Anselm Jappe – Situationists and separations
(p. 110-114)
© the author, Mobile Album
Forty years ago, when Guy Debord published
Society of Spectacle, he also aimed to sum up
situationist
theory. The first chapter is named
The culmination of
Separation, and all along the book the concept of separation
constantly comes back, along with those that
relate to it : scission, specialization, isolation, or, on
the contrary, unification. The controversial concept of
spectacle is in itself a variant of the concept of separation
: it highlights the separation between actors
and spectators — and hence between managers and
underlings in general — and the socially organized
passivity that follows from it. Giving such centrality
to the
Critique of Separation (title of a 1961 film by
Debord) was absolutely coherent for Debord. From
the beginning the central claim of the young lettrists,
and then the situationists (groups that were leaded
by Debord) was to bound life to art. This did not mean
giving a greater place to art in life, but searching to go
beyond the separations between, on one side everyday
life, economics and utility, and on the other art as the
expression of a possible human fullness. Art had to
be « realized », and to make that possible it was first
necessary to go out of the art world, and change the
whole society. It is because of this project, defended
for over fifteen years (1957-1972), that the situationists
have often been qualified as the last avant-garde.
And yes, they did radically take up what used to be the
deep tendency of the historical avant-garde : moving
beyond art as a separate field. First, the modern artists
wanted to override the barriers between the different
art practices (painting, literature, music...) ; then they
claimed not to be (solely) artists, refusing the confinement
of art.
But a much more radical attempt was to « change
life » so that the whole life would be up to art and all
its promises. The situationists wanted to apply this in
real life, raising back the banner of the
Dadaists and
surrealists. The
everyday was to be the unitarian place
for life, and its revolution the backbone of anything
that pretended to go towards a non-alienated society.
Art only had to melt into everyday life. It must be said
that the situationists were not the only ones facing
this idea. At the time when Debord was writing : “In a
society without classes, could it be said, there will be
no more painters, but situationists who would, among
other things, be painting” (
Report on the Construction
of Situations, 1957), one of the members of
Fluxus,
Allan Kaprow, was saying : “Today's young artists do
not need anymore to say :“I am a painter, or a poet, or
a dancer”. They are just artists”. Situationists as well
as
Fluxus intended to use the legacy of art for the
creation of an exciting everyday life, starting within
experimental groups.
But appearances are deceptive. The situationists and
Fluxus set similar issues, but their projects were not
close — and not just because of some “missed meeting”.
For a better understanding of this, the habit of locking
the situationists in one of art history's drawers labeled
“anti-art” should be given-up. The adventure of the situationists
was not only driven by the legacy of avantgarde
art, but also just as much by the thought of a
possible revival of a revolutionary working-class movement,
and of Marxist theory. Their aim was to achieve
a “radical separation
from the world of separation”
(
Society of Spectacle, § 119). The situationists — and
that was one of their strong points — read again the
revolutionary project through modern art, and viceversa.
Given the fact that this aspect of situationist
activity is now likely to become less known, it might
be worth taking a glance backwards to understand the
controversial relationship between a certain minority
Marxist tradition and modern science's tendency to
always establish even more separations.
It is in the eighteenth century that “humanities”
begun their process of differentiation and specialization,
that went on uninterrupted until today. The
proliferation of disciplines, fields, and objects of study
left in charge of ever more specialized “experts”, is
today considered by bourgeois science as the basic
guarantee of scientism for studies on mankind, finally
stripped off of unverifiable philosophic speculation.
The pilling-up of knowledge was the official pretext
for the setting-up of disciplinary boundaries, as the
central element of all positivist programs which have
followed for nearly two centuries. The real reason of
this determination is rather to be sought for in the
desire to bring the study of mankind to “operationality”
and “ usefulness”, so that it may be put to work
for the new society based on labor : the goal was not
so much to understand what mankind is — as it used
to be in the tradition of philosophy — but to enhance
the use of mankind. So as to have machine-man work
at best, it is suitable for every engineer to take care of a single wheel — the same applies to medical science.
This fundamental purpose of humanities always ends
up covering up any other tendency that may rise
within them, because it fits the social role they were
designed for. Meanwhile, it reenacts the crumbling
of modern life into separate fields (work / leisure ;
private/public ; economics / politics ; art / seriousness ;
and so on), unknown in previous times.
But, in time, the results obtained in this crumbling race
turned out to be quite unsatisfactory, including from
the point of view of a science only willing to present
useful conclusions to its employers. So it steadily
generates contradictory reactions. The machinery of
science itself indulges into “interdisciplinarity”. But,
as the word suggests, this is all about fitting together
pieces that have previously been carefully broken, and
to have specialists talk together about the ways of
linking after the fact scientific results that are useless
because of their unidimensionality. So other attempts
rise outside the walls of the university, reacting to a
scientific spirit that has lost track not only of the forest,
but also of the trees, and then the branches. Holistic
thought, periodically reborn, sometimes manages
to pin down efficiently the limits of official science.
But its own search for “wholeness” always tends to
suppose more or less religious “essences” that, as
they cannot be proven, remain a question of faith.
“Qualitative” thought goes by official science, just as
modern irrationality follows modern rationalism like
its shadow, without ever being able to go past it, and
thus staying there as its distorting mirror.
The other attempt to oppose the shrinking of the study
of mankind to the making of a toolbox goes back to
the times when this shrinking began. It can be found
in Hegel's first formulation of
modern dialectical
thought. Here, all the figures of knowledge are always
transmuting one into an other, because they only are
temporary forms of a continuously developing mind.
With
Marx, this way of describing reality looses its
privileged reference to the world of representations.
But it would be a deep mistake to consider the work
of
Marx as a work of “economics”, or even to talk of a
passage from philosophy to economics in the development
of his work. The “critique of political economy”
(the subtitle of
Capital) is a large critique of life and
production in capitalist society, building on its basic
patterns (commodity, labor, value, money, capital). As
opposed to a widespread idea,
Marx does not analyze an economical “base” over which would rise “superstructures”,
such as religion, culture or family, for
which other disciplines would be needed.
But that is what his followers did. Official Marxism
rapidly gave up the dialectic reflection of totality that
was at the core of the method of
Marx. Using bourgeois
science as a model, Marxism developed “Marxist
economics”, “Marxist history”, “Marxist philosophy”,
and so on. The first to oppose this trivialization of
the theory of
Marx was Georg Lukàcs in 1923 in his
book
History and Class-consciousness. He reminded
that
Marx's theory is an analysis of modern society
as a whole comprised by commodity-form, that tends
to weigh on every manifestation of human life. This
interpretation has been taken up by various forms of
“heretical” Marxism, including the Frankfurt School
and the situationists, and contemporary “critique of
value”. The
Society of Spectacle is strongly influenced
by Lukács. The category of totality implies that a social
phenomenon is but a stage of a dynamic process. But
for official Marxism, as for bourgeois science, facts
have to be studied on their own first, in their independence,
and only then comment on their “reciprocal
effects”. As opposed to dialectical theory, bourgeois
science and Marxism shaped on the same model do
not consider politics and economics, state and market,
individuals and society, capital and labor existing only
as opposed factors, as opposed ends of a relationship
that contains them (in modern society, it is commodity
as a “crystallization” of labor) and will just as well
melt them. If dominant thought rejects the concept of
totality as “non-scientific” (or even bound to “totalitarianism”) and makes fun of it as a “vague supposition
that everything is likely to have some kind of relationship
with everything” (Adorno), other reasons may be
suspected. Indeed, in this way it avoids having to state
a global judgment, and for instance to conclude that
western democracies, fascism, Stalinism, and nationalist
third-world regimes are in the end just different
shapes or different stages of the global development
of commodity.
It is against this default of totality that the situationists
stood up. For them, “workers” should “refuse
the totality of their misery, or else nothing” (
Society
of Spectacle, § 122). Recomposing the totality that
crumbled under the effect of commodification and
spectacle, first in thought, then in practice, was the
challenge of the situationists. But, according to them, it will not be possible to rebuild the social totality, and
to go past the separations that make modern alienation,
without having art come back into life from
which it was separated at the beginning of modern
times. It was nostalgia for the lost unity of art and life,
and the practical will to reenact it that allowed situationists
to be more than an artistic avant-garde. If
historical circumstances have not made possible the
accomplishment of their program, at least they had
the merit of having formulated it, and tried to put it
into practice.
Translation Hervé Roelants