RETORT: an unkind reply
NOT BORED | 08.06.2004 21:52 | Analysis
an unkind to RETORT, ex-situationists who wrote a terrible article on "The State, the Spectacle and September 11". TJ Clark gets his, again!
"blunders, gullibility, over-reach, unfathomable ignorance and wishful thinking"
an unkind reply to RETORT
It says here, at the end of the first footnote to an essay entitled "Afflicted Powers: The State, the Spectacle and September 11" and reprinted in the May/June 2004 issue of New Left Review [1], that RETORT "is a gathering of council communists and affiliated nay-sayers, based for the past two decades in the San Francisco Bay Area." In a tell-tale use of the passive voice, this footnote goes on to say: "Involved in the writing of the present essay were Iain Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts."
Yes, dear reader, T. J. Clark: the author of that horrible book Farewell to an Idea, which we had such a good time demolishing several years back. As you might recall from that rather long essay, we castigated Professor Clark for adamantly refusing to discuss his subjects (modern art and socialism) in terms of the situationist concept of "spectacle," preferring instead to call upon such boring old farts as Sigmund Freud, Paul de Man and Noam Chomsky. And yet, here is Clark, signing his name to an essay that goes on and on about "Guy Debord and the Situationist International." Since Clark was once a situationist, one must take seriously -- or at least give a fair hearing to -- his "dissent" from the "totalizing closure" of the concept of spectacle. Or such is the underlying assumption of "Afflicted Powers."
But this assumption is completely unwarranted. In point of fact, "Afflicted Powers" is -- to seize and re-direct the accusations RETORT makes about the manner in which the Bush Administration has conducted its war against Iraq [2] -- dominated by blunders, gullibility, over-reach, unfathomable ignorance and wishful thinking about literally everything it attempts to shed light on. Clark and his mates can't even say an intelligent thing about pop music! [3]
blunders and ignorance
"We start from the premise," RETORT says, "that certain concepts and descriptions put forward forty years ago by Guy Debord and the Situationist International, as part of their effort to comprehend the new forms of state control and social disintegration, still possess explanatory power -- more so than ever, we suspect, in the posionous epoch we are living through." This is a valid premise, provided, of course, that one actually understands and accurately summarizes those concepts. But RETORT fails to do either one of these things.
Over the course of their essay, the members of RETORT rack up an staggering array of errors. The group refers to the situationists' "hypotheses": but the Situationist International (SI) positioned their ideas as theories, that is, as hypotheses that had been tested and found to be valid. RETORT claims that the "original objects" of the theory of the spectacle "were the Watts Riots and the Proletarian Cultural Revolution": but Debord said that "the modern spectacle" was invented by Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. RETORT claims that "spectacle" names "the submission of more and more facets of human sociability [...] to the deadly solicitations (the lifeless bright sameness) of the market" and that the situationists "were interested in the means modern societies have at their disposal to systematize and disseminate appearances, and to subject the texture of day-to-day living to a constant barrage of images, instructions, slogans, logos, false promises, virtual realities, [and] miniature happiness-motifs": but, for the SI, "spectacle" named the bureaucratic state in both the "capitalist" West and the "Communist" East and found its ultimate expression not in "appearances" but the organization of space.
But the worst mistakes RETORT makes are to reduce the SI to Guy Debord, to focus on what Debord wrote in the 1960s (in particular, his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle), and to ignore virtually everything he wrote in the 1970s and 1980s. [4] "The version of 'spectacle' with which we operate," RETORT says,
is minimal, pragmatic, matter of fact. No doubt the idea's original author often gave it an exultant, world-historical force. But his tone is inimitable, as all efforts to duplicate it have proved; and in any case we are convinced that the age demands a different cadence -- something closer (if we are lucky) to that of the lines from Paradise Lost we use as our pamphlet's epigraph [and title] than anything from Lukacs or Ducasse.
But Guy Debord -- who did not "author" the "idea" of spectacle, but "detourned" (diverted) the way this concept was used in the critical theories of Georg Lukacs, Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes and many others -- does not designate a tone of voice or cadence. And, as we will attempt to show (see below), "the age" doesn't demand "something" different; instead, our poisonous epoch would be quite well-served by Debord if it managed to actually understand what he meant.
Not surprisingly, RETORT's "version" of spectacle is flat-out wrong. Instead of being a dialectical exposition, it is a chronological narrative.
Debord, to speak of him directly, was concerned most of all with the way the subjection of social life to the rule of appearances had led, in turn, to a distinct form of politics -- of state formation and surveillance [...] We extract the following propositions from his pages. First, that slowly but surely the state in the twentieth century had been dragged into a full collaboration in the micro-management of everyday life. The market's necessity became the state's obsession. (Slowly, and in a sense against the state's better judgment, because always there existed a tension between the modern state's armoured other-directedness -- its raison d'etre as a war machine -- and capital's insistence that the state come to its aid in the great work of internal policing and packaging [...]) This world of images had long been a structural necessity of a capitalism oriented toward the overproduction of commodities, and therefore the constant manufacture of desire for them; but by the late twentieth century it had given rise to a specific polity. The modern state [...] has adjusted to its economic master's requirement for a thinned, unobstructed social texture, made up of loosely attached consumer subjects [...]
Alas, poor State, it has been led astray -- and, what's more, against its better judgment (!) -- by what RETORT elsewhere calls the "shady corporate world." And so, despite its announced impatience with "classical Marxist terms, proudly unreconstructed," RETORT presents and assumes its readers will accept the vulgar Marxist notion that the "superstructure" (the State) follows what goes on in the "substructure" (the economy). But Guy Debord never had any truck with this simplistic nonsense. As much an anarchist as a Marxist, he knew that the State -- long before there was such a thing as a globalized capitalist market -- had been deeply involved in surveillance, internal policing, spatial deconcentration and the "micro-management" of everyday life. [5]
gullibility, over-reach and wishful thinking
According to RETORT, the events of September 11 aren't a confirmation of the theory of the spectacle, but a demonstration of its limits. After quoting a few lines from Debord [6], the group says,
Too many times over the past twelve months [7] these sentences, in their anger and sorrow at the present form of politics, have echoed in our minds. But ultimately we dissent from their totalizing closure. Living after September 11, we are no longer sure -- and we do not believe that spectacular power is sure -- that [Debord was correct when he asserted that] "there is no danger of riposte [to the spectacle], in its own space or any other." For better or worse, the precision bombings were such a riposte. And their effect on the spectacular state has been profound: the state's reply to them, we are certain, has exceeded in its crassness and futility the martyr-pilots' wildest dreams.
Note well RETORT's insistence on what's happened since September 11. Situationist concepts "strike us as having purchase on key aspects of what happened since September 11, 2001," they write. RETORT asks, "Are we to understand the forms of assertion of American power since September 11 [...] as a step backwards, a historical regression [...] to a new/old era of gunboats and book-burning?" and "How, politically and strategically, has the US state responded to [September 11]?" To RETORT, September 11 was a "defeat" suffered by the American state, and the group states that "The spectacular state is obliged, we are saying, to devise an answer to the defeat of September 11."
RETORT never seems to imagine -- let alone think through any of the implications of the possibility -- that the attacks of September 11 weren't perpetrated by "organized enemies of the US Empire," but by the US Empire itself. Apparently believing everything that the spectacle has told them about the attacks, the members of RETORT go on and on about "Islamism," "the new terrorists," the "new breed of bombers," "regimes hostile to the new world order," and the "failed states" (presumably Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan) "from which the personnel and ideology of September 11 so unmistakably arose." For RETORT, it is "common knowledge" that the events of September 11 "were trained for in Jalalabad, [and] paid for in Riyadh."
RETORT's confidence in the truth of what the spectacle has told them is so complete that its members believe that they can tell what the "terrorists" were thinking. Veritable mind-readers -- despite the thousands of miles that separate their native Berkeley from Osama bin Laden's training camps -- they write:
'You know our demands,' said the martyr-pilots (strictly to themselves). 'And we know you cannot accede to them. We know what you will do instead. We are certain your answer will be military. We anticipate your idiot leader blurting out the word crusade. What you will do will vindicate our analysis point by point, humiliation by humiliation, and confirm the world of Islamism in its despairing strength. And you will do it because there is no answer to our image-victory, yet you (because humiliation is something in which you have no schooling) have to pretend there is one.'
A few pages later, RETORT says:
The perpetrators knew full well that they lacked the means to spread out through the wider social fabric and bring ordinary doings to a halt. And they believed, rightly or wrongly, that in present circumstances they did not need to. What they did was designed to hold us indoors, to make us turn back and back to a moving image of capitalism screaming and exploding, to make us go on listening (in spite of ourselves) to the odious talking heads [on television] to put something, anything, in place of desolation.
This is precisely the point where RETORT's complete and total ignorance of the real value of situationist theory comes back to haunt them. Had they read Gianfranco Sanguinetti's On Terrorism and the State [8], or Debord's 21 April 1978 letter to Sanguinetti concerning the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, or Debord's Preface to the 4th Italian Edition of "The Society of the Spectacle" or even his Considerations on the Assassination of Gerard Lebovici, the members of RETORT would have focused on what happened on September 11, not during its aftermath. [9]
RETORT never thinks about what preceded the attacks (the creation, training and arming of Al Qaeda by the CIA; the surprising strength and vehemence that the "anti-globalization" movement showed in Seattle and Genoa; and the theft of the 2000 US Presidential election), never tries to get inside the heads of those who are in charge of NATO, the Pentagon or the CIA, never asks the classic question, "Who benefited?" Instead, RETORT occupies itself with the "singularity" of "the present madness," [10], as if what happened at the Reichstag, or at the Bologna train station, could never happen here. But it can; indeed, it already has.
-- Bill Not Bored, 8 June 2004.
Author's notes:
[1] As recently as 1997, T. J. Clark and another ex-situationist, Donald Nicholson-Smith, attacked New Left Review for totally ignoring, and then falsifying, the contributions of the Situationist International to modern revolutionary theory.
[2] RETORT says of Bush's war against Iraq:
We too take seriously the idea that factions within the US administration had long thought the impasse of 'sanctions' intolerable, had thirsted for oil, had dreamt of a new brridgehead in an increasingly anti-American region, and so on. But at the very least it can only be said that the manner in which these policies were finally acted upon -- they had been pipedreams of the ultra-Right in Washington for more than a decade -- has been a barely credible mixture of blunder, gullibility, over-reach, lip-smacking callousness (hardly bothering to disguise its lack of concern at the 'stuff happening' in the streets of Kandahar or Baghdad), unfathomable ignorance and wishful thinking, and constant entrapment in the day-to-day, hour-by-hour temporality of the sound bite and the suicide bomb.
Though the members of RETORT takes "seriously" the idea that there were impatient "factions" within the US administration, they don't take seriously enough the idea that some of these factions might have conspired with, "tele-guided" or simulated Al Qaeda's operations.
[3] According to RETORT,
The silence of so-called 'popular culture' in the face of September 11 has been deafening. (It is as if the commercial music of America in the mid-twentieth century had nothing to say about war, or race, or the Depression, or the new world of goods and appliances. It had plenty -- partly because the adjective 'popular' still pointed to something real about its audiences and raw materials. That was long ago, of course: the present total obedience of the culture industry to the protocols of the war on terror -- its immediate ingestion and reproduction of the state's interdicts and paranoias -- is proof positive, if any were needed, of the snuffing out of the last traces of insurbordination in the studios of TimeWarner.)
Obviously the members of RETORT have never heard -- or have never heard of -- Bruce Springsteen's famous album The Rising, which was released in July 2002.
[4] It is true that the members of RETORT quote (in re-ordered fashion) a few sentences concerning "the media" from Debord's 1988 book, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, but they ignore the fact that its author was at pains to point out that,
Rather than talk of the spectacle, people often prefer to use the term 'media.' And by this they mean to describe a mere instrument, a kind of public service which with impartial 'professionalism' would facilitate the new wealth of mass communication through a form of communication which has at last attained a unilateral purity, whereby decisions already taken are presented for passive admiration. For what is communicated are orders; and with perfect harmony, those who give them are also those who tell us what they think of them. Spectacular power, which is so fundamentally unitary, so concentrated by the very weight of things, and entirely despotic in spirit, frequently rails at the appearance in its realm of a spectacular politics, a spectacular justice, a spectacular medicine and all the other similarly surprising examples of 'media excess.' Thus the spectacle would be merely the excesses of the media, whose nature, unquestionably good since it facilitates communication, is sometimes driven to extremes.
In reality, Debord's Comments on the Society of the Spectacle -- like his Preface to the 4th Italian Edition of "The Society of the Spectacle" (1979) and his Considerations on the Assassination of Gerard Lebovici (1985) -- are about the State and, to be more exact, its use of terrorism as a method of government.
[5] For more on this subject, see T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Knopf, 1985).
[6] See footnote [4].
[7] It would appear that the body of "Afflicted Powers" was written in September or October 2002, and that footnotes were added as late as March 2004.
[8] There is a strange echo of the convoluted beginning of Sanguinetti's On Terrorism in RETORT's ridiculous pronouncement that "Terror as a political instrument, in other words, is the property of the state (maybe the founding property of the state in its 'modern' manifestation), or of those thinking like a state." In his 23 February 1981 letter to Jaap Kloosterman, Debord denounces the "insolence" of Sanguinetti's attempt to "reduce to a ridiculous schemata [...] the historical and strategic question of armed struggle in general and the particular case of all terrorism as it has existed in many diverse forms throughout history."
[9] Note well that RETORT wants to keep "September 11" nice and simple: "The terror of September 11 had a handful of targets (our tendency to make it, in memory, simply 'the bombing of the Twin Towers' is not untrue to the logic of the event)." But what is "not untrue" in one "logic" is totally false in another. At least two of the events that also took place on that day -- the explosion at the Pentagon and the collapse of World Trade Center building #7, which wasn't attacked by the "martyr-pilots" -- are highly suspicious and suggestive of the perpetration of an "inside job."
[10] "It matters profoundly," RETORT says, "that the horrors of September 11 were designed to be visible, and that this visibility marked the bombings off from most previous campaigns of air terror, especially those sponsored by states. There were no cameras at Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima. The horror there had to be unseen." Quite true, but there were plenty of cameras present when Jack Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald.
an unkind reply to RETORT
It says here, at the end of the first footnote to an essay entitled "Afflicted Powers: The State, the Spectacle and September 11" and reprinted in the May/June 2004 issue of New Left Review [1], that RETORT "is a gathering of council communists and affiliated nay-sayers, based for the past two decades in the San Francisco Bay Area." In a tell-tale use of the passive voice, this footnote goes on to say: "Involved in the writing of the present essay were Iain Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts."
Yes, dear reader, T. J. Clark: the author of that horrible book Farewell to an Idea, which we had such a good time demolishing several years back. As you might recall from that rather long essay, we castigated Professor Clark for adamantly refusing to discuss his subjects (modern art and socialism) in terms of the situationist concept of "spectacle," preferring instead to call upon such boring old farts as Sigmund Freud, Paul de Man and Noam Chomsky. And yet, here is Clark, signing his name to an essay that goes on and on about "Guy Debord and the Situationist International." Since Clark was once a situationist, one must take seriously -- or at least give a fair hearing to -- his "dissent" from the "totalizing closure" of the concept of spectacle. Or such is the underlying assumption of "Afflicted Powers."
But this assumption is completely unwarranted. In point of fact, "Afflicted Powers" is -- to seize and re-direct the accusations RETORT makes about the manner in which the Bush Administration has conducted its war against Iraq [2] -- dominated by blunders, gullibility, over-reach, unfathomable ignorance and wishful thinking about literally everything it attempts to shed light on. Clark and his mates can't even say an intelligent thing about pop music! [3]
blunders and ignorance
"We start from the premise," RETORT says, "that certain concepts and descriptions put forward forty years ago by Guy Debord and the Situationist International, as part of their effort to comprehend the new forms of state control and social disintegration, still possess explanatory power -- more so than ever, we suspect, in the posionous epoch we are living through." This is a valid premise, provided, of course, that one actually understands and accurately summarizes those concepts. But RETORT fails to do either one of these things.
Over the course of their essay, the members of RETORT rack up an staggering array of errors. The group refers to the situationists' "hypotheses": but the Situationist International (SI) positioned their ideas as theories, that is, as hypotheses that had been tested and found to be valid. RETORT claims that the "original objects" of the theory of the spectacle "were the Watts Riots and the Proletarian Cultural Revolution": but Debord said that "the modern spectacle" was invented by Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. RETORT claims that "spectacle" names "the submission of more and more facets of human sociability [...] to the deadly solicitations (the lifeless bright sameness) of the market" and that the situationists "were interested in the means modern societies have at their disposal to systematize and disseminate appearances, and to subject the texture of day-to-day living to a constant barrage of images, instructions, slogans, logos, false promises, virtual realities, [and] miniature happiness-motifs": but, for the SI, "spectacle" named the bureaucratic state in both the "capitalist" West and the "Communist" East and found its ultimate expression not in "appearances" but the organization of space.
But the worst mistakes RETORT makes are to reduce the SI to Guy Debord, to focus on what Debord wrote in the 1960s (in particular, his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle), and to ignore virtually everything he wrote in the 1970s and 1980s. [4] "The version of 'spectacle' with which we operate," RETORT says,
is minimal, pragmatic, matter of fact. No doubt the idea's original author often gave it an exultant, world-historical force. But his tone is inimitable, as all efforts to duplicate it have proved; and in any case we are convinced that the age demands a different cadence -- something closer (if we are lucky) to that of the lines from Paradise Lost we use as our pamphlet's epigraph [and title] than anything from Lukacs or Ducasse.
But Guy Debord -- who did not "author" the "idea" of spectacle, but "detourned" (diverted) the way this concept was used in the critical theories of Georg Lukacs, Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes and many others -- does not designate a tone of voice or cadence. And, as we will attempt to show (see below), "the age" doesn't demand "something" different; instead, our poisonous epoch would be quite well-served by Debord if it managed to actually understand what he meant.
Not surprisingly, RETORT's "version" of spectacle is flat-out wrong. Instead of being a dialectical exposition, it is a chronological narrative.
Debord, to speak of him directly, was concerned most of all with the way the subjection of social life to the rule of appearances had led, in turn, to a distinct form of politics -- of state formation and surveillance [...] We extract the following propositions from his pages. First, that slowly but surely the state in the twentieth century had been dragged into a full collaboration in the micro-management of everyday life. The market's necessity became the state's obsession. (Slowly, and in a sense against the state's better judgment, because always there existed a tension between the modern state's armoured other-directedness -- its raison d'etre as a war machine -- and capital's insistence that the state come to its aid in the great work of internal policing and packaging [...]) This world of images had long been a structural necessity of a capitalism oriented toward the overproduction of commodities, and therefore the constant manufacture of desire for them; but by the late twentieth century it had given rise to a specific polity. The modern state [...] has adjusted to its economic master's requirement for a thinned, unobstructed social texture, made up of loosely attached consumer subjects [...]
Alas, poor State, it has been led astray -- and, what's more, against its better judgment (!) -- by what RETORT elsewhere calls the "shady corporate world." And so, despite its announced impatience with "classical Marxist terms, proudly unreconstructed," RETORT presents and assumes its readers will accept the vulgar Marxist notion that the "superstructure" (the State) follows what goes on in the "substructure" (the economy). But Guy Debord never had any truck with this simplistic nonsense. As much an anarchist as a Marxist, he knew that the State -- long before there was such a thing as a globalized capitalist market -- had been deeply involved in surveillance, internal policing, spatial deconcentration and the "micro-management" of everyday life. [5]
gullibility, over-reach and wishful thinking
According to RETORT, the events of September 11 aren't a confirmation of the theory of the spectacle, but a demonstration of its limits. After quoting a few lines from Debord [6], the group says,
Too many times over the past twelve months [7] these sentences, in their anger and sorrow at the present form of politics, have echoed in our minds. But ultimately we dissent from their totalizing closure. Living after September 11, we are no longer sure -- and we do not believe that spectacular power is sure -- that [Debord was correct when he asserted that] "there is no danger of riposte [to the spectacle], in its own space or any other." For better or worse, the precision bombings were such a riposte. And their effect on the spectacular state has been profound: the state's reply to them, we are certain, has exceeded in its crassness and futility the martyr-pilots' wildest dreams.
Note well RETORT's insistence on what's happened since September 11. Situationist concepts "strike us as having purchase on key aspects of what happened since September 11, 2001," they write. RETORT asks, "Are we to understand the forms of assertion of American power since September 11 [...] as a step backwards, a historical regression [...] to a new/old era of gunboats and book-burning?" and "How, politically and strategically, has the US state responded to [September 11]?" To RETORT, September 11 was a "defeat" suffered by the American state, and the group states that "The spectacular state is obliged, we are saying, to devise an answer to the defeat of September 11."
RETORT never seems to imagine -- let alone think through any of the implications of the possibility -- that the attacks of September 11 weren't perpetrated by "organized enemies of the US Empire," but by the US Empire itself. Apparently believing everything that the spectacle has told them about the attacks, the members of RETORT go on and on about "Islamism," "the new terrorists," the "new breed of bombers," "regimes hostile to the new world order," and the "failed states" (presumably Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan) "from which the personnel and ideology of September 11 so unmistakably arose." For RETORT, it is "common knowledge" that the events of September 11 "were trained for in Jalalabad, [and] paid for in Riyadh."
RETORT's confidence in the truth of what the spectacle has told them is so complete that its members believe that they can tell what the "terrorists" were thinking. Veritable mind-readers -- despite the thousands of miles that separate their native Berkeley from Osama bin Laden's training camps -- they write:
'You know our demands,' said the martyr-pilots (strictly to themselves). 'And we know you cannot accede to them. We know what you will do instead. We are certain your answer will be military. We anticipate your idiot leader blurting out the word crusade. What you will do will vindicate our analysis point by point, humiliation by humiliation, and confirm the world of Islamism in its despairing strength. And you will do it because there is no answer to our image-victory, yet you (because humiliation is something in which you have no schooling) have to pretend there is one.'
A few pages later, RETORT says:
The perpetrators knew full well that they lacked the means to spread out through the wider social fabric and bring ordinary doings to a halt. And they believed, rightly or wrongly, that in present circumstances they did not need to. What they did was designed to hold us indoors, to make us turn back and back to a moving image of capitalism screaming and exploding, to make us go on listening (in spite of ourselves) to the odious talking heads [on television] to put something, anything, in place of desolation.
This is precisely the point where RETORT's complete and total ignorance of the real value of situationist theory comes back to haunt them. Had they read Gianfranco Sanguinetti's On Terrorism and the State [8], or Debord's 21 April 1978 letter to Sanguinetti concerning the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, or Debord's Preface to the 4th Italian Edition of "The Society of the Spectacle" or even his Considerations on the Assassination of Gerard Lebovici, the members of RETORT would have focused on what happened on September 11, not during its aftermath. [9]
RETORT never thinks about what preceded the attacks (the creation, training and arming of Al Qaeda by the CIA; the surprising strength and vehemence that the "anti-globalization" movement showed in Seattle and Genoa; and the theft of the 2000 US Presidential election), never tries to get inside the heads of those who are in charge of NATO, the Pentagon or the CIA, never asks the classic question, "Who benefited?" Instead, RETORT occupies itself with the "singularity" of "the present madness," [10], as if what happened at the Reichstag, or at the Bologna train station, could never happen here. But it can; indeed, it already has.
-- Bill Not Bored, 8 June 2004.
Author's notes:
[1] As recently as 1997, T. J. Clark and another ex-situationist, Donald Nicholson-Smith, attacked New Left Review for totally ignoring, and then falsifying, the contributions of the Situationist International to modern revolutionary theory.
[2] RETORT says of Bush's war against Iraq:
We too take seriously the idea that factions within the US administration had long thought the impasse of 'sanctions' intolerable, had thirsted for oil, had dreamt of a new brridgehead in an increasingly anti-American region, and so on. But at the very least it can only be said that the manner in which these policies were finally acted upon -- they had been pipedreams of the ultra-Right in Washington for more than a decade -- has been a barely credible mixture of blunder, gullibility, over-reach, lip-smacking callousness (hardly bothering to disguise its lack of concern at the 'stuff happening' in the streets of Kandahar or Baghdad), unfathomable ignorance and wishful thinking, and constant entrapment in the day-to-day, hour-by-hour temporality of the sound bite and the suicide bomb.
Though the members of RETORT takes "seriously" the idea that there were impatient "factions" within the US administration, they don't take seriously enough the idea that some of these factions might have conspired with, "tele-guided" or simulated Al Qaeda's operations.
[3] According to RETORT,
The silence of so-called 'popular culture' in the face of September 11 has been deafening. (It is as if the commercial music of America in the mid-twentieth century had nothing to say about war, or race, or the Depression, or the new world of goods and appliances. It had plenty -- partly because the adjective 'popular' still pointed to something real about its audiences and raw materials. That was long ago, of course: the present total obedience of the culture industry to the protocols of the war on terror -- its immediate ingestion and reproduction of the state's interdicts and paranoias -- is proof positive, if any were needed, of the snuffing out of the last traces of insurbordination in the studios of TimeWarner.)
Obviously the members of RETORT have never heard -- or have never heard of -- Bruce Springsteen's famous album The Rising, which was released in July 2002.
[4] It is true that the members of RETORT quote (in re-ordered fashion) a few sentences concerning "the media" from Debord's 1988 book, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, but they ignore the fact that its author was at pains to point out that,
Rather than talk of the spectacle, people often prefer to use the term 'media.' And by this they mean to describe a mere instrument, a kind of public service which with impartial 'professionalism' would facilitate the new wealth of mass communication through a form of communication which has at last attained a unilateral purity, whereby decisions already taken are presented for passive admiration. For what is communicated are orders; and with perfect harmony, those who give them are also those who tell us what they think of them. Spectacular power, which is so fundamentally unitary, so concentrated by the very weight of things, and entirely despotic in spirit, frequently rails at the appearance in its realm of a spectacular politics, a spectacular justice, a spectacular medicine and all the other similarly surprising examples of 'media excess.' Thus the spectacle would be merely the excesses of the media, whose nature, unquestionably good since it facilitates communication, is sometimes driven to extremes.
In reality, Debord's Comments on the Society of the Spectacle -- like his Preface to the 4th Italian Edition of "The Society of the Spectacle" (1979) and his Considerations on the Assassination of Gerard Lebovici (1985) -- are about the State and, to be more exact, its use of terrorism as a method of government.
[5] For more on this subject, see T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Knopf, 1985).
[6] See footnote [4].
[7] It would appear that the body of "Afflicted Powers" was written in September or October 2002, and that footnotes were added as late as March 2004.
[8] There is a strange echo of the convoluted beginning of Sanguinetti's On Terrorism in RETORT's ridiculous pronouncement that "Terror as a political instrument, in other words, is the property of the state (maybe the founding property of the state in its 'modern' manifestation), or of those thinking like a state." In his 23 February 1981 letter to Jaap Kloosterman, Debord denounces the "insolence" of Sanguinetti's attempt to "reduce to a ridiculous schemata [...] the historical and strategic question of armed struggle in general and the particular case of all terrorism as it has existed in many diverse forms throughout history."
[9] Note well that RETORT wants to keep "September 11" nice and simple: "The terror of September 11 had a handful of targets (our tendency to make it, in memory, simply 'the bombing of the Twin Towers' is not untrue to the logic of the event)." But what is "not untrue" in one "logic" is totally false in another. At least two of the events that also took place on that day -- the explosion at the Pentagon and the collapse of World Trade Center building #7, which wasn't attacked by the "martyr-pilots" -- are highly suspicious and suggestive of the perpetration of an "inside job."
[10] "It matters profoundly," RETORT says, "that the horrors of September 11 were designed to be visible, and that this visibility marked the bombings off from most previous campaigns of air terror, especially those sponsored by states. There were no cameras at Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima. The horror there had to be unseen." Quite true, but there were plenty of cameras present when Jack Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald.
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WTF?
09.06.2004 08:35
Ian
a bit harsh
27.09.2004 15:38
situationism is a lot of things but one thing it is NOT is a framework designed to analyse 9/11. that means there is little point in claiming that one way of using situationism for the analysis is more genuine than the other. all that mental energy could have gone into "further debate" instead.
why are you so pissed off with T.J. Clarke anyway?
will
another unkind reply to RETORT
28.03.2006 04:54
It comes labeled as "An Exchange on Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War,"[1] but in no way is it an exchange; it is more like a series of juxtaposed rhetorical flourishes. The questions ("posed by Hal Foster before the first bombings in London," that is, before 7 July 2005) are separated in both time and space from the so-called responses ("delivered by Retort in the midst of the first flooding of New Orleans," that is, on or after 29 August 2005). It is clear from these sparse explanatory notes, which were provided by October, and from the movement or flow of the "exchange" itself, that it was conducted by email, but without the rapid-fire back-and-forth of typical emailed exchanges, not to mention instant messaging. Hal Foster and RETORT might well have simply sent each other letters.
Both parties are responsible for the ensuing disaster. Hal Foster can't seem to ask a direct question; instead, he relies on a series of small, indirect or "leading" questions, some of which lead nowhere. He doesn't seem to have done his homework, and might even have forgotten things that he knew when he wrote Recodings.[2] When Foster asks, "What are the possibilities of Situationist responses to this situation?" -- that is to say, the fact that "today radical invention, and not only reckless power, is most [sic] in the hands of the Right, both here and abroad" -- it is clear that he has no idea that at least three different authors have gone beyond contemplating "possibilities" and have actually made "Situationist responses" to September 11th -- and did so in the immediate aftermath of the event(s), not several months or several years later. Worse still, Foster unironically refers to situationist theory as "situationism," despite everything that has ever been said on the subject of its non-existence or its status as a tool of the situationists' enemies. But, then again, two out of the three writers published in this particular issue of October (half-devoted to Guy Debord) unironically refer to and comment about the existence of a "Situationism"![3]
Foster isn't totally clueless; at some level, he gets it. After reminding RETORT that it called September 11th "a spectacular defeat," despite the fact that September 11th "has served as the cover for both the military neoliberalism prosecuted abroad and for the political neoliberalism pursued at home" and has resulted in "an awesome burgeoning of powers," Foster asks, "with defeats like these, some in D.C. [District of Columbia] backrooms might chuckle, who needs victories?" Despite his disorganization, Foster clearly sees the obvious emptiness of RETORT's claims that the September 11th terrorists, thinking spectacularly, launched a successful attack against the spectacle; and that, as a result, the society of the spectacle was changed, the theory of the society of the spectacle needs to be changed, and RETORT's book is a good orientation for such a debate, such an "exchange" of ideas, "on the Left." One wants Foster to come right out and say, "No, you blatant apologists for the everything-changed-on-September-11th ideology promulgated by the Bush Administration, September 11th was a clear victory for spectacular power, for 'the spectacle,' and for the military/industrial/entertainment complex whose representatives meet in D.C. backrooms." One wants Foster to press the point: all that would have been obvious to Debord, if he had been asked about it between, say, 1969 and 1980, when spectacular terrorism was clearly being used by the Italian State (among others) to extinguish proletarian subversion. As we have already pointed out,[4] there is no need for a "new" or "changed" theory of the society of the spectacle: Debord's would suit us well enough, if we were properly informed of it and knew how to read what it says.[5]
But the primary responsibility for the disastrous "exchange" with October belongs to RETORT. Despite the group's announced intention to develop a "non-rejectionist" critique of modernity, RETORT refuses to refer to Hal Foster by name, instead calling him "October," as if he represents something, something beyond or larger than himself, something ideological, like "Octoberism" (he is in fact one of the journal's editors). As a result, RETORT doesn't so much respond to the questions it is asked as respond to "the overall drift of October's questions," which RETORT manages to discern after only two of them. This tactic allows RETORT to hold itself above everyone else or, at the very least, above the "Octoberists"; the "mice" who gnaw upon what RETORT in its haughty superiority labels (but does not describe or explain the details of) "a Conspiracy Hillbilly version" of the idea that September 11th was a victory for spectacular power;[6] and "the actually existing art world of the [American] Empire."[7] Needless to say, RETORT has never deigned to respond to (or even acknowledge the existence of) our Unkind reply, even though it was sent copies by both email and ground mail.
But this is not why we felt it necessary to respond to RETORT's "exchange" with October. We again reply unkindly to RETORT because of the group's continued inability to understand just what the fuck Guy Debord was on about when he wrote about "the spectacle," and because mainstream ("spectacular") publications have begun to buy into and repeat RETORT's illogical horseshit that September 11th "put [the] spectacle in doubt." It is absolutely appalling to read that, prior to the publication of RETORT's book, "the concept of spectacle needed to be desacralized. It needed to be applied, locally and conjuncturally -- to dirty its hands with the details of politics," especially because one of the members of RETORT is T.J. Clark, who -- just a few years ago -- went to great pains to show that Guy Debord was a very "social animal"[8] and that Debord and the rest of the Situationist International were political animals, not uninvolved theoreticians.[9]
RETORT's worst bit of disinformation concerning Debord's theory is the idea that "the spectacle" and "the State" are two different forms of social control, whereas every reader of The Society of the Spectacle knows that "the spectacle" is what the modern State became during its post-Depression (1939) fusion with the capitalist economy. Thus, it is meaningless to refer to "the state's entrapment in the [spectacular] logic of image-control," or to imagine that "the trouble with the spectacle, from the state's point of view, is that its monadology of consumption constantly dissolves (even paranoid) distinctions and puts Don't Know in their place."[10] But the writers from RETORT do, and people praise them for it, and we think we know why. Scared by the (possibly paranoid) idea that Guy Debord (and Henri Lefebvre and Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno) were actually Right-wing in their respective critiques of the spectacle of "modernity,"[11] RETORT seeks to protect itself by becoming less radical than Debord et al in its critique of the State. Despite identifying itself as "Council Communist," as "a gathering of [...] antagonists of the present order of things," RETORT never speaks of political revolution. For RETORT, the State need not be destroyed: it simply needs to free itself from the illogic of the spectacle. This margin allows the various members of RETORT to remain rooted in traditional politics: reinvigorating and strengthening "the Left" and the antiwar movement;[12] god knows what else (election to the Berkeley City Council?). To detourn Raoul Vaneigem: those such as RETORT, who talk of everyday life without mentioning revolution, have a corpse in their mouths.
-- Bill NOT BORED! 27 March 2006
[1] October 115, Winter 2006, pp. 3-12. RETORT's Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War was published by Verso in the summer of 2005.
[2] Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (1985).
[3] In "Terres Inconnues," Anthony Vidler studies the influence of the 17th century Carte de Tendre and the aerial photography of Chombart de Lauwe (circa 1950) on the ideas and illustrations in Internationale Situationniste, but completely misses the importance of the continuous illumination of the earth's surface by military devices (night-vision goggles, searchlights, helicopters, warplanes, satellites, et al), even though he himself quotes relevant material. For example: "Le Corbusier had noted thirty years before [that] 'the bird can be dove or hawk. It became a hawk. What an unexpected gift to be able to set off at night under the cover of darkness, and away to sow death with bombs upon sleeping towns'" (emphasis added). See instead Paul Virilio's Cinema and War (1989).
In "The Lessons of Guy Debord," Vincent Kaufmann tries to fashion or reinforce the image of Debord as "unilateral," "a principle of perfect autonomy, a principle of noncommunication and nonexchange," but is forced to admit in a footnote that "The Situationist group and more precisely the way Debord was leading it has often been described as Stalinist because of the many exclusions that occurred in its history. However, with the ongoing publication of Debord's correspondence, it becomes obvious that these exclusions had little to do with Stalinism." Indeed. And with the on-going translation of Debord's correspondence into English, one can expect an increasingly violent rejection of the ridicuous half-truths, falsehoods and outright lies told about Debord over the years by such people as Stewart Home, Len Bracken, Andrew Hussey, et al.
And, in "Guy Debord, or the Revolutionary without a Halo," Tom McDonough -- about whom we've written once before, in 1997 -- tries to discern "a break in Debord's work, which might be dated to the end of the 1970s, and which was marked by the deployment and consolidation of a normative -- if not archaic -- conception of selfhood." But such a project is doubly misguided: either one might argue (following, say, Vincent Kaufmann) that Debord's whole life was dominated by "interruption," that is to say, by a series of breaks, and/or one might argue that Debord first deployed and consolidated a "normative/archaic conception of selfhood" around 1961, when he stopped calling himself Guy-Ernest Debord and started using only his voice on the soundtracks of his films; or in 1972, when Debord authored the auto-dissolution of the Situationist International, etc, etc.
[4] See An unkind reply to RETORT (June 2004).
[5] We do not at all mean to imply that, like sacred texts, Debord's/Sanguinetti's theories from the 1970s and 1980s can only be understood by adepts, disciples or other mystics. It is simply a matter of the availability of good translations. Preferring a work published in 1967 to one published in 1988, RETORT never accounts for Debord's Comments on the Society of the Spectacle; even if RETORT did so, the best-known English translation of it is terrible and needed to be re-done from scratch by another translator.
[6] It appears clear that the "mice" are those who go further than timid Hal Foster and actually believe that, in addition to benefiting immensely from September 11th, the Bush Administration (the current face of the military/industrial/entertainment complex) actually perpetrated some or all of that day's events. For an account of RETORT's arrogant refusal to engage in a non-rejectionist "exchange" with these so-called conspiracy theorists, visit the Portland IMC.
[7] The very last line of the text is actually an avowal of RETORT's arrogant refusal to engage in a discussion with or critique of the art world: "We shall refrain from putting alongside Mohammad Sidique Khan's last testament a brief listing of the themes and styles of this week's gallery offerings in New York and Los Angeles, or a sample of the 'ethical stances' of their reviewers."
[8] See his Foreword to Anselm Jappe's Guy Debord: "For no one was better [than Guy Debord], over the whole stretches of his life, at making himself enough of a community for the purposes of the moment; and if that community had nothing to do with the 'political' culture of Sartre, Garaudy, and de Gaulle, then so much the better. Writing was one social activity among others. The room on the Rue Saint-Jacques where The Society of the Spectacle got written was at once an austere cell -- with nothing on the shelves, I remember, but a few crucial texts (Hegel, Pascal, Marx, Lukacs, Lautremont's Poesies) laid open at the relevant page -- and also the entryway to Debord's miniscule apartment, through which friends and comrades continually passed. The process was meant to be seen, and interrupted. One moment the deep, ventriloqual dialogue with History and Class Consciousness: the next the latest bubble for a comics detourne, or the best insult yet to Althusser and Godard."
[9] See "Why Art Can't Kill the Situationist International," co-written with Donald Nicholson-Smith: "All the same, what we find nauseating in the received account is the implication that concern for problems of internal organization -- above all a determination to find a way out of the legacy of 'democratic centralism' -- is more token of these art-politicians' lack of seriousness. Anyone who actually reads what the SI wrote in 1966 and 1967 will quickly realize that it could not have issued from a group of people walled into their own factional struggles. There were such struggles. They were thought (sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly, in our view) to be the necessary condition of the kind of revolutionary clarity that informs the best of Situationist writing. But the Situationists never got stuck in their own turmoil, and they went on thinking, especially as things heated up in the course of 1967, about how they were to act -- to 'expand' -- if the capitalist State offered them an opportunity. Here, for instance, are extracts from a working document entitled 'Response aux camarades de Rennes -- sur l'organization et l'autonomie.' Signed by Debord, Khayati, and Vienet, and dated 16 July 1967, this text came out of a series of discussions (and joint actions) with other small groups on the Left [...] We cite the 'Response aux camarades de Rennes' because its contents contradict the current travesty-history of the SI during this period, and not least that travesty-history's favorite political claim -- that the Situationists were simply 'council communists' whose only answer to the practical questions of revolutionary politics was to hypostatize past experiments with workers' councils as a way of solving all problems of organization in advance."
[10] Let the reader be assured that we, too, have no idea of what is meant by this remark, which receives no further comment or explanation from RETORT.
[11] According to RETORT, "to the extent that the Left tradition inevitably did include moments when the modern condition was thought about as a whole -- as of course was true of Benjamin and Adorno or, for that matter, Debord and Lefebvre -- what resulted most often, it seems now in retrospect, were Right-wing motifs repeated in an ultra-Left register [...] Modernity, says Benjamin somewhere in the Arcades Project, is 'the time of Hell.' The language, again, is that of the Right. It is a line from The Pisan Cantos. We could imagine it nowadays issuing straight from Al-Zawahiri's mouth." But RETORT refuses to acknowledge the possibilities that, in evoking Hell, Benjamin was speaking metaphorically or was detourning that line from The Pisan Cantos; that Benjamin (a Jew), Adorno (a Protestant), Al-Zawahari (a Muslim) and Debord (a former Catholic) might not have the same concept in mind when they each evoke "Hell"; or that -- whatever the political orientations of these four men or the desire we might experience to "kill the messenger" of bad news -- modernity might in fact be the time of Hell. See Debord's evocations of the Devil in his 1978 film In girum imus notce et consumimur igni.
[12] Clark and Nicholson-Smith, "Why Art Can't Kill the Situationist International": "It was the Left (as opposed to, say, the art world) that the Situationists most hated in the 1960s and thought worth targeting. Whether the Left is still worth targeting we are not sure. We have tried several times to write a conclusion to these pages that did so, and have come up hard against the emptiness of the present. As usual, Debord is the best guide to this state of affairs."
NOT BORED!
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