technical images and linear text

 

“The reality shows are only side-effects, and moreover mystifying, because in indicting them as manipulation, the critics assume that there is somewhere an original form of life … This criticism is over, as is every Situationist criticism of the ’spectacle’ and the concept of ’spectacle,’ as also in substance all criticism of ‘alienation.’ Unfortunately, I would add. Because the human abstraction of the spectacle was never hopeless; it always offered the chance of disalienation. Whereas the operation of the world in real time, its unconditional realisation, is really without alternative. Radicality has changed, and all negative criticism, surviving itself, actually helps its object to survive.” – Baudrillard, “Aesthetic Illusion and Virtual Reality”

1. Of the spectacular society, and why it demands our disobedience. 

Debord and the Situationists have revealed for us the spectacular society’s true character. The years have not dated their description of the spectacular society, but rather, society has grown into its description with the continued refinement of capitalism and its accessories. In the 21st century, far more than in the twentieth, ‘everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.’ No longer is there a ‘real’ life against which we can determine the nature of the ’spectacle.’ Representationalism is a basic human conceit, and yet the society of the spectacle exaggerates the primacy of representation to the point that it becomes absurd, it supplants the real. The map of mass culture no longer refers to, nor covers the territory, but rather it is the territory which lies in rotting tatters scattered across the map. All that once existed as free and fluid human creativity is undergoing a condensatory congealing into its inferior commodity forms. Commodity fetishism — the domination of human relations by the relations between things — ‘reaches its absolute fulfillment in the spectacle, where the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible par excellence.’

The society of the spectacle demands our disobedience because it assumes our obedience as given. The spectacle in-itself ’says nothing more than ‘that which appears is good, that which is good appears.” In a society beholden to the spectacle, to be other than a spectator is to be deviant, to subject oneself to reproach, punishment, retribution. Why should we take issue with a society that makes us all into spectators? Because when the only ability is to spectate, the act of creation fades off into the mists of the memory. To be human is to create; thus to spectate is to be inhuman. The attitude demanded by the spectacle ‘in principle is passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance.’ To rage against the spectacle is to be human, to affirm one’s humanity in the face of its constant televised refutation.

2. Of situationism and the worker: preposterous pandering to a past proletariat.

Even as the Situationists recognized the cultivation of proletarian idiocy on the part of the spectacular, they remained blinded by dogma. The spectacular breeds passivity, and the countless screens of spectacular capital are at the ready to drown out the pitiful yelps of theoretical solipsism. Why, then, are these students and intellectuals so caught up in the ‘emancipation of the proletariat?’ The spectacle has already ensured that the proletariat have no interest in their own emancipation, nor at they aware that they need to be emancipated (or that they are proletarian). Debord and his contemporaries called for revolution — a fine and noble goal, to be sure. But every revolution is but a rotation. How could the Situationists deluded themselves into hoping for revolutionary change, when such change could only but be built on the mass mobilization of the spectacle’s dupes? Indeed, how could such a mobilization ever take place but by the deployment of the spectacular? The backwardness and self-contradictory nature of the Situationists’ Marxism is clear: the worker is the slave of the spectacle, therefore to mobilize the workers one must speak the language of the spectacular, and yet the spectacle is inherently an incitement to passivity.

A postmodern situationism takes the Society of the Spectacle as its point of departure, and necessarily (but reluctantly) leaves the proletariat behind. We have no interest in inciting revolution, nor in pandering to a proletariat that has long ago been induced to no longer identify itself as such. 21st-century workers have all but lost interest in the patently conventional ‘workers’ union,’ much less in violent struggle against some supposed capitalist oppressors who provide them with all they (believe themselves to) need. This is not to say that we have forgotten the worker, but merely that we have accustomed ourselves to the worker’s having forgotten us. Nor do we lay the blame upon the shoulders of the worker! Being continuously admonished in the workplace, the last thing we might expect the worker to respond to would be further admonishments to revolution in the leisure-place. Such incitement might seems noble to the naïf bourgeois, but to the ‘real’ worker (such that this hypothetical construct even can be said to exist) the revolutionary is merely a new boss, and one who pays poorly at that. A postmodern situationism must forget its ‘negative criticism’ and seek its own positive jouissance before it can hope for acceptance.

3. Of the revolution, and its infinite postponement.

The revolution is at once impossible, inevitable, and irrelevant. It is impossible in that we will never be able to incite its occurrence; it will begin when it begins, and it will end when it ends, and that will be that. It is inevitable because we can be sure that it will begin, even if we might not be sure of when or what form it might take. And it is irrelevant, in that a full revolution always returns from whence it came: ‘the vision comes to life in the moment of uprising – but as soon as ‘the Revolution’ triumphs and the State returns, the dream and the ideal are already betrayed.’ Revolution, when it does come, will as likely as not speak the language of the spectacle, and it will replace one set of spectacles with another. Of this we cannot be a priori certain, but only ex posteriori vindicated. It is not our concern to incite yet another rebellion which will more deeply enshrine the dominance of the spectacular, but to reshape our relation to the spectacular so that if and when the revolt does arise, it will be a productive one. As Vaneigem tells us, ‘Hierarchical power, which has been with us for millennia, furnishes a perfectly adequate explanation for the permanence of rebellion, as it does of the repression that smashes rebellion.’ In order to reshape this repressive interaction, we must remake our idea of revolution.

Our postmodern situationism abandons not the ‘hope-for’ a social revolution, but the ‘attempt-at.’ We seek no abstract revolution, but rather to enshrine rebellion as an essential social value. Why have we abandoned revolutionary ideology? The western Marxist has been repeatedly confronted with the paradoxes of proletarian revolution. Where its seeds have taken root, true revolution has necessarily been thwarted by those states and traitorous ‘leftist’ organizations still deeply invested in capitalist oppression. And where ‘socialism‘ has truly flourished, we have seen the development, not a workers’ free states, but quasi-fascist oligarchies, socialist in name alone. Since roughly Gorky, even the most dogmatic of intellectual Marxists have affirmed by their patterns of residency that they would much prefer the bourgeois legality of a comfortable democratic-capitalist state to a repression which masquerades as proletarian. And yet many of these same intellectuals go on proclaiming the ideals of revolution, as though this proclaiming in-itself was somehow sufficient to bring about a true Marxist revolution. Only a fool blinded by spectacular society could hope to enshrine Marxism through the force of idealism, of all things! Today, the revolutionary is even less likely to succeed: watched, heard, and scrutinized by an assemblage of hidden cameras and microphones, the overt revolutionary has only the repressive state apparatus itself as audience.

4. Absurd responses to an absurd society: Dérive, détournement, déconstruction.

Vaneigem tells us also that ‘anything that does not kill power reinforces it, but anything which power does not itself kill weakens power.’ All of this development leads to a central concern: what is the radical alternative to revolution?  The spectacular society is necessarily an absurd one; it accepts no logic not of its own. We live in ‘a topsy turvy world where people do the opposite of what they wish, pass the time away in self-destruction and venerate that which destroys them, obedient to abstractions and sacrificing their real lives to those abstractions.’ Marxism in a spectacular society is no different. Revolutionaries agitate when they would rather be playing, sleeping, making love. They venerate their ridiculous idols in the fetishized author-personae of Marx, Trotsky and Mao. They are obedient to the abstraction of Marxist dogma, and their lives are certainly sacrificed to that abstraction. Leaving dogma behind, we have constructed against this pattern our irrevolutionary response to a society that refuses to recognize the possibility of revolution.

We refuse to enslave ourselves to unfree labour of any sort which does not beget immediate, tangible, and comprehensible benefits to ourselves; where we are compelled to labour within the theft-structure of capitalism, we will replace our surplus labour with our own play. We will appropriate the technologies of capital to suit our own ends: in an originary coup, this manifesto was covertly written in a workplace for pay. (The ideal act of disobedience is performed on company time!) In short, we accept capitalism as fundamentally enshrined in the Western ego, and yet we refuse to obey the structures which capital provides for our work and for our leisure.

Through situationist détournement, we reappropriate the undifferentiated mass of cultural commodities to suit our own ends. We wish to express ourselves with pastiche, reinterpretation, parody, and satire; nevertheless, this postmodern collage, ‘far from aiming to arouse indignation or laughter by alluding to some original work, will express our indifference toward a meaningless and forgotten original.’ Indeed, we wish to recognize the fact that the spectacle has become the simulacrum: the question of ’the original’ has become irrelevant. Nor do we consider détournement as a hermeneutically-sealed, artistic project. Indeed, we refuse to recognize these bourgeois distinctions between art and labour, between labour and leisure; our labours are both art and leisure. Nothing could be more anathema to our art than a gallery! This institution of the oppressor cannot be tolerated: our gallery is the street and the sidewalk, our canvas, the high-rise and the highway! If art does not provoke a repressive response from the institutions of capital, then it is little more than a dessicated husk, a throwback to a previous order of simulacra.

The dérive is an implicit refusal to accept the categories of spatiality imposed by capital. Our geography is to be a dipole interaction between our psyches and our lived environment; we refuse to allow this intimate psychogeographical awareness to be mediated by consumerism, or by the structures of industrialism and commercialism. We will treat the shopping mall as a park, the industrial plaza as a shopping mall, and the park as a canvas. Through psychogeography, we will uncover and transgress those hidden, soft boundaries of urban existence and break free of the tyranny of a corporate-administered habitus: “We must replace travel as an adjunct to work with travel as a pleasure.” Instead of travelling in the traces of capital, we wish to forge through its ‘extended and indistinct bordering regions’ and recover the geography that is rightfully public.

In both of these (and other) relations to capitalism, there is an implicit deconstruction of its dictates. We strive to carry this deconstructive spirit with us always; this is the essence of the irrevolutionary struggle! Culture is a socially-made and individually-performed decision. Capitalism persists by the individual free choices of an mass citizenry unfree in its ideology; in the face of this, we wish always to reaffirm the freeness of our choices. This is the paradoxical revolution at the core of our irrevolutionary manifesto. By never accepting the dictates of a capitalist culture as given, and by questioning always the hidden assumptions of an oppressive economic régime, we hope to institute a new paradigm in the citizen’s relation to capital. As deconstruction speaks from within the text to uncover its inherent contradictions and excluded conclusions, we speak from within a spectacular society to unearth its contradictions: its basic unreality and its hegemonic function.

5. The revolution of everyday play.

There is, deftly concealed in our ‘irrevolutionary’ manifesto, a revolution (or perhaps we had better say, a ‘rebellion’ or ‘revolt’). Baudrillard and others have demonstrated the incoherence of supposing to criticise the society of the spectacle from some privileged position outside its symbolic order. The futility of negative criticism against the spectacle, however, requires us to make some positive contribution to our lived experience of the spectacle. Our sanity demands it! We cannot incite revolution against the spectacular, but must first radically reshape our relation to the spectacle. By adopting our deconstructive stance toward the spectacle, one takes the first step in performing the long-awaited revolution.

Marxist theory after Marx has often reified capitalism to an unfortunate extent. Capitalism is portrayed by Marxists and capitalists alike as monolithic, powerful, and external to society (for it is in the interests of both to do so). “Capitalism” has dictates, and “society” has to accept them! This is a portrayal that suits the purposes of those who would maintain or undermine capitalism, but which has precious little correspondence to our lived reality. Indeed, it is this very myth which allows capitalism to persist. By avoiding it, we hope to avoid complicity in the continued dominance of a regressive economic system. The truth is: capitalism is chosen by you! Like any social structure, it exists, develops, changes, and (or!) persists on the basis of choices made by the individuals who find themselves in that structure. If we persist in obeying the dictates of the structure, then we are in effect ensuring its continued dominance. But what if we don’t? This is the proof that capitalism is up to us.

What if, like me, you go to work and write a manifesto for six hours? What if, far from contributing to the surplus labour pool of your employer, you fail to perform even that labour which is ostensibly ‘necessary’? Does that not undermine the basic principle of capitalism from within? And what if your overseers have no way of knowing that this fundamental tenet of oppression is being quietly phased-out? What if you sell a product to a customer for its use-value, or steal something and give it away? What if you cease to regard the dictates of capitalism as natural, or given, but you begin to question their basic premises and find them to be nonexistent?

Apart from the obvious — that you are reaffirming your fundamental human freedom and revelling in an oppressive regime’s deserved disobedience – you are also starting the rebellion. The radical nature of our irrevolutionary manifesto is thus: capitalism has colonized your life-space, stolen your labour and humanity, and removed any possibility of meaningful change within its structures . . . so you are to take it for all it’s got! Study its repressive mechanisms, its disciplinary apparatus, its cameras and its gatekeepers, and take advantage them all! Concern yourself with its asymmetries and its blind spots! Play with capitalism, and teach others to share in your playfulness. This is how the revolution will take place — not through the obscure jottings of a flaccid intelligentsia, but through the decisive example of those who refuse to accept repression as a given!    

6. Indebtedness.

Although a neo-situationist manifesto needs no repressive citation-apparatus to justify its intellectual pastiche, we recognize in this manifesto a debt to Guy-Ernest Debord, of course, as well as Raoul Vaneigem, Jean Baudrillard, Hakim Bey, and the students of U.N.E.F. Strasbourg, 1968, amongst many others. This manifesto was produced while its author was being compensated by one Sykes Canada Corporation for services-not-rendered. The radical tendencies outlined in this manifesto are not our invention, nor even particularly original. Rather they constitute an uncanny manifestation of an attitude toward the spectacle that is already long familiar to anyone who lives and works as a subject of the spectacular. Consider it a positive formulation of ironic detachment and postmodern sarcasm.

7. Onward!

You’re not still reading, are you?

This is a text to be performed, not contemplated.

“…we might now contemplate aesthetic actions which possess some of the resonance of terrorism (or “cruelty,” as Artaud put it) aimed at the destruction of abstractions rather than people, at liberation rather than power, pleasure rather than profit, joy rather than fear. ‘Poetic Terrorism.’ Our chosen images have the potency of darkness–but all images are masks, and behind these masks lie energies we can turn toward light and pleasure.” - Hakim Bey