Shawn Greenlee
Shawn Greenlee
March 31, 2002

Sorry to be posting late…
Lovink’s analysis of the message consisting of many layers of information uncovers an aspect of media-user response, that echoes what Keenan hinted at in the failing of media to do the job it supposedly sets out to do…illicit humanitarian response. The messages forced through our window (end-user media) are passing through shattered glass distorting (encrypting?) the original ‘broadcast’ (if there even was one). Intent may be a subject of investigation in any broadcast, or re-broadcast. Lovink states that the media fails us… in giving us ‘pure’ information. The words chosen and the tone is which those words are dictated, and images arranged - stamp the events with a world outside the one in which the events took place. We do not always observe the layers of information that encapsulate the message we are seeking to read, although we most defiantly should be always on guard about our bought and sold purveyors of the news. We, perhaps, understand world events as the ‘real-time’ event itself that we observe on TV, rather than a representation, we see it as a transmission. The simulation takes the place of the real, thus becoming a substitution. The substitution (actually simulation) subverts our drive to ‘deal with the real’. This concept of the layers of the message… the various ‘frequencies’ of which the message is composed then transmitted… each message a work of information launched by an intent and then distorted by another’s intent seems necessary to investigate as an extension to Keenan’s look at what goes wrong with media coverage dis-informing/transforming events. I am unsure if there can be a presentation of reality that is not encapsulated in degrees of extra information. Perhaps the absence of the human suggests that this is possible. The promise of the machine is to be the substitutive vision. Machine’s can see ‘perfectly’ and have no motives on their own. But once we rewind, play-back, slow down, edit, fade in/out, pan, zoom, well whether these are realizations of the human in a new form or advances in technology that enhance human perception they are created by the desire for the human to see. Machine vision is human vision.

posted by Anonymous at 8:27 AM

"Detournement, the reuse of preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble... the loss of importance of each detourned autonomous element – which may go so far as to completely lose its original sense – and at the same time the organization of another meaningful ensemble that confers on each element its new scope and effect.”

Isn’t this process of detournement exactly what Barthes describes as the construction of myth from “a second-order semiological system,” whereby “that which is a sign in the first system, becomes a mere signifier in the second.” Through this lens, it begs the question in my mind, what makes the Situationist myth better than the capitalist myth which they wish to undermine?

I suppose the goal is moreso the de-hegemonization of a media or an image, the deconstruction of the dominant subjectivities installed by the society of the spectacle, than the actual altered content itself, but in terms of a constructive protest, I like something like Surveillance Camera Players tactic better myself (who were also part of the Situationists if I remember correctly.) That is drawing attention and alienating the objectionable object rather than adding upon it like a decoupage. So if parody is the order of the game, is Saturday Night Live, with their parodies of commercials, Situationist? If so, while I find that line of activity highly amusing and entertaining, I doubt its revolutionary potential. Also, while it seems to me that the greatest merit of this group of theory is its ability to put theory into practice (i.e. through their techniques of derive and detournage), this merit is completely undermined in my mind by the inscrutability of an essay like Debord's "Society of the Spectacle," whose denseness appears to completely preclude its ability to be disseminated and cements the movement as being able to appeal to only an exclusive and elite group of academics. This seems to me to be highly opposed to its original goal.

As for the rest of the Situationist goals, I’m all for them...seriously. I don’t want to work either. And I’m bored too.

posted by Anonymous at 3:19 AM

Debord’s articles seem to set up a binary of Derive and Spectacle. The derive is based on human spending time and monitoring it, while the spectacle is ”that which escapes the activity of men, that which escapes reconsideration and correction by their work”(pt18 of Separation perfected). Dissimilarly, the Derive is nothing without reconsideration, in fact its existence is solely in the “level of awareness” and the human “deliberateness” of the actions. The way in which the spectacle fits into the course is obvious in that it is a moment of separate but universal partaking in publicity. The role that Derive plays in our course is less obvious though it lies in the same kind of intense self-consciousness that results from being under surveillance. In this case the surveillance is at first a self-surveillance and then, in situations like “the ‘possible rendezvous,” a more classic type of surveillance.

Another aspect of the opposition between the Derive and the Spectacle (an opposition which ties in with some of the recent Keenan threads of the course) is the difference in the functioning of time. One of the derive’s only parameters is that it exists in real time (to impose a cold tele-visual word on a quaint French way of looking at analog life). The quest in the task considers not only attempting “exploration of a fixed special field,” but the task of giving that small journey a beginning, middle and end – or at the very least the real task is defining the parameters of a real time experience to create a discrete derive. By giving passages of life inputs and outputs, Debord can fuel his look with a more conscious gaze.

The time of a spectacle is already in some way determined by another hand’s editing, with every input and output there is a complete story. The part where the spectacle begins to exist in real time is the part where ‘detached’ image becomes part of the world of a human being who is living in real time. Debord writes that this “fuses into a common stream,” again unwittingly using terminology later to be linked with live feed streaming video hookups. This “pseudo-world apart” (which is grander in scope than simply television, though may be best exemplified) is then a world, and it would only make sense that a person could take a derive around and document his exploration. Would Debord concede to the possibility of taking a derive on the couch with a remote control? – would he be more convinced with more channels from a broader satellite feed?
Even though television often consists of spectacles, the duration of the watching is determined by man, and even though there are ways to prepare yourself to avoid chance in what you are watching, it would be easy to make yourself ignorant of your TVguide as a deliberate construct to embrace the arbitrary of a rainy day derive.

posted by Anonymous at 2:48 AM

31 March 2002
(Sorry this is a tad late)
I have to start off by agreeing with Nick’s response in that I find the Situationist readings appealing and somewhat hopeful in their faith in the decentering of meaning. I embrace the idea that images can be reappropriated and inverted. However, I see a break between the kind of aimless wanderings of the derive and the reappropriation that takes place with detournement (and Lovink’s tactical media) that I can’t reconcile. How are these connected? Both seek to question given/preconceived meanings, one in space, the other in art. One is essentially physical mobility and freedom, the other is essentially intellectual. But I don’t see the aim as being the same. Theory of the Derive seems to advocate aimlessness for the sake of aimlessness, chance for chance’s sake, in order to experience space on a different level, while Detournement and tactical media seem geared towards political ends, and I’m having trouble connecting the two. The only thing I can come up with is that the value lies in the separation of meaning from world – but does this mean that meaning can be placed anywhere by the deriver or the viewer of detournement, and it’s fine? Or is there a feeling among the Situationists that people will react in the same way and find common alternative meanings? How, if this is not the case, did the Situationists expect anything to come of these detachments (if they expected anything? Perhaps it is the very unstructured nature which is important, not the outcome?)?

posted by Anonymous at 1:13 AM

Theoretical Decadence.

Geert Lovink’s preemptory comment about Amsterdam, in his piece, “The Data Dandy and Sovereign Media,” does well to fool his audience into the idea that he is about to explore something concrete. His second paragraph starts: “Theory and practice in Amsterdam are only indirectly related.” This relation is about as indirect as the piece’s relation of theory to Amsterdam or anything , for that matter, which even resembles an affect of reality. Lovink’s text is so steeped in theoretical musings on theoretical labels for “potential media figures” and “Unidentified Theoretical Objects” which interact on levels upon meta-levels of theoretical media space, that it is impossible to get any sort of realistic grounding in the where, how, or most importantly, why-should-we-care part of his discourse.
As near as I can tell, Geert and his friends in the Foundation for the Advancement of Illegal Knowledge are what happens to the over-imaginative ultra-hip media theorists when they become too cool to whine about postmodernism anymore. Lovink’s saving grace may be in his partial admission of this point.

“Although ADILKNO members emphatically deny being data dandies, or propagating any similar decadent, outmoded, postmodern consumerism, many people claim to have data dandies in their circle of friends and this notion is difficult to counter.”

Lovink and his friends may not be data dandies. They seem too far removed from extra-textual interaction to be so anyway. But given the totality of his text, it seems quite fair to deem Lovink a theory dandy. The obscene way with which he plays with terminology alone fits into right into that decadent, postmodern idiom he describes so fervently. I mean, let’s be honest—defining the word media would not the soul of wit for this guy. Some of the best examples of Lovink’s theoretical decadence come in his discussion of vague media.

“This nonlinearity defies the rhizomatic dogma that prescribes endless switching. These hard-luck pilots do not wander; they stumble from one discontinuity to the next. In vague spheres one thing does not lead to another; after one thing comes something totally different. Nor are trees or roots visible here. A veiled belief in continuity is replaced in vague media by steam on the window of eternity. Undirected recreational activities form temporary compressions in the random distribution of particles which roam about in the vague ether. No order anyone discovers in this chaos will impress the insiders. Their brilliant conspiracy will be heard out for a while and then forgotten again.”

This passage comes far before he even mentions Oscar Wilde. His later quoting of Wilde: “The first duty of life is to be as artificial as possible” is unsurprisingly similar to a comment Lovink makes two paragraphs later: “In times of well-intentioned positivity, merciless effectivity and overpowering pragmatism, it is important to remain as unclear as possible.” Here, it seems Lovink has stumbled upon not only the rudiment of the data dandy, but the very thesis of his own work. Just as the data dandy acts the part of the true decadent in cyberspace, Lovink formulates his prose with all the loquacious, self-referential flare of the classic decadent author.
I do not mean to criticize Lovink’s writing to harshly. In fact, I find it imaginative and engaging in many ways—a welcome breath from the drab and clinical style of many of the theorists we have read. My difficulty in this piece is that it informs so much about itself in it’s layering of theoretical zones, that it comes across as almost a satire. So much so that I am almost afraid of being laughed at for taking it seriously. Still, there is a bunch of stuff in there to discuss—especially in his relations to cyber-punk literature and other things we can actually experience outside the purely theoretical

posted by Anonymous at 11:30 PM

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I really liked these readings, especially the Situationist manifestos. The way they embrace the possibilities of “play” appeals to my optimism. It shows that positive results may come from the decentering of the world. All meaning may be/are constructed from previous meanings, ultimately determined by nothing. But that means we may construct new “meanings” (through detournement, derive, pirate radio, etc) in “playful-constructive behavior” (“Theory of the Derive”) that is a “combination of parody and seriousness” (“Detournement as Negation and Prelude”). The need for self-parody is perhaps the need for Situationist works to call their own claims into question, assuring that they are not seen as positing certainties/essences. Thus, rather than having to qualify all their statements and quote all their words, like us theorists, they can “play” at being serious and saying/constructing things that “mean something”, while not getting too full of themselves and trying to claim absolutes.

How is the play of meanings (a la Derrida), or the “serious play” of Situationists, related to more common notions of play (the way kids play in the yard)? What does it mean to play? To hazard a vague definition: play involves pleasure, a release of inhibitions and controls, a surrender to an urge, a sensation, an experience. Meaning and identity serve as costumes that further the play, important only to the individuals engaged in play, for the extent of the play.

Yet the Situationists are very serious in their play, desiring that everyone may engage in it, unrestricted by ideologies, spectacles and other controls. Their tactic is to infect society with their sense of play: reveal the play of meaning in billboards, sabotage media to make people question its authority, create films and comics which bring attention to the issue of mediation (“The Situationists and the New Forms of Action Against Politics and Art”). As Chris said, a general project of defamiliarizing- call attention to the cracks in the “wholes” that ideologies present. I agree that this is very similar to the mustache on the Mona Lisa. I think the Situationists wish to make more explicit challenges to ideologies that concern the proletariat (I say this with no comprehensive knowledge of them).

I find it to be an odd kind of relief to recognize all of modern life as a play- nothing is as bad as it seems, it is only what it seems. Yet this does not mitigate the miserable conditions that make up existence for so many humans, which is to say that a worker is not emancipated simply by knowing that the machine s/he works for is a construction; a play that is often cruel, painful and binding. Extracting ourselves from the machine, both physically and mentally, is a difficult process. Perhaps impossible to do completely (except for some kind of spiritual “enlightenment”?). But the Situationists are not Luddites. They do not call for people to leave the cities and live off the land. They embrace the psychogeography of the cities, the centers of social machination; they stroll through them, play in them, enjoy them. This is the emancipation available to every man. To realize the play of the world is to be free from mental ideologies which offer no options. Play is the possibility of choice; the possibility of turning down whichever street strikes your fancy at the moment, not just the street that is always “right”.

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posted by Anonymous at 11:10 PM

Michael Bernstein

"The spectacle originates in the loss of unity of the world, and the gigantic expansion of the modern spectacle expresses the totality of this loss: the abstraction of all specific labor and the general abstraction of the entirety of production are perfectly rendered in the spectacle, whose mode of being concrete is precisely abstraction." (#29, Society of the Spectacle").

In many ways, Debord and the Situationists take as their point of departure Marx's theories of the alienation of the worker within a capitalist society determined by modes of production and the rapid accumulation of capital. The continued extension of capitalism has transformed all relationships into mere exchanges in which "all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles" (#1). The Situationist notion of "separation", perhaps, stands in for "alienation"; even though the turn to "spectacle" appears as an introduction of a new term not determined by strict Marxist theory, the idea of the spectacle's "subjugation" of men "to itself", its reduction of man into a passive object, seems invested through and through with the basic tenets of Marxism: "[The Spectacle] is the true reflection of the production of things, and the false objectification of the producers" (#16). What, then, marks the Situationist's move from Marxism, its modern reworking of such theories of separation and alienation? That the spectacle simply occurs at the upteenth degree of the accumulation of capital, its radical abstraction into mere image?: "The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image"? (#34). What seems interesting, or different, perhaps, in Situationist theory, is its location of this alienated consciousness of man at the moment of consumption, not mere production. It emerges in the continued proliferation of images determined by advertising/marketing's appeal to consumption: "It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choice already made in production…" (#6).

What seems difficult, in reading these ordering of fragments, is the production of a systematized reading or critique. Perhaps this is the point, to change the stakes of discourse, to elude the basic structural framework produced and elaborated by dominant theoretical models. But if, as Debord claims, to speak of the spectacle ultimately implies speaking the language of the spectacular, what is at stake? What seems difficult to pinpoint in this essay itself is a real point of departure for our own theoretical or practical re-elaborations. Can we speak of the spectacle while dispensing "with any reference to the past" (1, "The Situationists and the New Forms of Action Against Politics and Art").

Though we were not assigned the following article to read, I found in "Situationist These on Traffic" (also available at www.textz.com) a curious ending point: "Revolutionary urbanists will not limit their concern to the circulation of things, or to the circulation of human beings trapped in a world of things. They will try to break these topological chains, paving the way with their experiments for a human journey through authentic life." What is this so-called "authentic life" in Situationist theory? How is it reclaimable? And how ought we to read this notion of the authentic-as a nostalgic and humanist turning back to an earlier past in which the pervasiveness of these variables of mediation were not so thoroughly present or felt? All signs would suggest not, when juxtaposed with a Situationist inclination towards reuse, parody, and play, the proper "breaking through fields where chance holds sway by creating new conditions more favorable to [their] purposes" ("Theory of the Derive").

I agree with Chris's skepticism of these Situationist practices, especially that of Detournement. In fact, as Chris noted, Duchamp was elaborating on his artistic reworkings (parodies) of past cultural items (The Mona Lisa, for instance) several decades before the emergence of Situationist theory. Is this simply a follow-up, the drawing up of a theoretical framework for social change out of these moments of previous Detournements? In the act of detourning, are we asserting anything more than the post-structuralist notion that the sign can always be broken up into something other than itself, even something radically opposed to it? If the Marcell Duchamp "Mona Lisa" is the "negation" of the previous signifier of the "original" Mona Lisa, is it also a "prelude" in the Situationist sense? If detournement is invested, not simply in the breaking up of old cultural forms, but in the production of a response that cannot so systematically be reduced to rational discourse, can Duchamp's renaming of the work and application of a mustache to the face of the Mona Lisa fulfill such criterion?

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Is the Situationist belief in the relinquishing of all personal property anything other than Anarchism, something that appears opposed, or at least different from the kinds of parodic reuse/negation of the past found in the development of Situationist comics?

posted by Anonymous at 11:08 PM

Détournement seems like a far less revolutionary movement than Debord seems to think that it is. He calls it “the reuse of preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble…The two fundamental laws of détournement are the loss of importance of each detourned autonomous element…and at the same time the organization of another meaningful ensemble that confers on each element its new scope and effect” (Détournement). In the later essay, “The Situationists and the New Forms of Action Against Politics and Art,” he implies that détournement should have a kind of defamiliarizing, politically and socially disruptive element to it, but the kinds of disruptions that he promotes seem only like slightly more extreme examples of the same kinds of defamiliarizing re-uses of art that have been common from Dadaism to hip hop. I can’t remember which artist it was that took a reproduction of the Mona Lisa and painted a mustache on it, but that certainly seems to be in line with the kinds of programs envisioned by Debord, though he would be unsatisfied until someone painted a mustache on the original. To me, it’s just a question of degree. Essentially the same appropriation of art is being performed by musical sampling, the mustachioed Mona Lisa and Debord’s suggested re-writing of comic strips to tell whatever stories he would like; the only difference in is the level of defamiliarization or the kinds of political mobilization that such actions will produce. Hip hop sampling doesn’t really defamiliarize the listener at all, but I can’t imagine that simply re-filling cartoon speech bubbles with different words would do that much either. What I found much more interesting, and potentially radical, was Debord’s claim that he could film theoretical texts in reasonably understandable ways that would be accessible to the average urban proletariat. My question is not just how this would be done, though I would be interested, but how the production of these films would fit with the program of détournement? Would these films be composed of assembled elements or are they even expected to produce the same kind of defamiliarizing effects as the disruption of more typical capitalist media productions?
posted by Anonymous at 6:30 PM