Book of the Week: A Situationist blast from the past

One of the best books I have read is The Hacker Manifesto by McKenzie Wark, a dense book which offers a class analysis of current society, featuring a hacker class vs. a ‘vectoral’ class, and invites for deep and reflexive reading.

Ken Wark has now produced a new book, about a period that was just as pregnant as ours in terms of cultural and political change, i.e. the Situationist International that preceded May 1968.

* Book: The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International. McKenzie Wark. Verso, 2011.

The summary:

“Over fifty years after the Situationist International appeared, they continue to influence activists, artists and theorists. From the Invisible Committee’s bestselling The Coming Insurrection to Iain Sinclair’s psychogeographic explorations, their work is still found to be rich with possibilities, yet its breadth and diversity is still unexplored. In the first account since Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces (1989), McKenzie Wark traces the Situationist International’s beginnings in 1950s bohemian Paris up to the explosive days of May 1968. This account puts the legendary figure of Guy Debord back into the context of the other fascinating figures who made up the movement, including Constant, Asger Jorn, Michèle Bernstein and Jacqueline De Jong. It treats them as an international movement of conflicting passions rather than as a Paris coterie. Accessible to those who have only just discovered the Situationists and filled with new insights, Wark reconnects their work to new practices in communication, built form, and everyday life.”

An excerpt from McKenzie Wark’s Introduction: Leaving the 21st Century:

“We are bored with this planet. It has seen better centuries, and the promise of better times to come eludes us. The possibilities of this world, in these times, seem dismal and dull. All it offers at best is spectacles of disintegration. Capitalism or barbarism, those are the choices. This is an epoch governed by this blackmail: either more and more of the same, or the end times. Or so they say. We don’t buy it. Its time to start scheming on how to leave the twenty-first century. The pessimists are right. Things can’t go on as they are. The optimists are also right. Another world is possible. The means are at our disposal. Our species-being is as a builder of worlds.

Sometimes, to go forwards, one has to go back. Back to the scene of the crime. Back to the moment when the situation seemed open, before the gun went off, before the race of champions started. This is a story about a small band of artists and writers whose habits were bohemian at best, delinquent at worst, who set off with no formal training and equipped with little besides their wits, to change the world. As Guy Debord, not the least of their number, later wrote: “It is known that initially the Situationists wanted at the very least to build cities, the environment suitable to the unlimited deployment of new passions. But of course this was not easy and so we found ourselves forced to do much more.”

Where now does one find this kind of ambition? These days art is happy to settle for a little notoriety, a good dealer and a retrospective. It has renounced the desire to give form to the world. Having ceased to be modern, and finding it too passé to be postmodern, art is now merely contemporary, which seems to mean nothing more than yesterday’s art at today’s prices. If anything theory has turned out even worse. It found its utopia, and it is the academy. It is a colonnade adorned with the busts of famous fathers: Jacques Lacan the bourgeois-magus, Louis Althusser the throttler-of-concepts, Jacques Derrida the dandy-of-difference, Michel Foucault the one-eyed-powerhouse, Gilles Deleuze the taker-from-behind. Acolytes and epigones pace furiously up and down, prostrating themselves before one master – Ah! Betrayed! – and then another. The production of new dead masters to imitate can barely keep up with consumer demand, prompting some to chisel statues of new demigods while they still live: Alain Badiou the Maoist-of-the-matheme, Giorgio Agamben the pensive-pedant, Slavoj Zizek the neuro-Hegelian-joker.

In the United States the academy spread its investments, placing a few bets on women and people of color. The best of whom – Susan Buck-Morss, Judith Butler, Paul Gilroy, Donna Haraway,– at least appreciate the double bind of speaking for difference within the heart of the empire of indifference. At best theory, like art, turns in on itself, living on through commentary, investing in its own death on credit. At worse, it rattles the chains of old ghosts, as if a conference on ‘The idea of communism’ could still shock the bourgeois. As if there was still a bourgeois literate enough to shock. As if it was the idea that ever shocked them, so much as the practice.

Beneath the pavement, the beach. It’s a now well worn slogan from the May-June events in Paris, 1968. It’s the moment when two kinds of critique seemed to come together. One is communist, and demands equality. The other is bohemian, and demands difference. The former tends to get erased from historical memory. Its as if one of the world’s great general strikes never happened. The latter is rendered in a language that makes it seem benign, banal even. As if all that was demanded was customer service. Luc Boltanski: “Whole sections of the artistic critique of capitalism were integrated into management rhetoric.” What is lost is the combined power of a critique of both wage labor and of everyday life, expressed in acts. What has escaped the institutionalization of high theory is the possibility of low theory, of a critical though indifferent to the institutional forms of the academy or the art world. A low theory that dedicated to the practice that is critique and the critique that is practice.

And so: two steps back, that they might make possible three steps forward. Back to the 50s and 60s, when another twenty-first century seemed possible. Back to the few, the happy few, who thought they had discovered how to leave the twentieth century for sunnier climes, though not quite as warming as ours. Its not as if there are not already accounts of the Letterist International (1952-1957) and the Situationist International (1957-1972) that succeeded it. The Beach Beneath the Street claims no originality whatsoever. Rather, it’s a question of creating a past specific to the demands of this present. An account which resists the sorting and selecting which parcels out a movement into bite size morsels, each to be swallowed by a specific discipline: art history, media studies, architecture, philosophy or literature. The Situationist project implied the overcoming of separate and specialized knowledge, and has to be recalled in that spirit.

It is also easy prey for biographers, who excise this or that figure, creating little subjective narratives, like the plot of a novel or (dare we hope to sell the rights) a movie. The Letterist International and the Situationist International were collective and collaborative projects. Sure, some figures stand out (first among equals Guy Debord), but to reduce a movement to a biography or two is to cut a piece free from what made it of interest in the first place: the game of tactics and ruses, moves and cheats, by which each played with and against the other.

Even when the Situationists are treated as a movement, it is the supposedly minor figures who drop out of the story, or become mere props to the great men among them. Or, in order to make some coherent narrative out of it, to write a biography of a movement as if it were a subject, the differences among its members are either suppressed or turned into the stakes of a mere drama of personalities.ix Here instead is a large cast of disparate characters, some well known, some not, where Guy Debord and Asger Jorn rub shoulders with Patrick Straram, Michele Bernstein, Ralph Rumney, Pinot Gallizio, Jacqueline De Jong, Abdelhafid Khatib, Alexander Trocchi, or René Viénet. Where they come together, where they create something, is a situation. But situations are temporary moments, singular unities of space and time. They call for a different kind of remembering.

Some artifacts produced by the Situationist International are perhaps too well remembered. Do we really need another commentary on Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle? Is not the one he wrote himself enough? Perhaps today one could only do it justice by refusing to paraphrase it. The Beach Beneath the Street will bypass more than one of the well known landmarks on its route through the Situationist International, but it will also draw attention to some less well known moments. The criteria for inclusion is not historical importance but contemporary resonance. Mention will also be made in passing to prominent landmarks of high theory: Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and so forth. But only in passing. The Beach Beneath the Street will not engage them on their own terrain. Rather, it opens toward another terrain.

In this version of the glorious times and notorious lives of the Situationist International, it emerges out of the practice of everyday life, and the attempt to think it begun in Paris in the 50s by the Letterist International. It creates a space for itself by taking its distance from certain precursors. Some are well know: Jean-Paul Sartre, George Bataille, Henri Lebefvre, Le Corbusier. Some less so: Paul Nougé, Maurice Saillet. They find common cause with Asger Jorn, who developed his own distinctive practice and a distinctive set of theories. Jorn brings into the picture Constant Nieuwenhuys and Pinot Gallizio. Our attention then turns to the collective existence of the Situationist International, which unites the Letterists and with Jorn’s associates in 1957.

Along the way we shall look at a number of artists, writers, activists who entered the orbit of the Situationist International but drifted off to create their own distinctive works, each of which develops some aspect of the shared project, if often in contradictory directions. This includes Michele Bernstein’s writings on love and play, Jacqueline De Jong’s journal The Situationist Times, Alexander Trocchi’s Project Sigma and Constant’s New Babylon. It is not as if these were fragments awaiting some sort of synthesis, however. Rather, each appropriates some elements from the Situationists as common property and adds to it in their own way. This account of the post-Situationist legacy of borrowing and correcting is meant rather to encourage further such takings and leave takings. The well has not yet run dry. A chapter on Henri Lefebvre shows what the Situationists took from him as well as what he took from them. The Beach Beneath the Street concludes with the Situationists’ own account of the revolutions of late sixties – both in Paris and also the Watts rebellion in Los Angeles. In contrast to those groups which made a profession of turning failed revolutions into literary or philosophical success, the Situationists chose with the ebb tide of the early seventies to disband.

Guy Debord spent a lot of time working on how to remember situations, how to document them and keep them in a way that could ignite future possibilities. For the most part, he created legends. “When legend becomes fact, print the legend,” as the newspaperman says at the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962). Much of the literature on the Situationists seems designed to be disabling, to prevent any real creative use of this body of work for critical practices in the twenty-first century. The authorities on this period delight in drawing attention to the follies then committed, as if their own complacency of thought was in some sense a higher achievement. Or it is all safely consigned to the archive, a time one can visit like a tourist before returning back home to the workaday world. The Beach Beneath the Street makes more than occasional reference to events of a more recent past, in which the cogency of Situationist thought and action still registers. Leaving the twentieth century was the aim the Situationist International once ascribed to itself. Leaving the twenty-first century might not be a bad ambition. On paper at least, we have longer to achieve it.”

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