Another burst of SI musings below.
What I want to do in the final two sessions of this course is to explore the question that effectively lies behind the whole endeavour: not just who were the Situationists, but crucially, why should we be interested in their ideas today.
The failure of May 1968
The culmination of the Situationist project was undeniably the civil unrest that paralysed France in May 1968.In a 1969 article somewhat optimistically entitled ‘The Beginning of an Era’ they stated that
In March 1966, in International Situationniste #10 (p. 77), we wrote, “What might appear to be audacious speculation in several of our assertions, we advance with the assurance that the future will bring their overwhelming and undeniable historical confirmation.” It couldn’t have been said better.
If many people did what we wrote, it was because we essentially wrote the negative that had been lived by us and by so many others before us.[1]
With typical modesty they here claim that they had always been stating the obvious, were perceptive enough to read the signs on the street.Meanwhile, the Situationists, after a brief period in hiding, left Paris for Brussels where they set about a process of chronicling and, perhaps unsurprisingly, apportioning blame.
The Situationists summarised the various failings in the same article:
Further on we will go into the movement’s weaknesses and deficiencies, which were the natural consequences of ignorance, improvisation and the dead weight of the past exerting themselves precisely where this movement best asserted itself; the consequences, above all, of the separations that all the joint forces for the preservation of the capitalist order narrowly succeeded in defending, with the politco-union bureaucratic machines exerting themselves to this end more intensely and effectively than the police at this moment of life or death for the system.[2]
The unions had been consistently against the strikes, viewing them both as juvenile and non-productive:
Those who turned down the ridiculous contract agreements offered to them (agreements that overjoyed the trade union leaders) have still to discover that while they cannot ‘receive’ much more within the framework of the existing economy, they can take everything if they transform the very bases of the economy on their own behalf.Their bosses can hardly pay more – but they could disappear.[3]
Whilst it is clear that the Situationists laid the blame for the failure of May ’68 firmly at the doors of other people, they were not short to attribute its successes to themselves:
The largest general strike that ever stopped the economy of an advanced industrial country, and the first wildcat general strike in history; revolutionary occupations and the first steps toward direct democracy; the increasingly complete withering of state power for nearly two weeks; the complete verification of the revolutionary theory of our time and even here and there the beginning of its partial realization [sic]; the most important experience of the modern proletarian movement that is in the process of constituting itself in its fully developed form in all countries, and the model it must now go beyond – this is what the French May 1968 movement was essentially, and this in itself is already its essential victory.[4]
These proclamations of triumph were somewhat premature, this being published in what was, unbeknown to the group, the last issue of International Situationniste.In spite of their attempts to emphasise the successes of the events, the aftermath and the reassertion of the banality of everyday capitalism must in fact have been characterised by a sense of crushing anti-climax, and left a bitterness in the air that the group was unable to recover from.
The dissolution of the SI
Following May ’68, the Situationists retreated for a period of intense reassessment. Debord was later to claim that after more than a year they had failed to write even 15 lines of usable text.[5] However, the main topic of discussion was, typically, discipline, or rather, the lack of it, and a number of members handed in their resignations. Debord published a declaration in 1970 acknowledging the problems that faced the SI:
The crisis that has continually deepened in the SI in the course of the last year, and whose roots go much further back, has ended up revealing all its aspects; and has led to a moreAnd that is precisely the heart of the problem, for what we have really been experiencing, behind an abstract proclamation of the contrary, is this refusal to take any responsibility whatsoever in participating in either the decisions or the implementation of our real activity, even at a time when it has been so indisputably threatened.[9]
The tone of this quote conveys the sense of crisis that gripped the group at this time, and the corollary paranoia that accompanied it.
Questions
It was probably inevitable that the SI should dissolve following May ’68. Whilst their identification of the trade unions as the main culprits in the collapse of the revolutionary impetus is probably largely correct, there remained also the possibility that the Situationists analysis of the culture they were intent on destroying was just plain wrong. In what follows, I look briefly at two theorists who had some contact with the Situationists and involvement with the events of May ’68, and whose thought bears some debt to them, yet who came to occupy positions quite radically opposed to the Situationists: the ‘post-modern’ philosophers Jean Baudrillard and Jean-François Lyotard.
Baudrillard and ‘hyperreality’
Many of you are probably more familiar with Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation than you think, playing, as it did a cameo role in the Wachowski brothers’ film The Matrix, and allegedly providing some of the inspiration for the film.This is quite appropriate, as in many respects it reads like bad science fiction. At the beginning of The Society of the Spectacle, Debord states that
The whole of life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles.All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.[10]
In order to sustain itself, Capitalism has expanded to such an extent that our real desires are sold back to us in commodity form.For the Situationists, this is exactly what happened in the early moments of the May ’68 revolution:
The movement was a rediscovery of collective and individual history, an awareness of the possibility of intervening in history, an awareness of participating in an irreversible event (‘Nothing will ever be the same again’); people looked back in amusement at the strange existence they had led a week before, at their outlived survival.[11]
The irruption of desires, new forms of social organisation, new forms of politics were created in these brief moments, an irruption of the real into the unreality of the Spectacle. The story, ‘On Exactitude in Science’, is only one paragraph in length, goes as follows:
In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.[12]
Here we have the image of a representation or abstraction which is no longer abstract, and consequently is useless. However, where in Borges fable it is the map that rots over the territory, in Baudrillard’s hyperreality, the map remains as the terrain itself disappears:
Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept.The desert of the real itself.[13]
‘Real’ life and its representations in the Spectacle, in Baudrillard’s system, have become indistinguishable from one another and therefore to attempt to find ‘real’ desires beneath the Spectacle’s distortions is illusory.Or, to use another cinematic metaphor, imagine (again) the moment in John Carpenter’s They Live where the hero puts on his special ideology-penetrating sunglasses, and, instead of revealing the true messages behind the billboards, the billboards remain the same.
Lyotard’s ‘scepticism towards grand narratives’
Jean-François Lyotard, as a member of the student mouvement du 22 mars, was an active participant in the events of May ’68.The act of criticism is deeply hierarchical: ‘where does his [the critic’s] power over the criticised come from? he knows better? he is the teacher, the educator? he is therefore universality, the University, the State, the City, bending over childhood, nature, singularity, shadiness, to reclaim them?The confessor and the God helping the sinner save his soul?'[14]
Some of this critique is borne out by what is known of the organisational structure of the Situationist International: although they described themselves as a ‘conspiracy of equals’, it is well known that it was a dictatorship, and that the dictator was Guy Debord himself.The revolving-door cycle of expulsions and arguments that is documented in the history of the movement is testament to this. He describes this as follows:
Science has always been in conflict with narratives.I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth.[17]
Science, by which he means any discipline that involves the search for truth, be that empiricist science, Marxism or capitalist Economics, makes claims to represent reality. This means that the whole concept of universal truth disappears under Lyotard’s analysis.
This state of scepticism towards all claims of truth, salvation, and universality is what Lyotard defines as the postmodern condition, and within this framework it is arguable that Debord and the Situationist International stand as the last, great Modernists.
It is not difficult to characterise the philosophies of Baudrillard and Lyotard as philosophies of despair.To end, I would like to consider whether it might not be helpful to rethink Baudrillard and Lyotard’s position on capitalism – that it has ‘always already’ recuperated its own resistance, that our desires are inherently alienated – and consider a model whereby capitalism is instead always trying to catch up with those desires.
[1] Anon., ‘The Beginning of an Era’, in Ken Knabb (trans.), The Situationist International Anthology, (Berkeley, CA: The Bureau of Public Secrets, 1995), p. 227.
[2] Anon., ‘The Beginning of an Era’, in Ken Knabb (trans.), The Situationist International Anthology, (Berkeley, CA: The Bureau of Public Secrets, 1995), p. 225.
[3] Viennet, Enrages and Situationists, quoted in Simon Ford, The Situationist International: A User’s Guide, (London: Black Dog, 2005), p. 127.
[4] Anon., ‘The Beginning of an Era’, in Ken Knabb (trans.), The Situationist International Anthology, (Berkeley, CA: The Bureau of Public Secrets, 1995), p. 225.
[5] Simon Ford, The Situationist International: A User’s Guide, p. 135.
[6] Simon Ford, The Situationist International: A User’s Guide, p. 136.
[7] Debord and Sanguinetti, The Veritable Split, quoted in Simon Ford, The Situationist International: A User’s Guide, p. 136.
[8] Debord and Sanguinetti, The Veritable Split, quoted in Simon Ford, The Situationist International: A User’s Guide, p. 137.
[9] Debord, Riesel and Viénet, ‘Declaration’, in Ken Knabb, The Situationist International Anthology, p. 366.
[10] Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, (New York: Zone Books, 1995), p. 12.
[11] Anon., ‘The Beginning of an Era’, in Ken Knabb (trans.), The Situationist International Anthology, (Berkeley, CA: The Bureau of Public Secrets, 1995), pp. 225 – 226.
[13] Jean Bauldrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1994), p. 1.
[14] Jean François Lyotard, ‘Adrift’, quoted in Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age, (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 115.
[15] Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age, (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 114.
[16] Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age, (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 114.
[17] Jean François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1999), p. xxiii.
[18] Jean François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1999), p. xxiv.
[19] Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, quoted in Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture, pp. 165 – 166.