.

All of these projects, these reinventions, are almost inconceivably grand, adding etymological and semiotic challenges to a Left that is already floundering under the weight of its tasks. But as Ross’ book on May ‘68 demonstrated, the meanings of historical moments have always been instable, open as much to recuperation as to reparative readings. For now, I just want to question, briefly, what might be significant in Ross’ assertion that it is ‘democracy’, rather than ‘communism’, which must be reinvented.

I make a distinction here between Badiou’s Communist Hypothesis and Ross’ Democratic Hypothesis. Their projects may not actually be opposed, but they are certainly articulated in different terms. Firstly, both hypotheses wish to illuminate the falsifications of actually existing democracy, to say, ‘This is not democracy as an emancipatory and fair principle. Look how it functions in real terms: it is oppressive and unjust.’ This is not an easy project, but it is a necessary one in a (Western) world that so often declares itself as emerging from History into the promised future of liberal, capitalist, democracy. Both hypotheses question the entity that depicts itself as the last man standing, imperfect but still the best option, the victor of the historical process of political evolution. Neither hypothesis is, in the first instance, a positive or affirmative one.

It is in their second movements where the two hypotheses diverge. The Communist Hypothesis, having illuminated the degradation of the present, points towards something which is already out there somewhere, even if only (in Badiou’s terms) as a ‘horizon’. ‘The communist hypothesis remains the good one, I do not see any other’ [my italics, Badiou’s words]. There is an anterior presence which is still – after a little tweaking – preferable to the current order.

The Democratic Hypothesis is rather less binary, or at least less oppositional. The Democratic Hypothesis says that democracy as it exists is not the democracy that we want, but it cannot say that if we look in another direction we will find a different entity towards which we should move. By retaining the term ‘democracy’, Ross is doing more than saying that the foundations of a better order are the same foundations that the current order (falsely) claims; she is also saying that the order which must supercede the present must simultaneously emerge from the present. The Democratic Hypothesis is immanent, not alterior.

I realise that I make a jump here, in saying that Ross’ conception of democracy does not posit itself as an Other, as an entirely separate configuration, but as an improvement (either a forward progression or a return to a historical moment of ideological divergence). She may well be saying that she envisages a contest between one democracy and another: capitalist democracy, say, versus Communard-style direct democracy. If this is the case, I do not understand why she (and, by extension Ranciere) insist upon the importance of ‘democracy’ as a label.

My review/critique of the Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection is in the current adbusters, and is available at present on their website.

This being the first thing I’ve written that a large number of people are likely to read (PhD, 3 years; likely readership, 3 people), I feel impelled but also wary to defend the article. In the Comments box on the adbusters site, someone’s already addressed me as ‘Mr Cooper’*, which feels rather peculiar. However, the article was edited before publication, and there are two particular changes to the original that I would like to qualify:

1)     The opening sentence, presently, runs:

The instability of meaning within the society of the spectacle is such that a statement can contain two opposing messages simultaneously.

Originally, I had said ‘… within what we might call the society of the spectacle…’. I think this is an important clause, whereby I am attempting to problematise the too-easy adoption of a social diagnosis as broad as Debord’s society of the spectacle. Instead of saying, ‘yes, we live in a spectacular society’, let’s look at the type of power relations Debord is describing, and see how far they extend into scenarios that we recognise.

2)     Another sentence now reads:

Capitalism, as we are hearing more and more regularly, is in crisis.

My original had said that ‘Capitalism… is crisis’. I don’t really understand why they’ve changed this: I don’t think that capitalism is in crisis, it will certainly mutate and recover. I was referencing the slogan, ‘capitalism is crisis’, that seems to have appeared in the last year (in England at least), which itself references the now familiar argument that capitalism needs a series of crises to sustain itself.

Anyway, I’m very grateful to adbusters for contacting me and allowing me to revisit The Coming Insurrection (they contacted me following the original review here).

*So much for blog anonymity.

That last post was very dry, I do apologise. Probably one just for the English Situationist enthusiasts.

So, to address perhaps less specific interests: the essay I was looking at is full of (what I have since learnt to be) antimetabole. This rhetorical device involves  ’the repetition of words in successive clauses, but in transposed grammatical order’. You find such statements throughout literature, religion and political discourse, from Jesus (‘The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath’) to JFK (‘Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country’) to Marilyn Manson (‘Is adult entertainment killing our children, or is killing our children entertaining adults?’). I guess readers of Hegel and Marx (and the Frankfurt School and the SI…) will be particularly familiar with these constructions.

Some antimetabole from ‘The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution’ (excluding the essay’s own title!):

‘It is not enough for art to seek its realisation in practice: practice must also seek its art.’

‘…Utopia…? To create the real time and space within which all our desires can be realised and all our reality desired.’

‘Their culture of the absurd reveals only the absurdity of their culture.’

‘The nihilism of modern art is merely an introduction to the art of modern nihilism.’

What I can’t decide, however, is how far such constructions can represent a grammatical structure that comprehends the (hegelian/marxist) dialectic. Does that follow? The danger is that many clauses can be arranged in this way without revealing anything more about the interrelations of their composite parts. Dr Seuss: ‘I meant what I said and I said what I meant!’ There remains, I think, some darstellung in these constructions commensurate with the logic of the dialectic; but there is also a shallowness, an ease, which betrays the inherent contradictions and complications of the statement.

‘The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution’ is the only substantial document produced by the short-lived English Section of the Situationist International. Chronos, who first published the document as a pamphlet in 1994, report that the essay was produced in 1967 for the first issue of an English Situationist journal, although the English Section’s expulsion on December 21st meant that the essay long went unpublished. The group was composed of Charles Radcliffe, Tim Clarke, Christopher Gray and Donald Nicholson-Smith, and whilst Radcliffe had already resigned for personal reasons, the latter three’s expulsion was due to their allegedly having sided with the American Ben Morea (of Black Mask and Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker) in a dispute with Raoul Vaneigem, as reported in Internationale Situationniste 12 (September 1969). Although Ralph Rumney and Alexander Trocchi had both previously been members of the SI, Radcliffe, Clarke, Gray and Nicholson-Smith represent the SI’s only recognised English Section.

As Not Bored note, the ‘Revolution of Modern Art’ essay displays a curious time-lag in its sole citation of  the SI, using a quotation from the first Internationale Situationniste, which had been published nine years previously, in 1958. Rather than this lag being due to the unavailability of translations of Situationist work, or to ‘the relative “immaturity” of the English situationists’ theoretical development’ (the quoted passage is taken from the SI’s earliest self-pronouncements, whose tight focus had dispersed into much broader concerns by 1967), Not Bored propose that the English situationists were producing ‘an intentional distancing’ between themselves and the SI as it then existed, ‘because they [the English section] weren’t ever really committed to being members of any type of official organization’. Not Bored are surprisingly approving of the post-SI trajectories of the English situationists, who ‘were and are still deeply committed to the dissemination of situationist theory and to the undertaking of the situationist project by as many autonomous people as possible’. This commendation stands in stark contrast to Chronos’s blurb, which accuses the English situationists of ‘a certain amount of vulgarisation’, before individually denouncing Gray, Clark, Radcliffe and Nicholson-Smith.

 ‘The Revolution of Modern Art’ attempts four things: to recapitulate (or introduce) the central tenets of Situationist theory, presumably to a British audience underexposed to the movement; to denounce the contemporary Left; to call attention to a selection of situationist theses most relevant to Britain, with particular consideration of the potentially revolutionary role of the lumpenproletariat; and to more generally reconfigure what should be the concerns and praxis of a modern revolutionary movement.

The essay does not introduce the SI as such, only aspects of its theory as articulated at its moment of inception. The English situationists are thus most concerned with ideas of play, of rewriting urban space, of the game, and of the necessity of a ludic revolution: ‘Life is revealed as a war between the commodity and the ludic’. They criticise the New Left’s failure to recognise that a critique of capitalism must incorporate a willingness to invent new ways of living. On art, the English situationists recount familiar lessons of the irretrievable recuperation of the artwork as aesthetic object, and offer a narrative of the historical avant-garde as a descent into nihilism. 

The most interesting developments – or divergences – made by the English situationists are those borne of their attempts to anglicise situationist theory. Most of this anglicisation addresses very directly a particular period of the British Sixties counterculture. So, the essay is dismissive of the beatnik/hippy scene’s retreat to mysticism: ‘Without the drugs it could be explosive’. Antonioni, Ionesco, and Robbe-Grillet, as well as Leary, Warhol and Burroughs, are all said to ‘re-enact a Dadaist revulsion from contemporary life – but their revolt, such as it is, is purely passive, theatrical and aesthetic, shorn of any of the passionate fury, horror or desperation which would lead to a really destructive praxis’. In their attack on Ionesco, Leary and Burroughs in particular, the English situationists were attacking ex-situationist Alexander Trocchi’s generation of avant-gardist cultural activity, demonstrating that the development of English situationism was not linear. The English Section were not taking over from Trocchi’s situationist-inflected ‘project sigma’, but developing tangentially with a very different interpretation of the original Continental theory. 

An overarching concern of the English Section is locating the site of the most promising avant-gardist activity within spectacular-commodity society. Theirs is a world of social distinctions, between and within the intelligentsia, the proletariat, the artists, the counterculture, and so on. Regarding the intelligentsia, the English situationists draw a line between the majority which has ‘quite crudely, sold out’, and ‘its truly dissident and imaginative elements’ which have withdrawn increasingly from production and collaboration ‘to become indistinguishable from the rest of the new lumpenproletariat in their open contempt and derision for the “values” of consumer society’.

The question of the lumpenproletariat is critical for the English Section. Not Bored explain that, ‘In the “lumpen” the English situationists include rioters, juvenile delinquents, petty criminals, thrill seekers, shoplifters, members of such organized groups as the Provos and the Hell’s Angels, and working-class subcultural groups as the Mod and the Rockers’. In what Chronos call their ‘crass eulogy of the violence of juvenile delinquents’, we can assume that the English situationists were drawing from Morea’s Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker group and their self-identification as a ‘street gang with analysis’, although the notion of politicising delinquent violence was also explored in Vaneigem’s Revolution of Everyday Life and the ’66 pamphlet ‘On the Poverty of Student Life’. King Mob, the incarnation of the English Section after its expulsion from the SI, practiced more immediately the combination of situationist critique with hooligan aesthetics.

‘The Revolution of Modern Art’ makes the claim that ‘the juvenile delinquents… are the true inheritors of Dada’. As a ‘spontaneous rebuttal’ of capitalist prerogatives and a ‘grass-root refusal of hierarchically organised distribution’, shoplifting is rather spuriously cast as something that Michel de Certeau would later call a tactic: resistance from within, an everyday gesture of noncompliance. At present, we are told, such gestures are limited, again leading only to nihilism. Deliquent violence, then,

Is a spontaneous overthrow of the abstract and contemplative role imposed on everyone, but the deliquents’ inability to grasp any possibility of really changing things once and for all forces them, like the Dadaists, to remain purely nihilistic.    

The English Section advocate that the aforementioned ‘rebel intelligentsia’ should operate within the lumpenproletariat, to harness the latter’s energies whilst precipitating its crisis, which will prefigure a revolutionary scenario. Again, the English situationists display close concerns with Vaneigem, who wrote: ‘Nihilists, as de Sade would have said, one more effort if you want to be revolutionaries!’ Not Bored highlight a difference here between the anglicised situationist theory and its continental forebear:

For the continental SI, the goal was to negate the separation between the intelligentsia (which includes the art world and the student milieu) and the proletariat; but for the English situationists, the goal was to negate the separation between the lumpenproletariat and the proletariat.

This tension between lumpen and prole (a distinction, I suspect, founded more in caricature than any sort of research) is what Not Bored also recognise as the driving force of punk, whose origins have previously been traced through the English Section of the SI, and especially Chris Gray’s desire to produce ‘a totally unpleasant pop group’.

This type of street fighting logic, often cartoonish and caricatured, which arms the lumpenproletariat with situationist theory, has coloured much of the development of English situationist practice: from King Mob’s street gang posturing (later renounced by Dave and Stuart Wise as a ‘hysterical over emphasis of violence’); to Stewart Home’s early fiction, with its skinheads and bootboys; right through to Laura Oldfield Ford’s aesthetic of Special Brew and ultraviolence. Even in France, The Coming Insurrection echoes this glorification of delinquent violence in finding its promise of future revolt in the banlieu riots. At a later date, I hope to investigate these motifs as they continue beyond the English Section into King Mob.

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.

The sixteen years between ‘Howls…’ and ‘In Girum…’ had seen the rise and fall of the Situationist International, which had undertaken an extended exploration of the possibilities of visual or artistic production within an oppositional political programme. I want to look at the first five years of the Situationist International (SI) from 1957 to 1962, a period of rapid development of situationist theses on aesthetics, accompanied by a gradual dissociation from the artistic avant-garde from which the SI had emerged. This analysis shall take three sections: firstly, I shall introduce the complementary theoretical motifs of détournement and recuperation; followed by tracing the widening schism within the movement across its fourth and fifth conferences, which culminated in the expulsion of the majority of artists from the SI; and finally, I shall pay some attention to post-situationist (pro-situ[1]) movements, whose attempts to move beyond the spectacle necessitated a movement beyond the SI itself.

1.

Like the avant-gardes of the early Twentieth Century which had been predicated on a single conceit – futurism, constructivism, dadaism, surrealism – the Situationist International was originally something like a single-issue political party. The SI held that the historical project of the avant-garde, identified by Peter Bürger as ‘the destruction of art as an institution set off from the praxis of life’[2], could be fulfilled through the perpetual construction of lived situations. These situations would undermine the logic of the spectacle which had served to replace direct experience with representation. In a preparatory document for the July 1957 conference at which the SI was founded, Guy Debord wrote that,

Our central idea is the construction of situations, that is to say, the concrete construction of momentary ambiences of life and their transformation into a superior passional quality.[3]

Debord proposed that such situations would be created primarily through engagement with the urban environment, thus advocating active forms of social participation such as the practice of psychogeography, rather than aesthetic production in the visual arts. Nonetheless, during the first few years of its existence, various elements within the SI courted the art world, with exhibitions from prominent figures such as Asger Jorn and Giuseppe Pinot Gallizio, and Debord sought to ensure that these events demonstrated situationist principles such as the constructed situation, the momentary ambience and, especially, the aesthetic technique of détournement[4].

Image from Internationale Situationniste 9[5]

Drawn from Lautréamont’s assertion that plagiarism is necessary and implied by progress, and passed through a prism of Duchamp’s readymade and the Surrealist collage, the concept of détournement was introduced in the first issue of the SI’s journal, Internationale Situationniste, as:

Short for “détournement of prexisting aesthetic elements.” The integration of present or past artistic productions into a superior construction of a milieu. In this sense there can be no situationist painting or music, but only a situationist use of those means. In a more elementary sense, détournement within the old cultural spheres is a method of propaganda, a method which reveals the wearing out and the loss of importance of those spheres.[6]

In simpler terms: détournement, at least in relation to the visual image with which we are concerned here, changes the meaning of an existing image through adapting or recontextualising it. The Situationists insisted that it was their intention to transcend art as a domain of specialised activity and integrate creativity and free play within a renewed practice of everyday life. They did not seek to create an identifiably situationist aesthetic. Even in the pre-revolutionary meantime, within a world still dominated by capital and the spectacle, there could be no situationist art, although détournement did offer something of a stopgap measure. Whilst not, strictly-speaking, the production of unique images, détournement assumes a dialectical function, a negation of already-existing culture, a productive iconoclasm. Détournement feeds off the surplus, waste and detritus of capitalist production, its excess of imagery, whilst problematising notions of private property and individual authorship. The politics of détournement were described by Debord as, ‘a real means of proletarian artistic education, the first step towards a literary communism’[7].

Image from Internationale Situationniste 9[8]

Examples of détourned images are found throughout the SI’s journal, but for now I want to concentrate on those that engage with pornography. Pornographic images epitomise Debord’s understanding of the spectacular image: they replace sexual experience with its representation, objectifying the sexual figure and reducing sexual desire to an alienated engagement with images. One situationist treatment of such imagery simply attached speech bubbles with quotations from Marx or slogans that praised the workers; elsewhere, the images were reproduced without embellishment, used to illustrate essays on alienation, and specifically the alienation of desire. Kelly Baum argues that the sexual images reproduced (détourned) by the SI generally represent ‘the becoming-image of desire’[9]. The juxtaposition of the loaded political sentiment with the lascivious image, the suggestion that an image of a nude model could be anything more than an image of a nude model, as well as the implied association between life under the spectacle and prostitution, was intended to expose the alienation contained within and propagated by the original image.

Page from Internationale Situationniste 1[10]

However, the gaze elicited by the SI’s détourned images is complicated, not least because détournement takes only a negational role, and cannot point towards an alternative, situationist, image of non-spectacular sexuality. These détourned images also provide evidence of the internalised sexism of the SI: Why this willingness to investigate only the heterosexual male gaze? Or, as Kelly Baum asks, who is the SI blaming for the alienation of desire: ‘capitalism, women, or both?’[11] Whilst the Situationists maintained that they represented an orgiastic conception of untrammelled sexual freedom derived from the Marquis de Sade and Charles Fourier, their political-aesthetic framework precluded any visual representation towards those ends. When used against sexual imagery, détournement lacks the libidinal energy or sexual abandon that we might expect from an assault upon the spectacle’s reduction of life to a passive engagement with images. The détourned image offers no exit from a visual paradigm established by the spectacle.

The description of détournement as ‘literary communism’ signals that the Situationists’ preferred application of the technique was to textual sources, rather than within the visual arts. Situationist theory, even in its earliest stages, was very suspicious of the visual as terrain for mounting cultural revolt. The Situationists’ critical apparatus, to borrow Martin Jay’s phrase, denigrates vision. The spectacle – if not a visual thing unto itself, ‘is a social relation between people that is mediated by images’[12] – has irrevocably colonised the visual, precisely so that every image reinforces the same lies.

The Situationists recognised that détournement only ever offered a temporary destabilisation of visual meaning within spectacular society. The rewriting could go either way, so that a seemingly benign image could be radicalised as easily as a critically-loaded image could be defused. Every gesture of resistance is accompanied by a latent complicity; and thus the SI identified recuperation as the spectacle’s reciprocal absorption of oppositional or radical voices: a de-détournement of sorts. Détourned visual imagery, then, always already contains its own reintegration back into the spectacular order, in a feedback loop or vortex of détournement-recuperation. The two processes cannot be separated.

2.

As it reformulated its programme to jettison any vestigial reliance on the visual image, the Situationist International began expelling its more artistically-inclined members. Artistic production was judged (rather prematurely) to have no function other than feeding and bolstering the spectacle. The question of the SI’s self-identification with art or with politics – a false dichotomy, of course, but one which was to determine the direction of the SI’s activities – became a central concern at the fourth conference, held in London from the 24^th to the 28^th of September, 1960. It was asked, ‘To what extent is the SI a political movement?’[13] The German section, composed of the Spur group of artists, aligned the SI with what Peter Bürger has since called the historical avant-garde, saying that,

The German section considers that the SI should prepare to realize its program on its own by mobilizing the avant-garde artists, who are placed by the present society in intolerable conditions and can count only on themselves to take over the weapons of conditioning.[14]

The German proposal was rejected by the Parisian core of the SI, not only because it criticised the SI’s unwavering faith in a revolutionary proletariat, but also because it associated the SI with a specialism – artistic production – when situationist theory had been expressly wary of any specialist pursuit, or any separation of art from everyday life. Asger Jorn responded to the Germans by saying that the SI should not strive for recognition as artists, but instead ‘it is necessary for the world to become artistic in the sense defined by the SI’[15].

These tensions, the (false) division between the artistically-inclined and the theoretically-inclined Situationists, were not resolved by the time of the next conference, held this time in Gothenburg on the 28^th to the 30^th of August 1961. Raoul Vaneigem’s orientation report introduced a hard pro-theory, anti-art line, and reiterated the SI’s dismissal of situationist art:

The point is not to elaborate the spectacle of refusal, but to refuse the spectacle. In order for their elaboration to be artistic in the new and authentic sense defined by the SI, the elements of the destruction of the spectacle must precisely cease to be works of art. There is no such thing as situationism, or a situationist work of art, or a spectacular situationist. Once and for all.[16]

Attila Kotányi was rather less absolute, offering a summation of where the SI stood in relation to artistic production as it currently existed:

Since the beginning of the movement there has been a problem as to what to call artistic works by members of the SI… I propose a very simple rule: to call them ‘antisituationist.’ We are against the dominant conditions of artistic inauthenticity. I don’t mean that anyone should stop painting, writing, etc. I don’t mean that that has no value. I don’t mean that we could continue to exist without doing that. But at the same time we know that such works will be coopted by society and used against us. Our impact lies in the elaboration of certain truths which have an explosive power whenever people are ready to struggle for them.[17]

The SI’s split with the artistic avant-garde came most decisively in the first few months of 1962, when, in February, the German Spur artists were expelled, followed by the Scandinavian artists centred around Jørgen Nash in March. The following issue of Internationale Situationniste poured scorn on the ‘Nashist’ artists, who were depicted as using their Situationist connection to further their own artistic careers. In that diatribe, the remaining Situationists neatly encapsulated the dialectical nature of their conception of cultural revolt:

It seems to us that Nashism is an expression of an objective tendency resulting from the SI’s ambiguous and risky policy of consenting to act within culture while being against the entire present organization of this culture and even against all culture as a separate sphere.[18] [my italics]

To engage critically with spectacular society, the SI had to operate within the remits of visibility as determined by the spectacle and its distribution of visual sensibility. Yet at the same time, the situationist aesthetic sought an anti-spectacularity, which even involved becoming anti-situationist. The SI’s visual productions needed to carry the seed of their own supersession, their own negation. Détournement was thus necessarily dialectical, a preliminary formulation of auto-destructive art.

3.

Where the Situationist International was unable to move beyond the spectacle – or, more precisely, chose to remain dialectically suspended within and against the spectacle – the trajectory of situationist critique after Debord and Vaneigem reveals an attempt to move beyond the SI. The absence, for the most part, of visual erotic forms from the SI’s aesthetic marks a notable difference between themselves and contemporary or spin-off ‘pro-situ’ groups, who took tactical and theoretical influence from the SI but generally placed more emphasis upon confrontational sexuality and the imminence of a sexual revolution, with graphic depictions thereof. In this final section, I want to look at some instances of situationist sexual aesthetics beyond the SI, as the attempted realization of the project heralded by Vaneigem and Debord in their respective détournements of Sade’s call, ‘Frenchmen! One more effort if you want to be Republicans!’ into, ‘Nihilists, one more effort if you want to be revolutionaries!’[19] and, ‘One more effort if you want to be Situationists!’[20]

Unattributed Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker poster [21]

The most sexually aggressive and aggressively visual pro-situ current is demonstrated in the American Ben Morea’s anarchistic Black Mask and Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker groups. Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker – or, the Motherfuckers – offered a particularly primal image of sexually liberated man (and we should note it is always man), through an iconographic repertoire that consisted of skeletons, werewolves, and fiercely masculine Native and Latin American revolutionaries. The posters of the Motherfuckers are clearly oriented towards the male, heterosexual gaze; and reflect the pseudo-mystical and quasi-pornographic imagery of the more radical hippie and beatnik movements, which would eventually attract the various obscenity trials faced during the late Sixties by the Anglo-American underground press, most notably by the magazine Oz which was taken to court in 1971 over images within its Schoolkids issue.

Oz 28, the Schoolkids issue.

The imagery of the Motherfuckers was in turn reproduced in the posters of King Mob, an incarnation of the English Section of the Situationist International after its expulsion by Debord in 1967, for allegedly siding with Morea in a dispute with Vaneigem[22], a moment that demonstrated the division between the Continental SI and Anglo-American pro-situs. Although King Mob was ideologically closer to the French Situationists than to the hippie mysticism of Morea’s groups, it utilised the latter’s pornographic imagery, replacing its alpha male excesses with an Anglicized, less erotic, black humour. Geronimo is replaced by Andy Capp, and the erect phallus becomes a toilet-door scribble of a cock-and-balls.

Unattributed King Mob poster[23]

King Mob is particularly merciless in its iconoclasm, as even the fêted sexual revolution is made puerile and pathetic. Should it be considered in terms of the authentic – the SI’s perennially vague denotation of the alternative to life under the spectacle – such imagery is repulsive. But it is supposed to be shocking, even to King Mob’s sympathisers. King Mob’s ‘Keep the dialectic open’[24] poster, for example, is supposed to be jarring, exploitative and misogynistic, replicating crude sexist iconography under the guise of progressive sexual liberation. With such a cartoonish overload of sarcasm and insincerity, King Mob’s proto-punk aesthetic blurs the SI’s distinction between serious, stony-faced authenticity and repressive, spectacular, insincerity.

Unattributed King Mob posters [25]

King Mob’s imagery in particular is pure bagatelle, a relentless attack on liberal values. Where the SI’s insistence on the authentic tied their aesthetic project to realism, King Mob attempted to produce the ‘irreality’[26] that Roland Barthes attributed to the Marquis de Sade. At the root of the SI’s concern over the authentic is a sense of social responsibility; the Sadeian project, revitalised in these Anglo-American pro-situ groups, is more concerned with obscenity, taboo, violence, a concerted social irresponsibility. Quoting William Blake, a famous piece of King Mob graffiti rationalises the group’s ‘hysterical over emphasis of violence’[27]: ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom/ the tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction’.

These pro-situ aesthetics disregard the SI’s concerns over the fallibility of the radical image. King Mob’s response to the vortex of détournement-recuperation was to make something so ugly that the spectacle would not want it, yet their project was still determined only in the negative. There remained no constructive principle to proffer an image of an alternative sexual praxis; and however violent the affront upon the spectacle’s own production of images, by waging the battle solely on the terrain of the visual (through pushing it to its extremes), the underlying moral-ideological base was not challenged. Hence, even the situationist or pro-situ project can regenerate old forms of sexism, anti-feminism, heteronormativity and other forms of reified consciousness[28].

What, then, does détournement offer to an oppositional political programme, and what are its limits? Détournement promises something like Walter Benjamin’s conception of the dialectical image, to expose the insoluble contradictions of capitalism via its own regime of visual representation. Yet the Situationists were not content with Benjamin’s assertion that it is enough to simply demonstrate these irreducible antinomies in order to catalyse their supersession. Recuperation steps in before that moment, and reclaims the isolated images for the meaningful whole.

McKenzie Wark has argued recently that détournement’s radical promise is in its practice rather than its product: ‘The key to détournement is not to appropriate the image, but to appropriate the power of appropriation itself’[29]. Détournement’s oppositional worth is not to be found on the level of the visual or the image, but as a gestural politics, an active engagement with the spectacular image that reveals the latter’s fallibility. To return to ‘In Girum…’, Debord reincorporates the image into his filmmaking whilst simultaneously denouncing it: ‘In the present film, for example, I am simply stating a few truths over a background of images that are all trivial or false. This film disdains the image-scraps of which it is composed’. Détournement must receive the same treatment: as a limited combative measure, productive in its contradictions[30].

[1] ‘Pro-situ’ is the derogatory term Debord uses for peripheral members of the Situationist International and hangers-on in Guy Debord, The Real Split in the International, trans. John McHale (London: Pluto Press 2003).

[2] Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1984), 83.

[3] Guy Debord, ‘Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organization and Action,’ in Ken Knabb (ed.), Situationist International Anthology (Berkeley CA: Bureau of Public Secrets 2006), 38.

[4] For example, Debord wrote to Gallizio on the 8^th January 1958 to say that the latter’s upcoming exhibition ‘offers us extremely important opportunities’. Guy Debord, Correspondence: The Foundation of the Situationist International (June 1957-August 1960), trans. Stuart Kendall and John McHale (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) 2009), 71.

[5] Internationale Situationniste 9 (August 1964): 21.

[6] Situationist International, ‘Definitions,’ in Ken Knabb (ed.), Situationist International Anthology, 52.

[7] Guy Debord & Gil J. Wolman, ‘A Users Guide to Détournement,’ in Ken Knabb (ed.), Situationist International Anthology, 18.

[8] Ibid., 36.

[9] Kelly Baum, ‘The Sex of the Situationist International,’ October 126 (Fall 2008): 34.

[10] Internationale Situationniste 1 (June 1958): 11.

[11] Ibid., 39.

[12] Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb (London: Rebel Press 2002), Thesis 4.

[13] Situationist International, ‘The Fourth SI Conference in London,’ in Ken Knabb (ed.), Situationist International Anthology, 81.

[14] Ibid., 82.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Situationist International, ‘The Fifth SI Conference in Göteborg,’ in Ken Knabb (ed.), Situationist International Anthology, 115.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Situationist International, ‘The Counter-Situationist Campaign in Various Countries,’ in Ken Knabb (ed.), Situationist International Anthology, 146.

[19] Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Rebel Press 2006), 182.

[20] Guy Debord, Guy Debord présente Potlatch 1954-1957 (Paris: Gallimard 1996), 269.

[21] The text includes: ‘What is our program? We’ll know we’ve got it if it makes us feel good’. See Up Against the Wall Motherfucker! An Anthology of Rants, Posters and More (Parkville, Australia: Homebrew Press 2007).

[22] See Debord’s account in ‘The Latest Exclusions,’ in Ken Knabb (ed.), Situationist International Anthology, 375.

[23] Tom Vague (ed.), King Mob Echo: English Section of the Situationist International (London: Dark Star 2000), 91.

[24] Malcolm McLaren remembers that, ‘King Mob printed all these posters for a Vietnam demonstration. We all went around flyposting London with this image of a girl’s crotch and the slogan over the top of it that announced; “Keep the Dialectic Open”.’ Tom Vague, King Mob Echo: From Gordon Riots to Situationists and Sex Pistols (London: Dark Star 2000), 47.

[25] From ‘A Hidden History of King Mob (Posters/Cartoons)’, at http://www.revoltagainstplenty.com/index.php/recent/34-archivelocal/128-a-hidden-history-of-king-mob-posterscartoons [accessed 14-10-2009].

[26] Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (London: Jonathon Cape 1977), 36.

[27] Dave Wise & Stewart Wise, ‘The End of Music’, in Stewart Home (ed.), What is Situationism? A Reader (Edinburgh: AK Press 1996), 69.

[28] A different response to the problem of the image as formulated by the Situationists came by way of Alexander Trocchi’s attempts to organise a cultural opposition movement that shunned all forms of visual representation. In 1962, Trocchi, a Scottish Situationist and novelist, published an essay entitled ‘A Revolutionary Proposal: Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds’, which was followed by the essay ‘Sigma: A Tactical Blueprint’ to launch what Trocchi called Project Sigma. Attempting to produce a loose confederation of like-minded cultural revolutionaries whose form of organisation would be impervious to recuperation, Trocchi introduced his conception of an invisible insurrection, a ‘cultural coup-du-monde’ that would operate beneath the radar of the spectacle through its refusal to participate in the spectacle’s regime of visibility. Invisibility meant not only refusing to produce recuperable images, but also to organise without clearly demarcated boundaries in order to achieve a sort of amorphous invulnerability. However, Trocchi’s plans were vague and deemed to be ‘unclear to all except a few devotees’. The invisibility that was supposed to evade surveillance and spectacular recuperation actually rendered the project indecipherable and immeasurable, and the project faltered precisely because it failed to operate within the spectacle’s regime of visibility. Trocchi’s foray into the anti-aesthetic seems to validate the Situationists’ continued engagement with the image despite having acknowledged its inherent conservatism within the spectacle.

[29] McKenzie Wark, ‘Détournement: an abuser’s guide,’ Angelaki Vol. 14 No. 1 (April 2009): 146.

[30] This conclusion is drawn from Kelly Baum’s description of détournement’s contradictions as ‘productive and illuminating… whose primary source of dialectical energy was contradiction’. See Kelly Baum, ‘The Sex of the Situationist International,’ 42.

I would thoroughly recommend anyone living in London to go see the Gustav Metzger exhibition currently being held at the Serpentine gallery. I would try to say something clever about auto-destructive art and so on, but I’m tired so fuck it, I’ll just point you towards Stewart Home instead.

My name is Timothy Clark. I came to Berkeley in 1988, and the 21 years I have taught and researched here have been in many ways the most rewarding of my life. Therefore my feelings are painfully contradictory, you can imagine, as I look out at these old and new friends. It is an honor and a privilege to make the first speech on this occasion, but at the same time a tragedy.

Let me speak to the honor first. What I see in front of me – the banners, the faces, the demands – is the life of the university as I understand it. It is the university taking on form in the public sphere – escaping from the academic boardroom, shrugging off the jargon of the entrepreneurs and patent-seekers, and reminding us what a university really is. A university is not a brand name. It is not an umbrella organization for a 150 assorted corporate laboratories, with the faculty inside each striking bargains with their funders about how much or how little of the new knowledge they produce is immediately going to be “privatized.” A university – a public university – is not a finishing school for the sons and daughters of the shrinking few able to afford the fees. A university does not build its future on the backs of those most vulnerable in its midst – the men and women who keep the places we learn in safe and clean and continuing to function. A university – this is the last and vital element in its moral and intellectual life – does not see its crisis in isolation from the one that is threatening the state as a whole. It knows what is happening in schoolrooms in Richmond and Oakland and San Jose. It feels the despair of those for whom community college or the Cal State system seemed to offer a way forward, and who now see their courses cancelled and buildings shuttered. And all this – this is what is unforgivable – in a state whose concentrations of private and corporate wealth remain immense, but which a failed political system has put off limits even when the very life or death of our society is at stake.

People will say that in comparison with the hard times in California at large the university still has it good. I have two replies. First, of course we are not claiming parity in suffering with the truly disadvantaged and vulnerable, who are bearing the brunt of the state’s financial meltdown. We acknowledge the things we still have – but at the same time we know that a system of public education in a great state likeCalifornia is a complex, interdependent unity, and that we should fight with all we can, without apology, to preserve its whole fabric. The UC system is a precious resource – a public resource – built over more than a century with taxpayers’ money, private generosity and shrewdness, and the intellectual energy of generations of students, teachers, and staff. A state in its right mind does not destroy that resource when times get tough.

But this, make no mistake, is what is happening. How many times in the past two weeks have students found their department office closed, when they urgently needed advice on courses and requirements – “due to staff shortage”? How many times have you had to remember that if you needed to study in the library the coming weekend – that basic need of a university life – you should think again, for libraries at Berkeleycannot afford to open on either Saturday or Sunday? (Unlike those at the Universities of Mississippi and Alaska.) A colleague told me yesterday of a conversation she had had – one of many such conversations this week – with a trusted and dedicated member of staff in her building: the one person spared the layoff, asking her, with real desperation in his voice, “But how am I supposed to do the job now? How can one person prevent the whole facility from deteriorating to the point of no return?”

This is no time for the politics of denunciation. I know that many of these decisions are being forced on deans and chairs who can see no other way to do what has been mandated from the top. But as an overall policy, what we are living through makes me choke with anger. It is destructive and deeply unfair. It steers too close – if I may borrow an infamous phrase from a famous member of our faculty – to an “organ failure” model of crisis management. And if our leaders in UCOP think that in the end they will wear us down by using the oldest tactics in the reactionary playbook– Divide, Deceive, Conceal, Demoralize – they are deeply mistaken. We shall fight back.

Finally, then, let me offer the bare outlines of an alternative. There is a real emergency, we recognize, and many of us are willing to help address it. What do we want? What would bring us on board, as active participants in a work of reconstruction?

Well, supposing we were presented with an honest and transparent and coherent plan for the preservation of the public university in hard times… Supposing the plan was one in which sacrifices really were shared – in which the pet projects and inflated building programs and hidden overhead were no longer off limits when cuts were discussed… Supposing the profit-generating parts of the UC system (and they exist, by the way) were asked – maybe temporarily, as part of the true emergency – to contribute a proportion of their surplus to the urgent needs of the university’s teaching heart… Supposing the preservation of the true economic, racial, and ethnic diversity of UC’s student body was an absolute priority, an un-negotiable part of our institution’s character… Supposing it was simply unthinkable for the university’s future to be decided, as Yudof and the Regents are planning, by a commission of professional school managers and technicians who seldom or never face an actual classroom or a lab…

Then we would come on board. And this can still happen, my friends. We are at a moment of near-breakdown, and no one is pretending that the way out of it will be pain-free. An immense amount depends on the wider politics of the state. It is up to us to argue the case for a public university – for public education — in a democracy in crisis. The crisis is real. But crises produce choices. They shine a light on managers and management-speak. They make another vision possible. They remind us of why we think teaching and learning and the production of new knowledge matter – why they are vital to the life of society at large – and they call us to fight to preserve the space in which they can thrive. The fight has begun.

Just found out that I will be speaking at this conference, which is rather exciting. I think Aberdeen may well be the furthest north I have ever been. Anway, below is my abstract, I’ll post the full paper after the event, although I need to write it first.

‘The existing images only reinforce the existing lies’: The Situationist International in and against visuality.

The Situationist International (SI) introduced two key concepts to the study of the relationship between visual arts and politics: spectacle and détournement. These terms can be mapped onto Walter Benjamin’s distinction between aestheticised politics and politicised aesthetics: the spectacle as the mediation of social and political life via images, and détournement as a tactic of cultural resistance that turns the spectacle’s visual productions against themselves. Yet the paradox of détournement is that every gesture of resistance is accompanied by a latent complicity; thus, the SI identified recuperation as the spectacle’s reciprocal absorption of oppositional or radical voices. The vortex of détournement-recuperation – the instability of visual meaning within the spectacle – would lead the SI to renounce visual production, and concede that the image had lost its potential for resistance.

This paper explores the denigration of vision within the SI’s political-aesthetic program, read against the SI’s inability to engage productively with contemporary discourses of sexual revolution. Sexual politics remain a conspicuous absence within the SI’s professedly comprehensive critique of consumer capitalism. Though this paper does not speak of sex as such, it uses posters and images produced by the SI to demonstrate the proximity between resistance and complicity, and the shortcomings of an aesthetic program organised entirely around negation.

The paper moves on to consider the legacy of the SI via ‘pro-situ’ groups like Black Mask (US) and King Mob (UK), whose attempts to move beyond the spectacle necessitated a movement beyond the SI itself.