Critique of the Situationist International (4)
| The Spectacle and the Theory of Art |
| The theory of the spectacle expresses the crisis of the space-time outside labor. Capital more and more creates a realm outside of labor according to the logic of its economy : it does not develop leisure to control the masses, but because it reduces living labor to a lesser role in production, diminishes labor-time, and adds to the wage-worker's time of inactivity. Capital creates for the wage-workers a space-time that is excluded, empty, because consumption never succeeds in filling it completely. To speak of space-time is to insist on the fact that there is a reduction in the working day, and that this freed time also occupies a geographical and social space, in particular the street (c.f. the importance of the city and of the derive [7] for the S.I.). |
| This situation coincides with a dual crisis of "art". Firstly, art no longer has meaning because Western society doesn't know where it's going. With 1914, the West lost the meaning and direction of civilization. Scientism, liberalism and apologetics for the "liberating" effect of productive forces went bankrupt like their adversaries (Romanticism, etc.). From then on, art was to be tragic, narcissistic, or the negation of itself. In former periods of crisis, one sought the meaning of the world : today, one doubts if it has one. Secondly, the colonization of the market and the vain and frenzied search for a "direction" enlist the artist in the service of consumption outside of labor. |
| The S.I. is conscious of its social origin. Sur le passage de quelques personnes... (1959), one of Debord's films, speaks of people "on the margin of the economy." On this terrain, like S ou B on the terrain of the enterprise, the S.I. understood that modern capitalism tends to exclude people from all activity and at the same time to engage them in a pseudo participation. But, like S ou B, it makes a decisive criterion out of the contradiction between active and passive. Revolutionary practice consists of breaking the very principle of the spectacle : non-intervention (I.S. # 1, p. 110). At the end of the process, the workers council will be the means of being active, of breaking down separation. Capital endures by the exclusion of human beings, their passivity. What moves in the direction of a refusal of passivity is revolutionary. Hence the revolutionary is defined by "a new style of life" which will be an "example" (I. S. #6, p. 4). |
| The realm outside labor rests on bonds that are more contingent (c.f. the derive) and subjective than wage labor, which belongs more to the necessary and the objective. To the traditional economy, the S.I. opposes "an economy of desires" (I.S. #7, p. 16); to necessity, it opposes freedom; to effort, pleasure; to labor, the automation which makes it unnecessary; to sacrifice, delight. The S.I. reverses the oppositions which must be superceded. Communism does not free one from the necessity of labor, it overthrows "labor" itself (as a separate and alien activity - Tr.). The S.I. identifies revolution with a liberation from constraints, based on desire and first of all on the desire for others, the need for relationships. It makes the link between "situation" and "labor" badly, which limits its notion of the situation. It thinks of society and its revolution from the context of non-wage-earning social layers. Hence, it carries over onto the productive proletariat what it said about those who are outside the wage system (street gangs, ghetto blacks). Because it was ignorant of the center of gravity of the movement, the S.I. moved toward councilism : the councils permit a "direct and active communication" (Society of the Spectacle). The revolution appeared as the extension of the construction of intersubjective situations to the whole of society. |
| The critique of the S.I. passes through the recognition of its "avant-garde artist" aspect. Its sociological origin often provokes abusive and absurd interpretations of the "they were petty-bourgeois" variety. The question is clearly elsewhere. In the case of the S.I., it theorized from its own social experience. The S.I.'s artistic origin is not a stigma in itself; but it leaves its mark on theory and evolution when the group envisages the world from the point of view of its specific social layer. - The passing to a revolutionary theory and action that were general (no longer aimed only at art, urbanism, etc.) corresponds to a precise logic on the S.I.'s part. The S.I. says that each new issue of its journal can and must allow one to re-read all the previous issues in a new way. This is indeed the characteristic of a theory which is growing richer, being enriched, and the opposite of S ou B. It is not a matter of., on one side the general aspect of the S.I., and on the other its more or less critical relationship to art. The critique of separation was its guiding thread. In art, as in the council, in self-management, in workers' democracy and in organization (c.f. its Minimum definition of revolutionary organizations), the S.I. wanted to break down separation, to create a real community. While the S.I. refused "questioning" á la Cardan, it ended by adopting the problematic of "participation" á la Chaulieu. |
| [7] Translator's footnote : This concept was central to the "unitary urbanism" of the early S.I.. Loosely translated it means drifting around, usually on foot, in a city, and exploring and analyzing the life of the city thereby. (Tr.) |