Critique of the Situationist International (8)
| No Theoretical Summingup |
| Nothing is easier than a false summing-up. One can even do it over, like the famous self-criticism, every time one changes one's ideas. One renounces the old system of thought so as to enter the new one, but one does not change one's mode of being. The "theoretical summing-up" can be in fact the most deceitful practice while appearing to be the most honest. The Real Split... succeeds in not talking about the S.I. and its end, except so as not to grapple with its conceptions - in a word, it talks about it non-theoretically. Denouncing (no doubt sincerely) triumphalism and self-sufficiency in relation to the S.I. and in the S.I. but without a theoretical critique, the book ends up presenting the S.I. as a model. Debord and Sanguinetti don't get to the point except with the pro-situs, who inspired them to some good reflections, but still at the level of subjective relations, of attitudes. Theory is always seen from the standpoint of attitudes which incarnate it; an important dimension certainly, but not an exclusive one. |
| There is no self-analysis of the S.I.. The S.I. came, 1968 announces the return of the revolution, now the S.I. is going to disappear so as to be reborn everywhere. This lucid modesty masks two essential points : the authors argue as though the SIs perspective had been totally correct; they do not ask themselves whether there might not be a link between the sterility of the S.I. after 1968 (c.f. the correspondence of the Orientation Debate) and the insufficiency of that perspective. Even on the subject of the pro-situs, Debord and Sanguinetti fail to establish any logical relation between the S.I. and its disciples. The S.I. was revolutionary with the aid of a theory based on attitudes (which would later prove to be a brake on its evolution). After the phase of revolutionary action, the pro-situ retained nothing but the attitude. One cannot judge a master solely by his disciples : but he also has, in p art, disciples he has called forth. The S.I. accepted the role of master involuntarily, through its very conceptions. It did not directly propose a savoir-vivre, but in presenting its ideas as a "savoir-vivre" it pushed an art of living on its readers. The Real Split... registers the ideological use to which I.S. was put, its being turned into a spectacle, says the book, by half the readers of the journal. This was partly inevitable (see below on recuperation) but in part also due to its own nature. Every radical theory or movement is recuperated by its weaknesses : Marx, by his study of the economy in-itself and his radical-reformist tendencies, the German Left by its councilism, etc. Revolutionaries remain revolutionaries by profiting from these recuperations, eliminating their limitations so as to advance toward a more developed totalization. The Real Split... is also a split in the minds of its authors. Their critique of Vaneigem is made as if his ideas were foreign to the S.I.. To read Debord and Sanguinetti, one would think that the S.I. had no responsibility for the Traite : Vaneigem's weakness, one would think, belongs to him alone. One or the other : either the S.I. did indeed take his faults into account - in which case why didn't it say something about them ? - or else it ignored them. The S.I. here inaugurates a practice of organization (which S ou B would have qualified with the word "bureaucratic" ) : one does not learn of the deviations of members until after their exclusion. The organization retains its purity, the errors of its members do not affect it. The trouble comes from the insufficiencies of the members, never from on high, and not from the organization. As the eventual megalomania of the leaders does not explain everything, one is obliged to see in this behavior the sign of a mystified coming-to-consciousness of the group's impasse, and of a magical way of solving it. Debord was the S.I.. He dissolved it : this would have been proof of a lucid and honest attitude if he had not at the same time eternized it. He dissolved the S.I. so as to make it perfect, as little open to criticism as he was little able to criticize it himself. |
| In the same way, his film Society of the Spectacle is an excellent means of eternizing his book. Immobilism goes side by side with the absence of summing-up. Debord had learned nothing. The book was a partial theorization : the film totalizes it. This sclerosis is even more striking in what was added for the film's re-release in 1976. Debord replies to a series of criticisms of the film, but says not a word about various people (some of them very far removed from our own conceptions) who judged the film severely from a revolutionary point of view. He prefers to take on Le Nouvel Observateur. [16] More and more, his problem is to defend his past. He runs aground of necessity, because all he can do is re-interpret it. The S.I. no longer belongs to him. The revolutionary movement will assimilate it in spite of the situationists. |
| [16] A left-wing intellectual French weekly. |