[microsound] (no subject)

[Kim Cascone]

> Are you saying that Moles and DeBord would have wanted to have
> formalized their relationship as anything other than an irreconcilable
> difference?
no this statement is speculative and I did not (mean to) imply that
I was simply pointing out that Debord was actively alienating his  
last of his cohorts towards the end of the SI and that Moles might  
have been caught up in this

> 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!

I disagree with the author...I'd say 'Revolution of Everyday Life'  
and 'Society of the Spectacle' are pretty squarely fixed in political  
critique
and they did leave us a detailed blue print for culture-jamming


> 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,

this is what I was pointing out w/r/t Moles

> 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.

again I disagree...much of the political-punk movement took its rule- 
book from the SI


> Situationist theory, especially as represented by
> Debord's The Society of the Spectacle, is hopelessly
> young-Hegelian-rhetorical,

can't we find similar critiques in Baudrillard and Eco -- even  
Barthes and Sontag?
I don't think we should reduce SOTS to a young Hegelian utopian rant
to my mind Vaneigem and Debord both called bullshit on a post WWII  
society racing towards gluttonous consumerism

but in any case the idea of culture-jamming has been raised here in  
the past
witness the microsound drop-lifting project
maybe time to dust it off and infuse it with some new ideas?