Re: [-empyre-] Why US DAT is Virtual
Tobias-
The remix is the canonical form of the moment. The revolutionary
potential of collage / detournement - creating unexpected, surrealistic
connections - has become the orthodoxy of transnational networked
capital discourse, in other words totally banal.
Concerning locative psychogeographers there is no doubt that Debord
would unconditionally reject any use of the SI legacy that relied so
heavily on technological gadgetry. He, like Marcuse et al. would see it
as yet another form of commodity fetishism. I mean, we are talking
about someone who probably never travelled by plane...
Psychogeography as I understand the SI's practice of it, essentially
meant "experiencing poetic moments in urban environments" and a
precondition seems to have been to get really, really drunk before any
drifting was to occur.
At the same time, the SI, like most radical 60s groups, thought that
mechanization and automation would solve the problems of production by
liberating everyone to enjoy creativity, free time, etc. Though Debord
did spend the 70s in Italy, the SI had not seen, as the Italian
autonomists did, that the automated factory was the means of a)
removing workers from the site of production, thereby disarming their
control of machines and denying them the possibility of meeting
together in person and b) turning the whole of society into a "social
factory" networked towards production.
While I'm on my soapbox, I'd like to frame a question about the popular
political artform, tactical media, as practised by Critical Art
Ensemble, RTMark and others.
The tactical media discourse holds that corporations are like the net –
nomadic, fluid, unfixed, horizontal, highly responsive to changes in
the environment in which they make money... therefore any action taken
against them must take account of their mobile nature; it must be
tactical.
“The flexibility of corporate power, its lack of a center, comes at a
price: it has no brain. It may be as tenacious as a virus, but it also
has the intelligence of one: mechanical, soulless, minuscule” (RTMARK,
Sabotage and the New World Order, in Stocker and Schöpf, Infowar).
So they believe that minor assaults - each tailored to new situation
brought about by their predecessors - can drive real change. The irony,
as pointed out by Julian Stallabrass amongst others, is that this view
of corporate power buys into the conservative view of the market and
its creatures as natural forces. In fact, corporations, even when
networked, are highly structured and hierarchical entities with
geographical bases in global cities.
Corporate and state power can act in concert, have long-term forward
planning, and organize systematic destruction of their opponents.
Indeed the entire neoliberal (and Debord would add: postmodern) shift
is proof of that.
In short, it's highly debatable whether minor, fluid assaults such as
remixes of corporate discourse, pranks, etc have any effect on capital
beyond providing entertaining content for the mass media. Tactical
media may bring small increments of change, but activists realise that
they need wider strategic projects.
Finally, though I have a lot of time for Debord's ideas and style - and
how he lived in agreement with his beliefs, i.e. never gave in, never
spoke to the mass media - that kind of purity comes at a price... the
Situationists hurt a lot of people, by excluding, insulting, or
physically beating them. Was it worth it? I would like to quote another
Frenchman:
"Avant-garde artists, like many political agitators, propagandists and
demagogues, have long understood what TERRORISM would soon popularize:
if you want a place in ‘revolutionary history’ there is nothing easier
than provoking a riot, an assault on propriety, in the guise of art.
Short of committing a real crime by killing innocent passers-by with a
bomb, the pitiless contemporary author of the twentieth century attacks
symbols, the very meaning of a ‘pitiful’ he assimilates to
‘academicism’." (Virilio, A Pitiless Art)
Virilio then gives the example of... Guy Debord who declared that with
his first film "Howls in Favor of Sade" (Hurlements en faveur de Sade)
he wanted to kill cinema because it was ‘easier than to kill a
passer-by’. The founding act of the Lettrist International, Debord and
Wolman's breakaway left-wing of Isidore Isou's Letttrists, was to throw
pamphlets around while running through the crowd gathered for the press
conference of Charlie Chaplin, pitiful author par excellence… vilifying
him as a sentimental fraud, the mastermind of misery, proto-fascist...
It's easy to dismiss Virilio as an out-of-date humanist / catholic /
whatever... His questioning of the contemporary art / terror /
technological nexus won't go away, though.
Cheers,
Mathieu
On 22/10/2004, at 3:57 PM, tobias c. van Veen wrote:
while Guy Debord was concerned
with politically shifting the urban -
psychological landscape.
I'm curious about this claim, if only because of the apparent heritage
being
claimed today by various artists of locative media, mobile media, urban
interventionism, heirs to psychogeography, etc. It seems you can't
turn a
corner without encountering it these days.
Does anyone else find the claim often misrepresents the SI's full
impact?
Forgive me, for I spent the summer doing some reading .. it seems that
after
the early '60s, the artists were excommunicated, along with the earlier
psychogeographical experiments. Although we all know _Society of the
Spectacle_ (film and book), less studied is the decisive step from art
to
what can only be called revolution, when Debord's focus shifted quite
squarely to rewriting Marx's theory of value and to confronting capital
beyond artistic intervention. For some this was the beginning of the
end for
the SI; for others, its necessary self-critique in the face of
inaction, May
'68 notwithstanding.
In considering Debord, do we consider him as an artist, alongside
Duchamp,
Beuys, et al? (Are Beuys or Duchamp artists either, come to think?)
Does anyone else see the current appropriation of psychogeography from
the
SI arsenal as often quite superficial? As supporting, more often than
not,
the continuation of technological fetishism (mobile-this,
locative-that)
that Debord so abhorred?
I apologise for this tangent; but it's been bugging me lately, and for
good
reason -- I just finished curating an artist's residency of
"psychogeographers" -- and for other reasons too: for the tactics of
the SI
are claimed by a widescope of culture jammers, for example, Adbusters.
I'm wondering if anyone else out there thinks about it.
And I am thinking here again of "The Society of the Spectacle Remix" I
had
the chance to see in Paris .. (by Mark Amerika, Rick Silva, Trace
Reddell
et al) .. which for me raised these issues in a light I remain
perplexed by:
how aforementioned technology relates to the politics of the remix and
what
the thrust of the Society of the Spectacle Remix is getting at:
reintroducing art & tech to the SI? Getting the ex-art SI to laugh a
little?
Proclaiming that, in the end, Debord lost, technology won? That art
wins
over revolution (also reversing Breton, thus)? There is some irony to
this
remix, I wonder ...
best,
tV
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--
Dr Mathieu O'Neil
Visiting Fellow
Centre for New Media Arts (CNMA)
Peter Karmel Building
Childers St
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200 Australia
T: +61 02 6260 6124
F: +61 02 6247 0229
E: oneil@homemail.com.au
ANU new media group weblog:
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