Acknowledgments
It was no thanks to you that this book was written. You know who you are.
Why is it books do not start with such statements? Books are supposed to enter this world burdened with debts. But far from merely stating an author’s obligations, such acknowledgements also make a book’s first claiming of its rights. Starting right here, in a simple (if often lengthy) statement of acknowledgements, a book asserts its place in a network of power, however minatory that power may be.
The books of Guy Debord (1931-1994),, central figure in the history of the Situationist International, are conspicuous for their lack of acknowledgements. In Panegyric, he offers something of an anti-acknowledgement, drawn from the Illiad: “Why ask of my lineage? Men come and go as leaves year by year upon the trees.” The line of authority from which a book claim to come is unimportant. It says what it has to say, hopefully before the leaves rot.
Elsewhere Debord quotes Herodotus to the effect that one writes “so that time will not abolish the deeds of men.” A book on the Situationists, them, might be written so that time does not abolish them either. But how exactly are they to be memorialized? Rather than a book which interprets their writings, this is a book which uses their writing to interpret our own times. The critical procedure is here reversed. The defense of their work rests not divining in it the symptoms of some diagram of the critic’s invention or imposition. Rather, it is a question of going on the offense, of putting Situationist writings, not so much to work, as into play. Their lives matter still because they illuminate the disintegrating spectacle of our world.
Fair warning: I acknowledge from the start that many of the best lines in this book are freely adapted from Situationist texts, via a process they called détournement. This appropriation of other texts was one of their key contributions to critical practice, and it would pointless to write about it in the conventional way when its whole point was to upend such a convention. The past is called upon as a living resource in Situationist writing, and Situationist writing is called upon as a living resource in this writing, often without acknowledgement and always without apologies. As a concession to convention – which they would have despised – the sources are given at the end of each section. By way of illustration, most sections are accompanied by stories clipped from the newspapers – also a Situationist practice. In some cases these have been silently edited or slightly paraphrased.
Perhaps there are more important things to acknowledge than debts owed by one’s work and the poverty of one’s thought. We could acknowledge, instead, the poverty of the times. We could acknowledge the foreclosure of possibility. That what the Situationists took to be plausible uses for the resources of this society no longer seem possible is what damns the spectacle in its disintegration. We could acknowledge that this world isn’t real, isn’t whole, and cannot last. Should not last. We could acknowledge also that the confidence that it could be replaced by a better, rather than a worse one, is hard to sustain.
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.