…Guy Debord / La Société du Spectacle VIII…

CHAPTER EIGHT

180

  • Culture is the general sphere of knowing and showing life-as-it-is-lived, in a society divided along class-lines, but alive to the possibilities of history. Which is as much as to say: it is the ability of abstraction which is allowed to exist on the sidelines, so to speak: as one pole of the intellectual division of labor… and as   t h e   intellectual labor of division… Culture emerged when it became separate from the wholeness and solidarity of our old myth-based society, “when the power of unification disappeared from men’s lives, and when opposites lost their living relationship and dynamic inter-action and acquired autonomy…” (Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie) In gaining its independence, Culture began an empire-building trajectory of wealth-acquisition and self-development which is at the same time, a continual and gradual erosion of its independence. History – which fabricates the relatively autonomous space that Culture lives in, and also the ideological illusions that sustain this autonomous space – expresses itself in part as the History of Culture. And the entire triumphal History of Culture can be understood as the history of the gradual revelation of its own inadequacy, and as a long journey towards its own self-imposed abolition. Culture is the place where we look for and attempt to understand our lost wholeness, our lost one-ness. And in this search for wholeness and one-ness, Culture, precisely to the extent that it is a separate sphere, finds itself compelled to deny its own existence.

* – * – *

Don’t think that what you do will be professional activity thirty years from now…  In the world of art, for instance, we have been working back towards everyone-is-an-artist ever since Picasso walked into the Muséum Ethnographique des Missions Scientifiques…

…and in less than a decade, we have become a people of great photographers, and we have more Indie musicians – people who are really doing it – than any one person, in any one place, can keep track of…

…because all humans have always been artists: it’s the natural expression of a mind that can walk upright, dance and fight.

* – * – *

181

  • The struggle between tradition and innovation, which is the internal motor – the developmental principle – of all historical societies 1), can only progress by the ongoing, permanent victory of innovation. Yet innovation in these cultures is the result of an overall sweep of history which, as it becomes aware of itself as a totality, works towards transcending its own cultural presuppositions, and moves towards the suppression of all the separation that has been integral to these cultures.
1) that is: narrowly read, all Western societies that are within the scope of written history…

* – * – *

And in our century, even as technology continues to develop, it will look less and less like a self-sufficient arrow-trajectory up and up – and more and more like just one element of our tool-kit for dealing with problems caused precisely by that old illusion of ‘progress’…

Planting trees, caring for the land, caring for what land is in our cities, eating less meat, less fish and traveling shorter distances will help us more to handle climate change…

…for instance than geo-engineering, which will feel not like progress, but just like one more bulwark against the evil inversion of “progress” that is killing us.

It will be the end of our three-hundred year old faith in “progress” as the giant turtle, rising from the sea, carrying our world on its back… ever onward…

And when the Ogalala aquifer dries up, then growing teff and millet, crab apples, green-gages, okra… will look like a wise use of the past and of the heirloom knowledge of the planet. It will not look like some transcendent, self-justified machinery… disappearing upwards on a trajectory forever into the future…

What is over, is over.

* – * – *

183

  • Culture emerged out of the historical processes that dissolved the way of life of the old world(s) – but only as a separate sphere: such that it is a body of awareness, understanding and emotional communication that is still only a small part of this society that is   p a r t l y    h i s t o r i c a l l y   a w a r e . It is the meaningful part of a world that has too little meaning.

* – * – *

And in the Information Age, this “too little meaning” is not going to change: except to swiftly develop into “too many meanings” – a burgeoning multiplicity of meanings – with no intellectual means of tieing them together. Though, of course, there will always be courtesy, physicality and a sense of enjoyment.

And a sense of humor…

So acknowledge the mystery. Remember the Celts of ancient Gaul, who spoke little and in riddles: especially when there was a Roman listening…

Riddle and paradox are your friends…

And musubi comes not from sharing ideas, but from sharing action and gestures…

* – * – *

184

The end of the history of ‘culture’ manifests itself as two opposing sides:

  • the project that works for it to be overtaken and transcended by ‘history’ in general, and
  • the organization of its preservation as a dead thing, viewed through the lens of these performances and images.

The first of these cultural movements has linked its fate to the critique of society, and the other to the defense of class-power.

* – * – *

185

Each of these two sides of the end of ‘culture’ exists in a coherent, unitary fashion,  as much in every aspect of each respective body of knowledge as in every aspect of each performance and display that is presented to our senses – as what used to be called ‘art’ in the sense that it is generally understood.

  • In the first case, the growing number of fragmentary and partial accumulations of [counter-cultural] knowledge and skill-sets conflict with one another, and they eventually become unusable because the slightest assent to existing conditions of life in the end implies a renunciation of all the [counter-cultural] knowledge and skills that have been acquired, along with all the theory of their praxis, which alone encapsulates the truth of all this knowledge, because it alone encapsulates the truth of all these skills.
  • In the second case there is a conflict – an open contradiction – between the critical self-destruction of the former   c o m m o n   l a n g u a g e   of society and its artificial reconstitution in these consumerist performances and images: the illusory representation of things that have never been lived.

* – * – *

…but as the legacy culture fragments, it becomes easier to put something together that can stay fragmented… …and that is why we have ‘intersectionality’. That is why we are learning about intersectionality….

* – * – *

186

  • When society lost the communality of a society based on myth, it necessarily also lost all the referents – both spoken of and written of – of a language that is truly shared and held in common. And it will be this way until the moment when the broken-ness and fragmented-ness that happens when there is no active sense of community, is healed and transcended by the opening of society to its own history, and its own awareness of the ongoing possibilities of history, and all the sense of community that comes with that.  Art – which has been the lingua franca of a society with no active sense of community – as soon as it emerged  from its sacred origins in a religious world, and became a matter of creative individuals producing distinct and separate “works of art”, it became a special case: a way of thinking and creating that is in touch with the contradictions and movements that are in the foreground or the development – and ongoing history – of our fragmented culture. And so, the affirmation of its independent status  – as autonomous “art” – was also automatically the beginning of the long, slow process of its abolition.

* – * – *

So know your history – and the history of those around you – make art together, be active, and dance!!!

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187

  • The fact that the language of communication has been lost: this is what is  p o s i t i v e l y  expressed by the modern trend towards the decay of every kind of art, and its formal annihilation. What this trend expresses  n e g a t i v e l y  is the fact that we have to find a common language again – but n o t this time in the unilateral catharsis and resolution which, in the art of all our historical cultures,    a l w a y s     c a m e    t o o    l a t e,  speaking to   o t h e r s   about what has already been lived and experienced without any real dialogue, and simply admitting that this is a thing that is wrong in life  – – –  No  – – –  rather we must find another common language through our praxis, which must gather together and fold into itself both direct physical activity and the language that comes from it.  And what this has to do is: for real, have the sense of community in dialogue and the playing with time which have – hitherto – been merely    r e p r e s e n t e d    in each and every poetic-artistic piece of work.

* – * – *

So the possibility of real change has to be embedded and articulated in the art-work itself.

And the sense of time has to encompass shorter and/or much, much longer durations than reality TV. So that either we get the sense of “wait, was that it?” or a single art-work is spread out over years…

* – * – *

188

  • When art – now independent of any shared, communal mythology – depicts its world in bright colors, then there is some moment, somewhere, of our life that has gotten old: and that cannot be revived with bright colors. Only in our memories can it still be evoked. What we see as greatness, in art, only begins to be apparent as life itself declines and falls into decay.

* – * – *

So… art used to be an expression of group mind… of the great archetype within each culture. So that when you look at a ‘Greek’ motive, or ‘Mayan’ or whatever… it is the doodle of the mind of that place and time. So that whatever doodle you’re doing, is reflexive of your internal hardware: quite literally it is how your brain-pattern is working.

And what has happened now is that art has disconnected from that place-specific, deep continuity. And now, simply, it’s an appearance. That’s why so much art looks like cartoons.

We have become a graphic novel instead of a culture.

And so, in a graphic novel, what’s so easy is that there’s emotion but no continuity… so you’re allowed to destroy everything as if it’s going to reappear magically by the hands of others. Whereas in the old time, art was a reflection of a deep continuity: so a child would look at it and its brain would be that way, a weaver weaved the basket that way…

So now we’re in this very odd time of discontinuity. And although it appears that we’re forming a new culture, we may instead be annihilating the very structures of the mind that allow for continuity, and for culture.

So, for instance, in the theatre, now… if you’re an artist from an earlier generation who knows how to do emotional continuity – well, now, you have to  n o t  do that: because it doesn’t feel like the times.  It doesn’t feel like FB or random browsing…  What you have to do is start with emotional discontinuity, but also it’s good to  surprise them with the real, the physically real…and surprise them with real questions – so that you forge a link between the surprise of the physical and the mind that asks questions… so that the mind is being trained in a discursive experience around the unexpected. And you must have at least one WTF moment early in the play.  So… you lead them through  the experience of discursive thought… and once you have built a connection between physicality and a mind that is open, and once you have their attention… later on: you can surprise them with some emotionally continuity, some moments of gesamtkunstwerk, grounded in the physical and the physically real… and they will be moved.

And it will always feel like a window into another world.

Because we’ve hit an era where the things that used to hold things together are disappearing. But  nothing is replacing them in the koine but commercialism, a sense of purchase, a sense of appearance… which doesn’t leave any space for the heart to develop. Because your heart cannot be a set of appearances, it’s your being.

And it runs contrary to biology: you have so many neurons in your heart, just like your brain. But if they’re simply bereft of meaning any more: simply feeling what they’re told to feel – quite incidentally, almost accidentally – as your attention is held by some kind of strange, sensational commercialism.  Then you end up feeling deeply, deeply empty.

And the emptiness allows for the surreal insanity that surrounds us.

Whereas before, I think, we were actually beyond that. We were creatures of being. And if you think about pre-cognitive states, where people can see the future: those things were trusted,  so kokoro – the information of the heart  – was extraordinarily important. And people would make life-decisions based on that and not on what they were told to think – truly accidentally – by a culture that actually just wants to hold their attention.

And just as, in biology, you have the split where cells divide:  it may be that we are now reaching a great divide, where some beings can live in the world of appearances, and others know that some part of them will die if they do. And so they’re becoming more and more focussed on the world of being.

* – * – *

192

  • The consumerism of this society of performances and images, which – inter al – preserves in frozen form aspects of the legacy culture, including a newly-salvaged recycling of its more negative manifestations, is starting to become openly in its cultural sector that which it is implicitly in its whole, in its totality:   the   c o m m u n i c a t i o n   o f   t h i n g s     t h a t    c a n    n o t   b e    c o m m u n i c a t e d  .   The extreme destruction of language can – in art – be simply recognized as an officially positive value:  because this art is all about affirming and demonstrating a reconciliation with the dominant state of affairs – the way things really are – in which any communication is happily proclaimed absent. The critical truth of this destruction, manifested as the real life of poetry and of modern art is – of course – hidden, because the high art of these performances and images – whose function  it  is  to     m a k e    u s    f o r g e t    h i s t o r y    b y    s o a k i n g    u s    i n    c u l t u r e – applies in the pseudo-novelty of its modernist means that very strategy of non-communication which constitute it in depth. And so a school of neo-literature can be presented as ‘new’ which simply admits that it contemplates the written word for itself. Moreover, along with the simple proclamation of sufficient beauty in the dissolution of the communicable, the most modern tendency of this culture of performances and images – and the one most linked to the repressive practices of the way our society in general is organized – attempts to reconstitute, by means of “collective work”, a complex neo-artistic milieu out of decomposed, abstracted and broken elements: notably in the attempts to integrate these artistic left-overs and aesthetico-technical hybrids into urbanism. This is the translation onto the pseudo-cultural plane of these performances and images, of the general project of advanced capitalism: which aims to take hold of each individualized worker as a “personality well integrated into the group” – a tendency described by recent American sociologists (Riesman, Whyte, etc.). And everywhere we see this same project: to create structure without community.

* – * – *

We need:

infinite courtesy and real benevolence…

and always resist the dialogue reflex…

* – * – *

Un mondo donde quepan muchos mondos

we need:

an open framework and a repertoire of practice…

and language that shades into mystery…

* – * – *

We need:

political acts with consequence…

– even if it’s as simple as distributing seeds… or with-holding water…

* – * – *

…more a set of behaviors than a set of sounds…

* – * – *

And delineate the new commons…

* – * – *

We should see ourselves from above, just like a  Zen swordsman. And because this is a style that defines itself in opposition to something, just be clear, explicit about that.  And in the course of the piece, work to get beyond that… be beyond that.  If it starts with layer upon layers of hidden depth…then settle into the Tao… but work for the moment when a new figure of speech is coined, and the audience immediately gets it…

* – * – *

194

  • The body of knowledge which is still coalescing as our collective t h i n k i n g about these    p e r f o r m a n c e s       a n d    i m a g e s     would have to justify a society that has no justifications, and constitute itself as a general theory of false consciousness. It is entirely premised on the fact that it cannot and will not think about its own material basis in the physical infrastructure of the whole system of performances and images.

* – * – *

So of course, we’re all becoming proficient photographers with a dialogue reflex and a knack for détournement… But we have to see this, and sense this, within a context of taste and smell, touch, feeling, and natural sound and light. And awareness of the ceaseless flows of ki-energy.

Because how can we even discuss the idea of progress without an awareness of sunlight, and growing plant-life, and connection to the landscape and flowing water-ways. And the myriad intertwining strengths of the ocean, and the power of the storm. These are the meaning of

SUSANO-NO-MIKOTO  1) :

                                 or for that matter, of  Thórr – or of his Sámi original, Horagales – in whose name a pristine direct democracy – of the oligarchy  – was established in Iceland… 2)

And it is all there in the energies of the Tao.

* – * – *

So we have to lose our fascination with the play of contrasting images. They are an easy but shallow substitute for the profound inter-play of contrasting ki-energies – kannagara – that is everywhere, all the time, and all around us. And we are part of it. And if we include that in that human sensed-experience affirmed as foundational in the Feuerbach Theses – and if we always stay aware of the weight and energies of all the people living on this continent – then we have a touchstone for what might be missing or unaddressed in any one movie, reality-TV-show, or news-story.

As Arundhati Roy wrote, in different circumstances, but on this continent, “To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.” 3)

1) often considered the Kami of Progress
2) Archeology tells us that Thórr was the people’s god, while O∂inn was the god of kings and chieftains and warriors.
3)  ‘The End of Imagination’ in The End of Imagination, p.52

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195

  • The way we think about all the ways that appearances are organized in our society, is, itself, made far less clear by the ubiquitous lack-of-communication: which is actually protected by the way we think about it…  Purely and simply we stay unaware that there is a struggle underlying every single thing in this world of appearances.
  • The specialists at wielding power in this world of appearances: power that is absolute within its system of restless, ever-changing language… are corrupted absolutely by their own unremitting sense of disdain: and by the constant validation of that sense of disdain… as they continue to find their lack of respect confirmed in their every experience of the easy-to-disdain man or woman who is the un-nuanced, all-accepting spectator.

* – * – *

So be kind and tolerant and accept nothing as reality that is not from your own experience. And yet…

…cynicism is the enemy… so learn to be passionate without absolutes and without certainty….

…which means: kindness, tolerance…openness… these are the only way to be open to the dialectic without it destroying you – staying aware of constant change in our fast-changing world…

Even irony should be gentle and laughing…

* – * – *

203

  • Doubtless the analytical concept of  ‘le spectacle‘ could also be bowdlerized into some hollow formula of socio-political rhetoric in order to explain and denounce absolutely everything  –   i n   t h e   a b s t r a c t  :  and so  a c t u a l l y  come to the   d e f e n s e  of this whole system of  performances and images. Because it is obvious that no   i d e a   can get us beyond the existing spectacle, all it can do is get us beyond existing  i d e a s  about le spectacle.  In order truly to  end  la société du spectacle, it will take real women and men embodying and setting in motion an actual force in our society.
  • All the critical theory about ‘le spectacle‘ is only even true to the extent that it is integrated with a real opposing movement of refusal and rejection in society.  And this refusal and rejection – the re-affirmation of the struggle of an entire class of people working for transformation – will become self-aware as it develops its own  critique of  these performances and images.  Which will be the body of  theory that is actually based on real conditions, in practice, on the ground, of on-going oppression: and which at the same time, inversely, unveils the secret of what this all can be.  This theory does not expect miracles of people who actually have to work for a living.  It envisions a fresh awareness – and fresh witness to and practical work on – the realities and exigencies facing this new proletariat   [ or precariat 1)  – ],  as a long-term task.  And if we were to   a r t i f i c i a l l y   distinguish theoretical struggle and practical struggle – because according to the basis here outlined, even the formulation and propagation of such a body of theory is unthinkable without   a    r i g o r o u s     p r a t i q u e   –  it is certain that the complicated and far-from-easy working out of this body of critical theory will inevitably also be something that awaits the real movement of men and women acting at the scale of society.
1) The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, by Guy Standing, and see also Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

* – * – *

And now, fifty years later,  already,  le spectacle  has fragmented and has become prismatic.  La société du spectacle has fragmented and has become prismatic.  Already  i t   is broken.  Everyone who meditates,  who is in debt and in the Rockies – and West of here, too – is at a tipping point,  and ready to see everything the virtual world brings us in a new light.  Ready to see the camera crew behind the picture.  Ready to see it all as circumstance and context.

Ready to see everything the physical and the energetic world brings us in a new light.  As a new light.

* – * – *

204

  • Critical theory has to  c o m m u n i c a t e  in its  o w n  language. This is a language of contra-diction, and it has to be as dialectic in its form as in its content. It has to be critical of the whole sweep of history… and of the whole history of this critique…. It is not the “degré zéro de l’écriture” 1)  but the bottom falling out of the bucket.  It is not the annihilation of style, but a style that annihilates.

* – * – *

Shakespeare started this: with a little Zen moment at the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost – and the country-folks’ pageant that leaves us thinking: “who are these people?”

The laquer bucket, of course, belongs to Xuefeng Yicun (822-908)…

…and every artist among us is a little like Monsieur Jourdain… for forty years now we’ve been making Situationist art and didn’t even know it…

…at our best…

1) “The Zero-Degree of Writing” – the seminal book by Roland Barthes.

* – * – *

205

  • The style we use is literally an ongoing demonstration of dialectic theory – a constant awareness that ‘everything is change’ – and it is an outcry and an abomination to the ears of the predominant way of speaking – and to the rules of good taste into which we have been indoctrinated. Because when we do affirm and employ a pre-existing concept, we include simultaneously an awareness of its new-found, re-found   f l u i d i t y  and of the need for its destruction.

* – * – *

206

  • In this style of writing – and way of thinking – which has the critique of its own self built-in, the thing that is a constant is the affirmation that any critique and analysis, done  n o w , is pre-eminent  o v e r   a n y   a n d   a l l   p a s t  c r i t i q u e   a n d  h i s t o r y .   This is how the expository manner of what we call “dialectical theory” shows and displays the oppositional spirit that is within it. “Truth is not like a product, where you find no trace of the tools used to make it” (Hegel). This theoretical way of writing about change and change-ability, in which the traces of change must still be present, manifests as  r e v e r s a l s  of established relationships between concepts, and as the  d é t o u r n e m e n t  of inherited wisdoms drawn from all previous critique and analysis. Reversing the genitive is one such manifestation of this ongoing transformation of history – as expressed and distilled into thought – and it has been considered the characteristic epigrammatic style of Hegel.  The young Marx,  who much admired Feuerbach’s habit of replacing the subject with the predicate, is the writer who made best use of this  i n s u r r e c t i o n a l   s t y l e ,  which “from the philosophy of poverty, derives the poverty of philosophy.”  Détournement  subverts all of the past conclusions of critique and analysis, which have over time become solidified into truths-to-be-respected – which is to say: transformed into lies.  Even Kierkegaard  did this – and he knew he did it –  when he appended to his own thoughts their own denunciation: “But not-withstanding all these discursive ways and by-ways, just as the jam always finds its way back to the pantry, one always ends up by adding just some little saying, not really one’s own,  which is unsettling on account of all the memories that it arouses” (Philosophical Fragments). It is the obligation to take some distance from that which has just been falsified by becoming an official truth, that leads Kierkegaard to use what amounts to détournement, just as he admits elsewhere in the same book: “Just one more remark, about the numerous insinuations which tiptoe wholesale around the complaint that I mix in with my own ideas a certain number of borrowed dicta. I will not deny it, here, and nor will I hide the fact that this was intentional and that if I ever write another of these pamphlets, I will call things by their name, and lend a clear historical dress to these problems…”

* – * – *

So easy to see, of course, in our overwhelming flourescence of Facebook memes, a glorious Spring sprung from the walls of Paris ’68 – and a revolution that failed fifty years ago… but it is so strange to be reminded that two of the foremost rhetorical devices on our screens go back to and through Hegel and Marx… erased from our history like some politburo photographees…

Deguchi embraced this verbal play, along with the whole populist-syncretic mix of Tao-ist/Zen/Esoteric puns and popular etymologies. And O’Sensei was totally in this mold when he told a  young Roy Suenaka Sensei: “One apology is enough – more apologies make you look more like a fool… There’s no need to apologize more than one time for any mistake; therefore, make one mistake at a time.” 1)

1) Complete Aikido p.21

* – * – *

207

  • Our ideas improve over time. The meanings of words are part of this… plagiarism is essential. That is what progress is: you hold some words of a writer close – make use of her turns of phrase…delete a thought that is wrong… replace it with a thought that is correct –

* – * – *

All language is quotation… no meaning without repetition (Roland Barthes)…

But what we know is that with tighter repetition and more repetition comes a deeper meaning (which is also the level at which we talk to other species).

And repetition in a community of people who are close creates a deeper meaning still (and maybe there are lacunae: fewer words, and even silence…)

And then there is repetition where you join your energy to the energy of the universe: and that is kotodama.

These are all varying degrees of ki-musubi – – – and they each give birth to a particular kind of language.

* – * – *

208

  • Détournement is the exact opposite of citation – the exact opposite of some theoretically-based authority which is always already a lie because the citation is only a fragment, torn from its context, torn from its train-of-thought, indeed, torn from its era, and presented to us as some all-encompassing global reference… torn, too, from the precision with which – in context – it was originally formulated… whether we recognize the quote or not. Détournement is the fluid, ever-mobile language of  a n t i – ideology. It makes its appearance in communication that is aware that it cannot claim for itself – with any certitude – a guarantor. It is, to the highest degree, words that cannot be affirmed by some ancient reference, above criticism. But on the contrary, it has its own relationship with the facts of real-life, and they can confirm the ancient kernel of truth that it asserts. Détournement  builds its case on nothing more than its obvious veracity as today’s up-to-the-moment critique.

* – * – *

So why should we be surprised that a FB meme is typically completely unattached from any underlying logic…

The only applicable logic is artistic logic…and, hopefully, playfulness or poetry…1)   and that, of course, is the way you have to think, to understand the information age…

Now that doesn’t mean there aren’t other levels of meaning to be aware of… but few of them are found in words on a page…

…or even in words on a wall…

1)  OM ha! ha! ha! bisan-ma-ei sowaka!

* – * – *

210

  • What is actually a real negation – and a movement towards the abolition – of  “culture”  is the one thing that still enables it to have some meaning.  Because it is no longer enough simply to be ” c u l t u r e d ” or ” c u l t u r a l “.   And so…  this is what is left:  something that in some shape or form functions at the level of “culture”  but is understood and received in a completely different way.

* – * – *

So it is very, very hard to make art,  when all you are doing is making art.

But you can be making art when you plant trees, grow food, revive an ecology, become part of Nature, do something outside the money economy, make embu, make a performance out of street politics, arm yourself in a way that’s unexpected, that’s even invisible, and carefully make no sense, or too, too many possible senses…

 

– – – Guy Debord,  Paris 1967

– – – Takeharu Yoshi Renshi

read CHAPTER ONE:
read CHAPTER TWO:
read CHAPTER THREE:
read CHAPTER FOUR:
read CHAPTER FIVE:
read CHAPTER SIX:
read CHAPTER SEVEN:
read CHAPTER NINE:

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