Thursday Night 12.11.08 — McKenzie Wark — Talk/Discussion — 50 Years of Recuperation: The Situationist International 1957-1972
Comments Off on Thursday Night 12.11.08 — McKenzie Wark — Talk/Discussion — 50 Years of Recuperation: The Situationist International 1957-1972Thursday Night 12.11.08 — McKenzie Wark — Talk/Discussion
50 Years of Recuperation: The Situationist International 1957-1972
Contents:
1. About this Thursday Night
2. About McKenzie Wark
3. Spectacles of disintegration
4. Note on Art
http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday
http://www.ludiccrew.org/wark/
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1. About this Thursday Night
What: presentation / discussion
Where: 16 Beaver Street, 4th floor (directions below)
When: Thursday Night 12.11.08 @ 7:15 PM
Who: Open To All
In some recent readings and discussions in Paris this summer, two of us
wandered across the following text:
“The idea of investigating the conditions for a ‘recuperation of political
radicality’ in contemporary art derived from the sudden proliferation of
international exhibitions of contemporary art, seemingly organized around
various left political ‘isms’ … does contemporary art function
critically in this context? or do these exhibitions, biennials, etc…
fail, as Adorno wrote ‘to let nothing inherited go unchallenged.’
References to the cultural climate of the 1960’s and 1970’s have been
ubiquitous in recent …”
We thought it an interesting fragment to include in describing this
evening’s discussion and for introducing what we hope will be a
case-study. How to be inheritors of various legacies of the left? How to
avoid the traps of orthodoxy (which can result into idolatry) or fetishism
and the flights into irrelevance and impertinence?
The Situationist International (1957-1972) is widely recognized today as
one of the key movements of artistic and political experimentation of the
20th century. The interest in their work, their writings, their urban
proposals, their concepts, their protagonists (particularly Guy Debord)
have not only been extensive but intensive over the last decade or two.
And despite the strong reactions that any discussion of or engagement with
their ideas elicits today (from feigned boredom or fatigue to outraged
accusations of recuperation, appropriation, misreading, careerism), the
depth and range of their experimentation and critique remains elusive.
Has the work, activity, writing and critique of the Situationist
International been recouped?
What if the answer is yes AND no?
What can we make of the answer yes? Yes, they were recouped, one could
say, and their recuperation is evidence that the critique ‘worked’ or had
some efficacy.
What can we make of the answer no? No, some aspects of their critique
remain, not only valid, but unassimilable. What can we make of this
unassimilability?
The Situationists bequeathed many key concepts to us, including
psychogeography, the dérive, unitary urbanism, and of course the society
of the spectacle. It also spawned at least one major work of critical and
utopian architecture in Constant’s New Babylon. But rather than treat
these as seductive historical curiosities, or as precursors to more
“acceptable” notions, McKenzie Wark asks what might survive the
recuperation of the Situationists and act as pointers to new practices.
Rather than attempting to make an unbearable totality “sustainable,” might
we pick up the thread of those who dared to negate this world as a whole
and imagine it anew?
Or one might simply ask, “How to recoup what cannot be recouped, what
remains unassimilable?” “Is such a task a flight of fancy and utopia or a
necessary part of the idea-logical struggle – the struggle to imagine and
think a different world, different sets of values, and spaces for
different forms of life?”
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2. About McKenzie Wark
McKenzie Wark is the author, among other things, of A Hacker Manifesto
(Harvard UP
2004), Gamer Theory (Harvard 2007) and most recently 50 Years of
Recuperation of the Situationist International (Princeton Architectural
2008). He is th chair of Culture & Media Studies at Eugene Lang College
the New School for Liberal Studies.
The website:
http://totality.tv/
The book:
http://www.papress.com/bookpage.tpl?cart=1228684469681857&isbn=9781568987897
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3. Spectacles of disintegration
Who could have guessed that when the flood came it would come in slow motion, over forty decades rather than forty nights? As the polar ice sheets unravel and plunge into the waters, those who have so mismanaged the fate of all things cling to their private arks. The animals, one by one, will be saved, if at all, as gene sequences.
For those who wanted to see the preview for this blockbuster coming attraction, there was the short story of the President and the tropical storm. When the storm breached the levees and sank a fabled southern city, the President deigned to visit and show his concern, as protocol requires. Only he did not set foot there. Rather, upon leaving his vacation home, he had his personal jet detour over the sodden earth en route back to his other house. This was in order to produce the requisite photographic opportunity, of the President looking out the window with a look of compassionate conservatism, while below private armies of goons with guns secured valuable property, and the homeless were left to make a spectacle of their own misery, fans without tickets in the stadium of the endgame.
One could go on, but what’s the use? Where to start; where to end? These are times when one should dispense contempt only with the greatest economy, because of the great number of things that deserve it. And yet who even offers to dispense it? The newspapers are devolving, bit by bit, into shopping guides. The “quality” magazines are just coded investment advice. One turns with hope to the blogosphere, only to find that it mostly just mimics the very media to which it claims to be an alternative. Alternative turns out just to mean cheaper.
This scenario would seem like the best imaginable for a writer. What writer does not secretly want such a corrupt and venal world as material? In a blunted age, the scribe with one good butter knife dipped in spit has the cutting edge. And yet such writers hardly seem to have appeared among us. Hence the requirement of a preliminary inquiry into the causes of the decline of the quality of merciless prose.
At least three worlds of perception, affection and conception must be in good working order for critical thought to touch the totality of things. These are the worlds of journalism, art, and the academy. Critical thought takes its distance from these three worlds as much as from the big world beyond them, but for that larger distance to prove useful, critical thought has to mark itself off from the closer targets of journalism, art and the academy. In brief, these three worlds have failed to afford the conditions for their own negation.
What are we to think of American journalism? That it would be a good idea. It ceased to exist when the ruling powers discovered it more efficient, and more affordable, to rule without it. This proved easier than anyone imagined. It was just a matter of turning the rigid rules of production of American journalistic prose against themselves. No story can be considered complete until its reporter has heard from both sides. So by the simple expedient of manufacturing a “side” convenient to their interests, and putting enough money behind it, the ruling powers have ensured that they will have their interests “covered” at least 50% of the time. All one needs is a think tank—so named because it is where thinkers are paid not to.
At the extreme opposite end of the cultural scale from the cheap truth of the press are the bespoke contrivances of the art world. Rather than news you can use, art specializes in a venerable uselessness. This uselessness bestows on art a certain autonomy from the grim dealings in shopworn slogans and infoporn that characterize all other domains of the spectacle. Or so it once seemed. If journalism finds itself recruited to the retailing of interested fables, art finds itself recruited into the prototyping of fascinating consumables. As the economy comes more and more to circulate images of things rather than the things themselves, art is detailed with the task of at last making interesting images of what these nonexistent things are not.
Meanwhile, in the academy, the talent for historical criticism has fallen into disuse. The schools no longer tolerate it. Critical theory has become hypocritical theory. If there was a wrong turn, it bears the name Louis Althusser. He legitimated a carve-up of the realm of appearances that conformed all too neatly to the existing disciplinary arrangement. Henceforth, the economic, the political and the ideological (or cultural) were to be treated as “relatively autonomous” domains, each with its own specialized cadre of scholars.
And thus the critical force of historical thought was separated into various specializations and absorbed back into business as usual within the spectacle. Having renounced the criticism of the world, the world—in the form of journalism, scholarship, and art—can safely ignore it. The margins outside the spectacular world that once harbored a glimmer of negation have been all but foreclosed. What remains is professionalized anesthesia, mourning communities, discourse clubs, legacy fetishists. Some ages betray a deep respect for their critical thinkers. To Socrates, they offered hemlock; to Jesus, the cross. These days it’s Zoloft, a column—or tenure.
The restoration of critical thought is a big project, then. Before we can take three steps forward we have to take two steps back. Back to the scene of the crime, or at least to one of them. To Paris in the ’50s, when the fateful turn toward the institutionalization of critical thought was just about to be made. Back to the last best attempt to found a critical thought in and against its institutional forms of journalism, art, and the academy.
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4. Art
What is the ‘elephant in the room’ at any art show? The artist known as Banksy (formerly ‘street’, then more like ‘high street’) put an actual elephant in his first Los Angeles Show, and claimed it stood among other things, for the twenty billion people living below the poverty line.∗ But perhaps the invisible elephant in the gallery is art itself. Or rather, the mediocrity of art, at a time when art is just the shortest distance between two art dealers. The pretensions of the contemporary artist go hand in hand with the practical reduction of his or her realm of possible action to zero, which might not be so remarkable, if it were not for the such artists’ temerity, or stupidity, in denying it.
Situationist aesthetics does not involve a judgment of taste. It is not a question of being for or against any particular style. It is to make a judgment against art as a separate activity and the “artists of repetition” who populate it. By pursuing the Situationist rejection of modern art, we can arrive at a definitive judgment against the contemporary art which resolved none of the contradictions of what went before it, but merely replaced it with a new décor and new slogans. “Attachment to those creative forms permitted and valued in the economic milieu of the moment is difficult to justify.”
The spectacle never functions without a great mass of intermediaries, exemplars, subcontractors and functionaries who also set the tone for an age. “On the spiritual level, the petit bourgeoisie are always in power.” And what it values in art is a purely formal evolution. Art is that separate realm in which new forms market themselves, rather than new contents.
All that changes between late twentieth century modern and early twenty-first century contemporary art is the repertoire of gestures. “… the modern art of this period turns out to have been dominated by, and almost exclusively composed of, camouflaged repetitions, that is, a stagnation that bespeaks of both the definitive exhaustion of the entire old theatre of cultural operations as well as of the incapacity to discover a new one.” Contemporary art is ‘progress’ over modern art only in the sense that it gives up any pretensions to progress, redemption, purpose. It resigns itself to a set of purely formal variations on the materials given to it.
Art can no longer be justified. “The arts of passivity are over and done” The Situationist rejection of contemporary art is not made, however, in the name of some return to traditional form. It is not a question of abandoning contemporary art, but of realizing it. The artist creates freely, but only within the separate sphere of the art world, and always with the aim of transforming free action into a product. The product can be minimal, conceptual, post-conceptual, even non existent. But there is always some residue left for the dealer to sell.
The Situationist project is the realization and suppression of art. Suppression, in the sense of an end to art as a separate activity. Realization, in the sense that the free creativity that now takes place in the separate world of art can become the precursor to a new way of life. Art should be made by all. The makings of us all should be an aesthetic practice.
In the meantime, art is a means, something to be appropriated for other ends. “The literary and artistic heritage of humanity should be used for partisan propaganda purposes.” But in a quite particular way. “We obviously have no interest in encouraging the continuous artistic renovation of refrigerator designs.” Rather, it is a matter of producing ourselves, not mere images or things which might stand in for us.
The Letterist aesthetic dissolved the artwork into the adventure across the time and space of the city. The early Situationist aesthetic extended it to the construction of spaces for a particular kind of adventure as well. Why take the city as given? Why not imagine a new architecture, a new urbanism, one that could be both the outcome and the catalyst for play? These were early grapplings with the idea of an aesthetic without an object or subject, as a pure relation to time.
“The traditional goal of aesthetics is to make one feel, in privation and absence, certain past elements of life that through the mediation of art would escape the confusion of appearances, since appearance is what suffers from the reign of time.” Art, in this sense, is opposed to time. What is true in traditional aesthetics is what stands outside and against time. Art in this conception presents a true image of the Eternal. Modern art did not advance so far beyond this as might at first appear. What is true in modern aesthetics is what reveals Time as a concept. Time unfolds as a succession of formal advances – impressionism, cubism, expressionism, abstraction, and so on. Contemporary art relinquishes all faith in art as a representation of something true. All that are left are the fragments of the great project of the beautiful as an aspect of the true.
In situationist aesthetics, what is true is neither something Eternal, outside of time, nor Time as a concept, outside of the flux of appearances. Rather, “the Situationist goal is immediate participation on a passionate abundance of life, through the variation of fleeting moments resolutely arranged.” It refuses the arresting of time in the work, and all that this transformation of the play of creation into a thing implies. Even objectless art – fluxus, happenings – falls under this sanction. KK109 “The happening is a sort of spectacle pushed to the extreme state of dissolution.” “a hash produced by throwing together all the old artistic leftovers.”
The arresting of time in the artwork, the transformation of free creativity into a thing, when shorn of all justification in aesthetic theory, reveals itself for what it is – mere property. Aesthetics rested, in either its traditional or modern forms, on the conceit that something turned into a mere thing, an artifact, could nevertheless be something true. That it could represent the beautiful, over and against the flux of appearances.
Situationist aesthetics begins by reversing the judgment of aesthetics. Turning free creativity into an object is not to raise it above the flux of appearances toward the beautiful, but to degrade it. What is true is not the concept of the Eternal, or the concept of Time, but temporality, the lived time of everyday life. The tactics in relation to art then is to find, not a raising up of mundane materials into something more worthy, but rather a poverty, a fall.
Even the most sumptuous artworks conceal a poverty. Take the elaborate installations of Matthew Barney, which might be to art what the McMansion is to architecture. There is an abundance of lush materials, tactile surfaces, expensive stagings. But the frame on which it all hangs is cheap, generic, the intellectual equivalent of pre-cast concrete. ∗