Greil Marcus discussing Guy Debord’s book The Society of the Spectacle in his excellent essay “The Long Walk of the Situationist International” in ed. Tom McDonough, Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents (MIT, 2004):
This was the situationists’ account of what they, and everyone else, were up against. It was an argument from Marx’s 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, an argument that the “spectacle-commodity society,” within which one could make only meaningless choices and against which one could seemingly not intervene, had succeeded in producing fundamental contradictions between what people accepted and what, in ways they could not understand, they wanted.
This was the precise opposite of social science, developed at precisely the time when the ideology of the end of ideology was conquering the universities of the West. It was an argument about consciousness and false consciousness, not as the primary cause of domination but as its primary battleground.
If capitalism had shifted the terms of its organisation from production to consumption, and its means of control from economic misery to false consciousness, then the task of would-be revolutionaries was to bring about a recognition of the life already lived by almost everyone. Foreclosing the construction of one’s own life, advanced capitalism had made almost everyone a member of a new proletariat, and thus a potential revolutionary. Here again, the discovery of the source of revoltuion in what “modern art has sought and promised” served as the axis of the argument. Modern art, one could read in International situationniste no. 8, in January of 1963, had “made a clean sweep of all the values and rules of everyday behaviour,” of unquestioned order and the “unanimous, servile enthusiasm” Debord and his friends had thrown up at Chaplin; but that clean sweep had been isolated in museums. Modern revolutionary impulses had been separated from the world, but “just as the nineteenth century revolutionary theory arose out of philosophy”—out of Marx’s dictum that philosophy, having interpreted the world, must set about changing it—now one had to look to the demands of art.
At the time of the Paris Commune in 1871, workers discussed matters that had previously been the exclusive province of philosophers—suggesting the possibility that philosophy could be realised in daily life. In the twentieth century, with “survival” conquered as fact but maintained as ideology, the same logic meant that just as artists constructed a version of life in words, paint, or stone, men and women could themselves begin to construct their own lives out of desire. In scattered and barely noticed ways, the desire to construct one’s own life was shaping the twentieth century, or the superseding of it (“Ours is the best effort so far toward getting out of the twentieth centry,” an anonymous situationist wrote in 1964, in one of the most striking lines in the twelve issues of Internationale situationiste). It was the desire more hidden, more overwhelmed and confused by spectacle, than any other. It had shaped the lettrist adventures. It was the Northwest Passage. If the spectacle was “both the result and the project of the existing mode of production,” then the construction of life as artists constructed art—in terms of what one made of friendship, love, sex, work, play, and suffering—was understood by the situationists as both the result and the project of revolution.
Hello Donal, I’ve linked your blog with my blog. I like your articles. Take Care.—-Alice Wang (your Berlinale campus friend)
[...] After the ultimate collapse, failure and disillusionment of the ’60s New Left project and, most recently, after 8 years of Bush, what remains of the Left in America is battered and disempowered, faced with a resurgent, regressive system within which, as Greil Marcus put it, one can only make meaningless choices and against which one can seemingly not intervene. Even cultural forms of resistance seem Quixotic in the face of Debord’s “spectacle-commodity society” in full flight. Of course, activism was a common practice throughout the Bush nadir, but there was a never sense of revolutionary possibility involved. In Revolt Video’s unique activist documentary, Route Irish (2007), covering the protests against US war planes landing in Ireland, the point is brilliantly made that much modern activism serves more as a form of exorcism and disassociation (”not in my name”) than a project aimed at actually changing anything. (TWW’s one portrayal of anti-capitalist activists is also telling: given a meeting with a White House staffer, they are so disorganised and inarticulate that he just sits down and reads the newspaper while they argue amongst themselves. He later calls their protests “activist vacation”.) [...]