[microsound] micro-situations

[Charles Turner]

On Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:56:44 -0800, Kim Cascone wrote:
> yes Debord worked hard to alienate many from the movement in its  
> later days - even former colleagues
> my theory is that he sense the movement was being co-opted and turned  
> into a caricature of itself so he emptied it and created a vacuum

Are you saying that Moles and DeBord would have wanted to have 
formalized their relationship as anything other than an irreconcilable 
difference?

Anyway, T. J. Clark's "Why Art Can't Kill The Situationist 
International" is worth a read on this subject if you're into politics, 
or just a scan if you're into art:

<http://www.vze26m98.net/anechoic/Clark-1997.pdf>

(I won't leave this up forever...)

"Enough, enough. In the end the interest of the Debray/NLR proceedings 
lies in the way they reveal, just a little more flagrantly than usual, 
the structure (and function) of what now passes for knowledge of the 
S.I. from 1960 on. The established wisdom, let us call it. It can be 
broken down into four essential propositions, though obviously these 
overlap and repeat themselves.

Proposition 1: The Situationist International was an art organization 
(a typical late-modernist avant-garde) that strayed belatedly into "art 
politics."Judged as art, its politics do not amount to much. And surely 
they are not meant to be judged as politics!

Proposition 2: The S.I. in its last ten years was an art-political 
sect, consumed with the lineaments of its own purity, living on a diet 
of exclusions and denunciations, and largely ignoring the wider politi- 
cal realm, or the problems of organization and expansion that pre- 
sented themselves in an apparently prerevolutionary situation. Call 
this the clean-hands thesis. Or the burning-with-the-pure-flame-of- 
negativity thesis. (Proposition 2 is subscribed to, be it said, by many 
of the S.I.'s admirers.)

Proposition 3: Situationist politics was "subjectivist," post- or 
hyper- Surrealist, propelled by a utopian notion of a new "politics of 
everyday life" that can be reduced to a handful of '68 graffiti: "Take 
your desires for reality," "Boredom is always counter-revolutionary," 
etc.

Proposition 4: Situationist theory, especially as represented by 
Debord's The Society of the Spectacle, is hopelessly 
young-Hegelian-rhetorical, totalizing, resting on a metaphysical 
hostility to "mere" appearance or representation, and mounting a 
last-ditch defense of the notion of authenticity, whether of individual 
or class subject."