The spectacle is a realm of pseudo-communication, a world apart in which commodities commune with each other and with their chosen representatives. The disintegrated spectacle allots a certain power to remix, re-edit and recycle spectacular fragments to anyone who has purchased a few technological toys, but to the extent that this communication takes for granted the value or power of the fragments it re-arranges, this is still pseudo-communication. The question then is how might communication itself be conceived?
It is not the content of communication that is false, but the form. Or rather, the content is false because of the form. Even when the content is in some sense ‘true’ it is falsified. Communications appears as something separate from me. It comes to me as a thing, from without. In order to initiate communication, I have to adopt the form that is given, and yet within that form produce something that is ‘mine’, that it my property. The opposite of the alienated communication of the spectacle is not some pure and harmonious clarity, but rather a poetics in which I cam make all of the past instances of communication my own but assemble them within the form of my own invention.
What is private life deprived of? Of itself. People are as deprived as possible of communication and of self-realization. Deprived of the opportunity to personally make their own history. Morality has to adapt itself in order to cooperate in bringing to perfection that terrorism of conformity that underlies all the publicity of modern capitalism. We don’t now what to say. What communication have we desired, or experienced, or only simulated? What real project has been lost?
The Situationist strategy consists in being both thoroughly within the spectacle, within its channels, its forms, its most effective images and stories. Yet it is within them in order to negate them all the more thoroughly. It lacks Adorno’s mandarin squeamishness for pop that characterizes much of critical theory. It refuses to take refuge in fine art and in the pretense of a fine art untouched by the commodity form. It refuses to see mere style as a defense against spectacular recuperation.
While within the forms of the spectacular, Situationist attempts at communication need not pander. Nothing of importance has ever been communicated by being gentle with a public. A key tactic is to challenge most vigorously what spectators have convinced themselves to love. One must lead all forms of pseudo-communication to their utter destruction. Starting with those that are not generally perceived to be pseudo-communication at all.
Communication starts with a documentation of the conditions of non-communication, with the negation of pseudo-communication, but does not end with it. It is the practical destruction of the instruments of pseudo-communication that brings to the fore the question of inventing superior instruments. break with the appearance of pseudo-collaboration, of artificial dialogue. The process starts, as it were, at two ends. One is with negating the positive proposals of spectacular society. It is a refusal of its insistent facticity, that because it is, and because it is, it should be.
The other is with positive proposals that negate spectacular society. The greatest difficulty in such an undertaking is to convey through these apparently delirious proposals a sufficient degree of serious seduction. To accomplish this we can imagine an adroit use of currently popular means of communication. These proposals should not be too fantastic. It is a matter of flooding the market with a mass of desires whose realization is not beyond the capacity of present human means of action on the material world, but only beyond the capacity of the old social organization. Fragments of desire trapped in negative form.
Not stuttering, hesitating modernisms, which think form is a purely aesthetic category. To think form as a material, economic and political category. To materialize form and formalize materialism. Poetry must be understood as immediate communication within reality and as real alteration of this reality. “a poetry necessarily without poems.” – the situation. “It calls for a communication that undermines all separate power. Wherever there is communication, there is no state.”