How to kill your parents and become a revolutionary "Situationist primer"
"During the nineteenth century the traditional working class movements came into being (most of which were influenced by the works of Marx or Bakunin). Since then those movements have been defeated and appropriated; in the East by the Bolsheviks and then capital; and in the West by the bourgeoisie. Organisations that were supposed to support the workers (trade unions, political parties, etc), have sold out to capitalism and now act against the workers. More than this, capitalism has taken over the most radical ideas and returned them safely to the people in the form of harmless ideologies such as socialism or communism until the only choice we are presented with is either the spectacle of domination or the spectacle of opposition. Because of this advance in capitalism, not only are the ideologies themselves redundant, but also the theories and techniques of analysis from which they sprang.
Can any pleasure we are allowed to taste compare with the indescribable joy of casting aside every form of restraint and breaking every conceivable law?
To remedy this we must use new theories and techniques of analysis, because the old terminology of revolutionary ideology, defined when the technology of modern capitalism was beyond fantasy, is now sheer banality. It is no use trying to make the new conditions of life fit the old analysis; we need theories and techniques that are relevant to the modern world, not that of the nineteenth century. It was in regard to this problem that Guy Debord developed the theory of the Spectacle in his book "The Society of the Spectacle".
Nowadays we live in a world where capitalism (through television, computers, architecture, transport, and other forms of advanced technology), controls the very conditions of existence, a social relationship mediated by images. This is the Society of the Spectacle. The world we see is not the real world -- it is the world we have been conditioned to see. A world constructed from the black and white of tabloids, a world framed by the mahogany veneer of the television set, a world of carefully constructed illusions - about ourselves, about each other, about power, authority, justice and daily life. A view of life from the perspective of power.
THE DAYS OF THIS SOCIETY ARE NUMBERED; its reasons and its merits have been weighed in the balance and found wanting (Guy Debord).
Life itself has become a show contemplated by an audience. That audience is the proletariat itself, and the proletariat consists of anyone who has no control over the conditions of their own existence. Their modern "reality" is now merely something we look at and think about, not something we experience. In the real world, what is possible is determined by our resources and the limits of our imaginations, but upon this real world a totally fake world - the Spectacle - has been constructed. It is maintained on a microscopic level by our conversations and relationships; in our simplest everyday dealings we engage in the construction of social illusions. The Spectacle is a constructed reality. It does not satisfy, it cannot satisfy. It offers only the dream of satisfaction.
The basic characteristic of the spectacle today is the way it calls attention to its own disintegration.
The effect of this is the substitution of images and commodities for "real" experience. People enter into relationships with spectacular production rather than each other. Isolated individuals, united only by a passive contemplation of the spectacle. A manufactured alienation (ie the image of original totality or perfection from which we fell but to which we can return is also just another spectacular commodity whether it takes the form of Christianity or marxism) for manufactured personalities that multiplies needs precisely because it can satisfy none of them. Industry creates new needs to stimulate consumption and productivity. All of which conspires to conceal the fact that the material conditions for liberation already exist. However the various methods used by the Spectacle (mass culture, commodities, consumer goods, etc), don't always work.
Power must be totally destroyed by means of fragmentary acts (Vaneigem).
For example - punk rock, the riots of '81, the L.A. riots or the early raves. This shows the vulnerability of the Spectacle. It can be defeated, but not without real difficulty because the Spectacle has another weapon - "RECUPERATION" To survive, the Spectacle has to have social control. Recuperation is the way it achieves it. The Spectacle is able to recuperate a situation or resist any challenge to itself by shifting ground, by creating new roles and cultural forms (or, when the situation becomes dangerous to their domination, brute force). One way of doing this is by artificially encouraging "participation", in order to make things the new "fad" or "trend". People are allowed a greater say in the construction of the world, which then becomes theirs, and that of their own alienation. Punk rock soon became packaged for consumption (designer bin bags, torn tee-shirts from Fiorucci, limited edition Sex Pistol singles, etc), free festivals were replaced by Glastonbury and Red Wedge, and rave became the darling of the music industry. Once again we have the Spectacle of rebellion. The Spectacle embraced the threat of our culture, made it safe and sold it back to us. To resist this, we must continuously, spontaneously create our own reality.
Everybody wants to breathe and nobody can breathe and a lot of people say "we'll be able to breathe later." And most people don't because they are already dead.
Another technique of recuperation is to inseminate a nostaigic yearning for the past, keeping people happy by reproducing the fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, etc. The news and fashion of today becomes the plot and setting of the soap opera of tomorrow. Today becomes like yesterday, tomorrow like the day before. It is not enough that life be experienced, it must be seen to be experienced. The Spectacle is not sustained by the images it produces but by our reproduction of these images in our daily life. An artificiai production of a present for infinite reproduction as long as the audience remains happy and passive. Participants become spectators and the whole thing just another commodity. It doesn't matter which screen we look at; whether it be a monitor or set; it is a mechanism for conditioning us to a devaluation of objective reality, and of objects in general, and causing us to accept the general idea over the objective truth, the abstraction for the real being. The only excuse for the system of government and capitalism is that it has existed for so long.
We're not working for the spectacle of the end of the world, but for the end of the world of the spectacle.
And if this fails, and anyone decides to reject the materialist values offered by recuperation, there is a way for coping with this too. People bored by the mere possession of things are encouraged to possess experiences. Experiences are marketed by carefully controlled leisure industries, package tours, and the burgeoning New (order?) Age industries. The Spectacle, of course, tries to provide all things for all people; for people who don't find this enough, the state's clandestine branch, the mafia, will peddle you dope, acid, smack, crack, E, etc but all at a price. And of course if that isn't enough you can always buy into a cop out "alternative" lifestyle.
Ideology is essentially a partial, technical rationality.
The Spectacle not only occupies people's time, it occupies their environment as well, with "URBANISM". This came about when the recuperators realised people would no longer accept, and were beginrnng to resist the damage that the Spectacle industry was doing to their surroundings. Haphazard urban sprawl is replaced by more manageable structures (the new town [factory town], the supermarket, the shopping mall, the housing estate, the leisure centre, the grid road system, etc ). Huge new towns were developed solely for the purpose of work, profit and control, with no consideration of the needs of the real people who are forced to live there.
Urbanism maintains the class system, and class power, by deliberately keeping workers apart in little boxes, in isolation. The sub-division of space is merely the concrete manifestation of what has already happened to time. It controls the narrative structures of our lives both in time and in space; dividing it up into work time/work space, leisure time/leisure space, consumer time/consumer space, etc. Carefully controlled times, places, and activities, isolated and unconnected except by transport systems that become a kind of limbo space, a metaphoric mis en scene, and as the distance between places shrinks, the distance between individuals grows. The mass character of such a planned environment constructs within its glossy facade a formal misery.
The desire to play has returned to destroy the hierarchical society which banished it. (Vaneigem).
The answer to urbanism is simply the destruction of the entire territory and the reconstruction of a discourse between the needs of the people and the environment. Situationists are not interested in the improvement of society as it exists; resistance in terms of survival condemns us to the misery of working for oppression. Situationists are interested in putting something better in its place: "To make the world a sensuous extension of man rather than have man remain an instrument of an alien world, is the goal of the Situationist revolution. For us the reconstruction of life and the rebuilding of the world are one and the same desire. To achieve this, tactics of subversion have to be extended to schools, factories, universities, to confront the Spectacle directly. Rapid transport systems, shopping centres, museums, as well as the new forms of culture and the media, must be considered as targets, areas for scandalous activity."
Governor Hughes said after his morning inspection tour (of the 1965 Watts LA riots) that he had found the "holiday atmosphere" among the looters most repelling.
While we may choose particular issues as a point at which to intervene and extend the struggle, but we must never lose sight of the "big picture". Fragmentary resistance may win us some improvement in our individual position but it hardly makes an impression on the totality of oppression. In fact, single issue campaigns legitimate the Spectacle by allowing it to publicly make concessions that are of little value and can be taken away again if necessary. This is why it is important to expand from particular situations to universal ones that can serve to involve more people, because at the end of the day single issue campaigns play into the hands of the specialists of the Spectacle who play one group off against another (Animal Rights verses Human Rights; Sexual Discrimination verses Racial Discrimination, etc.) and stage manage the whole procedure so that control is maintained. Single issue politics can contain radical potential, but should only be used as a "detonator", a point from which to expand from, to widen the total struggle, to send shock waves of resistance reverberating around society.
Never sacrifice a present good for a future good. Enjoy the moment; don't get into anything that doesn't satisfy your passions right away (Fourier)... If it's not fun, why do it? (anon)
We must intervene in radical situations to try to speed up the revolutionary process; to create situations that jolt people out of customary ways of thinking and behaving. To destroy the stage sets of spectacular illusion, to know and to show that there are other ways of doing things. To identify the real demand - the demand for real life, the one demand the spectacle cannot meet. It is not enough to analyse the misery of daily life and its causes, we must speak of our dreams and desires and provide examples of life as it could be. We must start to build the world we want now (in our relationships, our interactions and the way we conduct ourselves in our daily lives). The only way to develop a revolutionary theory is to put it into practice; revolutionary theory is developed on the basis of lived experience. A revolutionary movement based on revolutionary theory is participatory. Its goal is the destruction of the commodity Spectacle.
Each person is the offspring of their works, as passivity makes its bed, so shall it lie in it (Debord).
Without political parties, hierarchies of any sort, or the mere transfer of power from one ruling elite to another, the Situationist revolution holds out the prospect of the total transformation of the world. The answer to the "Society of the Spectacle" is "The Revolution of Everyday Life". Revolution is a process, a process that can be started now."
-grim (fixed by J)