Date: Thu, 31 Aug 1995 16:19:51 +0300
Subject: Guy The Bore


GUY DEBORD IS REALLY DEAD.

by Luther Blissett
Written in December 1994 - 1st Italian edition: Crash Edizioni, Feltre,
January 1995 - English Translation by Miss Luther Blissett (August 1995),
revised by the author.



1. Nunc est bibendum.


- Butch, whose motorcycle is this?
- It's a chopper.
- Whose chopper is this?
- Zed's.
- Who's Zed?
- Zed's dead, baby... Zed's dead.

Quentin Tarantino, 1994


When Guy The Bore died (1) the Italian reformist press responded with
obvious, misleading 'obits' with nothing to be surprised about . The same
lib-lab trash-shredders who swallowed and ruminated K. Popper's dull
tirades against TV, have later celebrated The Bore as a prophet of
Berlusconi's taking the field. For years the leftist Ignoranzhia has been
mistaking the "spectacle" for the media insolence of the Establishment or
the cyclic recurrence of people like Letizia Moratti (2), or Sgarbi-and
=46errara-style Tv rows...(3) It 's no surprise then, that a critical theory
attacking commodification and a system of production turning each of us in
an insolent medium of the establishment, has been defused by a metonimy
(the effect instead of the cause, the content instead of the container).
Defusing the bomb was easy, due to its shortcomings, yet The Bore doesn't
deserve to be stored in the pantheon of leftist heroes together with
Pajetta and Berlinguer (4) where catto-togliattiani intellectual
gravediggers are trying to put him, although as a heretic.

The abuse of the epithet "situationist" and of the meaningless term
"situationism" (5) is due to the emphasis given the Debord's analysis of
the spectacle; savoir vivre, subversion of everyday life, psychogeography
and Unitary Urbanism - in a word, the whole range of immediate and
practical kinds of actions the Situationists suggested - were taken in
little consideration. Thus "situationist" was doomed to become an
uniformative term; cultural reporters then decided to attach it to whatever
personage or artistic movement whose expressions were nihilistic enough to
be considered "estreme" and spectacular enough to allow for second-class
mass-mediology. Thus, the TV schedule of Italia Uno - decided by Carlo
=46reccero - (6) was "situationist", as well as Striscia la Notizia (7), and
TV-truth on Guglielmi's Raitre (8): "situationist" is whatever text written
in a schizo-epigrammatic style, and so on.
Most of these 'wild labellers' hardly knows The Society of the Spectacle
and, taking it as a Talmud of radical critique (although it rather looks
like a bunch of clues for crosswords) pretends to be inferring anything
from it. "Situationist" has become a passe-partout opening all the doors,
from that of a badly-chewed dadaism, to that of an easy-minded
technological millenarianism. In a nihilistic world, whatever is real, is
"situationist".

After all, wasn't Debord himself the one who changed his reputation in that
of a spiteful Cassandra? Wasn't his own attitude to allow his best known
essay to be taken as a Talmud? Isn't it true that , two years ago, in order
to explain the fall of so-called 'socialism' in Eastern Europe, he didn't
do much more than recycling two laconic theses on bureaucracy, written 1/4
of century earlier and previously enclosed in the above mentioned book? (9)
During the last decade of his life, The Bore had endlessly tried to give
his dramatis persona a place in the historical context; like the prisoners
in Kafka's short story, "In the Penal Colony", he stepped into a machinery
carving on his body not only his writings (Considerations sur l'assassinat
de Gérard Lebovici, Panegyrique, Commentaires sur la societ=E8 du spectacle,
Cette mauvaise réputation...) but also the Law. In his case, the Law was
the Right Interpretation, against slander and passive contemplation of the
historical experience of the SI, and finally against pro-situ misleading
information. (10)
The ceaseless hypertextual cross-references (from one line of the body-text
to the other) seems to hide the desperate will to set up the proper bad
reputation, to foster the proper  way to contemplate, to bring about the
proper misleading information, in a word, the attempt not to change the
style and to keep control. Such a task would involve the whole system and
requires a group strategy: if a single will tries to reach it, (or simply
to mark it), he or she will obtain exactly the opposite of what they were
after. They used to care for style, now it's Identity to be defended, but
Identity freezes and kills style, and strenghtens the spectacle.
Thus, after The Bore's suicide, we inherit a body of rules which didn't
mean to be such , as well as a bunch of prophetic soliloquies. We're left
with holy writings, and only two things can be done with holy writings: you
can either take them literally and be a fundamentalist, or taking them to
mean whatever you like, without even reading them. But, where does this
attitude come from?
We believe it's due to the unappealable failure of the SI which doesn't
date back to the dissolution in 1972, but at least to a decade earlier,
when the French section (after the experience of Lettrisme) came into power
in the SI. Before the sky is breached and pro-situs insults start pouring
down, it's necessary to provide an explanation.
And while explaining, it's necessary never to forget that it's a long time
since a rift has grown between the SI and us, and this rift will shape the
following text, sometimes openly and unambiguously. After all, the SI was
still too strongly influenced by avantgardiste language and myths, and
"every avantgarde grows old and dies without seeing its successors, because
succession doesn't follow straight, but through a contradiction." (Asger
Jorn, 1960).


2.Notes for a counter-history of the SI.


The failure of most of the situationists serves to understand the nature of
the catastrophe and to run along the crisis. Panic can be an incredible
energizer.

Mark Downham, 1988

=46or which reasons and with a view on what did the SI get together? Few of
those who shed words about "situationism" are actually able to answer the
question. But it's very easy, it was all about CREATING SITUATIONS, i.e.
"temporary settings of life, characterized by a superior emotional
quality". The means to this aim were Unitarian Urbanism (an example of
which is the "theory of mood-quarters, according to which each quarter of a
town should tend to provoke a simple feeling, to which the subject would
consciously expose himself") , a "new architecture" (which "shall play on
the ambiance effects of rooms, colours, streets, an ambiance connected with
the actions they contain") and the psychogeographical exploration of sites
("active observation of today's urban agglomerates and establishment of
hypotheses on the structure of a situationist city"). The ultimate aim was
"the invention of essentially new games [...] to increase the non-mediocre
part of living and reduce null moments as much as possible [...] The
situationist challenge to the elapsing of time and emotions would be the
bet  of  being always in advance to changes, ever going further in the game
and increasing the touching moments". It was necessary to challenge the
capitalist way of life by fostering other desirable ways, "to destroy, by
all the hyperpolitical means, the bourgeois ideal of happiness".
This was the meaning of Debord's subtle plagiarisms  of famous marxian
phrases: "Emotions have been sufficiently interpretated: now it's question
of finding new ones". This was connected with the outlook of a "quick,
continuous increasing of free time, at the height of productive forces
reached by our age". "Today the ruling class manages to use the free time
won by the revolutionary proletariat, by developing a wide entertainment
industry which is an incomparable mean of abasing the proletarians with
by-products of ideology and the tastes of the bourgeoisie". Actually, the
situationists' purpose was that of discovering new means of action "simply
recognizable in the domain of culture and customs but applied in the
perspective of an interaction of all the revolutionary changes".
The current banal meaning of the word "situationist" has very little to do
with this programme. But this term has undergone such banalization because,
at a certain stage, the SI itself stopped being globally  situationist, and
the word followed the process of involution.
 As everyone knows, from 1957 onwards, the SI repudiated and banished
members, behaving as a sect; theory was blatantly detached from praxis, and
the organization was left with two members (Guy Debord and Gianfranco
Sanguinetti), and was then dissolved with the public document La véritable
scission dans l'Internationale (Champ Libre, Paris 1972). In the following
section ("New year's Eve in Naples") I will explore this document: reading
it is sometimes like hearing Glenn Miller playing (11). Let's go back to
the point, now.
With frequent expulsions the SI was basically aping the Surrealist
movement, whose heritage had been imported by the French section together
with its judicial language, typical of the Avant-gardes. The expulsions
involved other sections of the SI, in particular the German group SPUR. In
spite of Debord's words ("We have to eliminate the sectarianism among us
that opposes unity of action with possible allies for specific goals and
prevents our ifniltration of parallel organisations. Since 1952 to 1955 the
Lettrist International, after some necessary purges, has constantly been
tending to a sort of absolute rigour, leading to an isolation and an
unfruitfulness which were equally absolute, and fostering in the long run a
certain conservatism, a degeneration of the spirit of critique and
discovery. We have to definitively overcome this sectarian conduct, towards
actual actions. It's only by this criterion that we have to find or leave
comrades.)(12), since the beginning the French section stood out for its
paranoid and conspiratorial strictness; they expected an injection of
Hegelian steroids to strenghten theory, and expelled members for futile
reasons (13); in the end, they fostered nothing less than the contemplative
attitude and the inactivity they blamed on everybody but themselves.
Let's follow the order: the Dutch and the Italian sections were decimated
and then sent out before 1960. The Danish Asger Jorn, one of the most
important members of the SI, whose texts would certainly surprise readers
today(14), resigned in 1961. In Germany, the group SPUR (Trace or Track)
caused several scandals and directly outraged the cultural establishment;
at the IV congress of the SI (London 24-28 Sept. 1960) the group attacked
the French section and in the following 16 months turned out to be the most
active section, but they were finally sent out in January 1962 because they
refused to let their eponymous review to be administrated in Paris. In
March 1962 the former Scandinavian and German sections founded the Second
Situationist International, and in the following years they issued two
papers (Drakabygget and Situationist Times) and declared the following aim:
"...The point of departure is the dechristianisation of Kierkegaard's
philosophy of situations. This must be combined with the British economic
doctrines, German dialectic and French social action programmes. It
involves a profound revision of Marx's doctrine and a complete revolution
whose growth is rooted in the Scandinavian concept of culture: This new
ideology and philosophical theory we have called situology: it is based on
the principles of social democracy in as much as it excludes all forms of
artificial prejudice ."(15)
Stewart Home's comment is:
"...Not only has Europe always traditionally seen itself as the center of
the world, but Britain, France, and Germany tend to see th emselves as the
hub of this center. Thus, when the SI split in two, from a French or
Anglo-American perspective, the specto-situationists based in Paris were
seen as the real SI, while the 2nd International centred on Scandinavia
could be dismissed as 'foreign to the SI; much more sociable, certainly,
but much less intelligent' (IS 8, Paris 1963)."(16)
The French section promptly described the purges as parts of the conflict
between its 'revolutionary' component and the 'artistic' one. As far as art
was concerned, the SI had actually slightly less idealistic positions than
"nashists" (the spiteful name the Second SI was given)(17) and both the
internationals claimed to be revolutionary.
The SI certainly issued more coherent and radical statements, and claimed
the founding of Workers Councils (they borrowed this claim from Socialisme
ou Barbarie) although "they never really did anything to actually put them
into practice "(18); the 2nd SI lacked a consistent theory (probably
because they feared to become as dogmatic as their French cousins) and
aimed at the immediate realisation of Unitary Urbanism and of the
sperimental behaviour connected with it. Both sections inherited only a
part of the originary situationist programme, and both of them failed.
The SI seems to have had a wider influence than the 2nd SI on the 1968
movement and on the following experiences, but this is due to a mistaken
judgement,  i.e. post hoc, ergo propter hoc. The well-known scandal of
Strasburgh, 1966, certainly inspired those who, two years later, pulled up
the paving on the streets of Paris; it's also true that the Situationists
coined some of the best slogans of the movement; nevertheless, the effect
of their practical critique on the events of those days has been overrated.
If the influence of the Situationists had really been so determinant, it
would be hard to explain the large re-emergence of Maoism and Trotskism in
the following months, and especially the crisis in which the SI went
through until its dissolution 3 years later. Actually when the events of
May '68 began, the SI was already down in the maelstr=F6m of inconsistency,
and its structural problems didn't enable them to re-emerge. The French
comrades of the Encyclopédie des Nuisances, whose critique of the SI is
certainly very different from the one we're developing here, have
masterfully outlined this inconsistency:
"Situationist theory criticized politics without caring too much for the
means of its revolutionary realisation (leaving it to the Workers Councils,
which were very far from being founded); as a consequence, it was left
undeveloped as regards tactics and the search of necessary compromises:
both the external ones (i.e. the convergence between a radical theory still
in the making and a radical practice which was, in its turn, fragmentary
and incomplete) and the internal ones (i.e. the methods of organisation
which make the coherent appropriation of the critique possible). The myth
of a total fusion of theory and practice, which the SI believed to have
actually realised, and the myth of a revolution which will actuate this
fusion in society at one go, - the latter being the historical counterpoint
of the former- heavily affected the understanding of what the Situationists
should have actually done together" (19). But the EdN doesn't seem to
reckon that expulsion and the frequent derision of those who had refused
(even if only partially or intuitively) such promethean hallucinations were
among the very causes of the coming and persistence of those evil myths.
Those "former situationists" were first defined "indulgent" and
"inefficient" (20) and finally trapped in art and idealism, while their
contribution - mixed to the theoretical rigour of the French members -
would have given the situationist programme newer and wider opportunities
of application and success.


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