Mumford—Art and Technics (postlude)

Once we have achieved the right form for a type-object, it should keep that form for the next generation, or for the next thousand years. Indeed, we should be ready to accept further variations only when some radical advance in scientific knowledge, or some radical change in the conditions of life has come about... This interpretation of the path of technics, as leading to a series of flat plateaus rather than as a steady climb upward is, I know, a baffling contradiction to the popular one. ...The animus of the last three centuries has been toward improvement, innovation, invention without end; and the chief duty of man, according to the utilitarian catechism, is to adapt himself to such mechanical changes as rapidly as is necessary to make them profitable. But this stale view assumes that we are capable of learning nothing, that we are incapable of mastering the machine we have created and putting it in its place; that we shall not emancipate ourselves from the manias and compulsions that our preoccupation with the machine has brought into existence; that philosophy and religion and art will never again open up to man the vision of a whole human life. ...But once we arrive at a fuller degree of self-understanding, we shall render unto the machine only that which belongs to the machine; and we shall give back to life the things that belong to life: initiative, power of choice, self-government—in short, freedom and creativeness. Because man must grow, we shall be content that the machine, once it has achieved the power and economy of a good type, should stand still—at least until the creator again places himself above the level of his mechanical creature.
(pp. 83-84)

This is Mumford at his most Situationist, making a connection which the Situationists themselves were too self-absorbed and self-important to make. This is the case for Functionalism itself as a weapon against wasteful consumption and alienated expression, for an ascetic rather than a hedonistic resistance to entrenched power. This is how technology can free us from the burdens of mere survival now rather than at some yet-to-be-determined time in the future.

[December 2019. Like most concluding remarks, this was originally written first rather than last.]

Jappe—Debord—On Never Asking For Help

Anselm Jappe
Guy Debord (1993)
trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1999)

Debord claimed, and there is no reason to doubt him, that he never asked anything of anyone, that it was always others who approached him. (111)

Actually, this is not necessarily something to be proud of and could even conflict with the spirit (if not the letter) of Situationist theory given its grand practical pretensions and collectivist ideals. Perhaps this merely refers to the issue of "accommodation...with the system?"

[from a post-it, 2017 or 2018]

Jappe—Debord—Bursting the Third-Worldist Bubble

Anselm Jappe
Guy Debord (1993)
trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1999)

A bubble that the SI found easy to burst was the excessive enthusiasm for revolutionary movements in the Third World... The SI (like Socialisme ou Barbarie) believed that "the revolutionary project must be realized in the industrially advanced countries"... A bit of mockery of Third-Worldism is no doubt to be detected in the SI's use of such terms as "backward sector," "underdevelopment," and "war of liberation" in connection with the issue of everyday life. ...nor did "the young" per se, or the various "marginal" groups, inspire any confidence..." (97-98)

Really, this misplaced faith in the marginalized is quite a bit more (or, if you insist, less) than comfortable Westerners "striving to cover up their own ineffectuality." (97) That accusation smacks of personal score-settling at the expense of clear thinking. Rather, mustn't there be some species of White Guilt, or some similar organic psychosocial construct, motivating Westeners to offload both responsibility and valorization to the proverbial Third Worlders who have historically been on the wrong end of Western affluence? It seems like it must be a form of self-rejection, as we certainly see among Woke white people all the time in more local issues.

[from a post-it, 2017 or 2018]

Jappe—Debord—Unfulfilled Wishes

Anselm Jappe
Guy Debord (1993)
trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1999)

...the Situationist criticism of the work of art is curiously reminiscent of the psychoanalytical account, according to which such productions are the sublimation of unfulfilled wishes. For the Situationists, inasmuch as progress had removed all obstacles to the realization of desires, art had lost its function, which was in any case subordinate to desires themselves. (70)

This is a comparison I would not have thought to make, perhaps because psychoanalysis is calibrated toward individual psychology (note lower case) whereas the Situationists often spoke in the broadest (i.e. social/societal) terms. It is thus not clear to me that such a comparison achieves much besides highlighting a common concern with desire. It should therein be kept in mind that cultural production Beyond Necessity does not necessarily entail anything quite rising to the level of "desire" per se; also that it is not quite so easy to compartmentalize the Necessary and the Cultural: if food must be gathered no matter what, there will nonetheless be a different gait (dare I say aesthetic?) to each gatherer.

AJ appropriately labels this critique "debatable," which, channeling psychoanalysis again, is a cue to consider motive. If "the further culture advanced, the more doubt it was obliged to cast on its own social role," (70) then it is but a small step from there to a comprehensive value system (or Revolutionary Program, if you insist) which privileges not only the ultimate Revolution but also what can only be called a certain primitivism vis-a-vis culture prior to its later "advance."

[from a post-it, 2017 or 2018]

Jappe—Debord—The Supersession of Art

Anselm Jappe
Guy Debord (1993)
trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1999)

...to actualize artistic values directly in everyday life as an art that was anonymous and collective...in such a way as to transcend the dichotomy between artistic moments and moments of banality. (68)

I suppose this drags us kicking and screaming into trying to define Art, for if these are indeed hallmarks of supersession, then as such they betoken something of a radically different type. I usually argue for defining by reception rather than by intent, hence the notions of anonymity and collectivity are certainly not incompatible with classical and romantic conceptions of art. It is the blurring of distinction between the artistic and the banal, rather, which seems so thoroughly at odds with common sense, i.e via the Everything and Nothing problem. What could ever be more numbly terrifying, or terrifyingly numbing, than such a life without contour? This seems to place Art on a pedestal, thus representing the ecstatic pole which in alienated life is necessarily balanced by proportionately severe suffering. If the poles must balance, however, would moderation not be preferable to the opposite extreme?

[from a post-it, 2017 or 2018]

Strategist, Specialist

McKenzie Wark
50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International (2008)

The strategist is not the proprietor of a field of knowledge, but rather assesses the value of the forces aligned on any available territory. The strategist occupies, evacuates, or contests any territory at hand in pursuit of advantage. (28)

This is very illuminating...which is not to say that it reflects entirely positively on Debord in light of his predilection for speaking in absolutes. The strategist could well be any or all of the following: alienated, parasitic, specialist, Man Without Qualities (i.e. "proprietor" without a "field of knowledge"!); all metiers which he saw no possible role for or revolutionary potential in.

[from a post-it, 2017]

Give Me Back My Music, You Damn Romantic

McKenzie Wark
The Beach Beneath the Street (2011)

p. 106—music as the highest Romantic art; and Romanticism as the Dionysian opposite of classicism

Both taxonomies are trite, but I'd never considered them together, which places music precisely where polite Bourgie non-culture places it: unclaimed, mercurial, ultimately not to be trusted. As just one half of a dialectical pair (Apollonian-Dionysian), music is also incomplete, in need of grounding.

Incidentally, it is hard not to notice the complete absence of musicians in the SI and subsequent accounts of it, as well as similarly scant mention of music in SI theoretical statements. I suspect this has nothing to do with its Dionysian nature and much more to do with the Apollonian side of music's internal technical dynamics which the established mythology has reduced away.

Added Later: music CAN be just about perfectly balanced in the Ap.-Dion. respect. If anyone cares to pursue this. Probably true of all the arts. So, music pre- and post-dates Romanticism, but the Romantics get to claim it for their ends, and no one else's. Not productive! Music could, via a one-sided account, be posited as the ultimate Romantic art; but Romantics were hardly the ultimate musicians. In fact the opposite, strictly IMHO.

[from a post-it, 2017]

[the passage:]

The classical assumes a legitimate order, revealed by the light of the sun. God's in his heaven, the king's on his throne, all is right with the world. And what goes wrong can be rectified. Like Le Corbusier's plans, classicism favors the right angle and the straight line. It favors the form of the myth, in which order is destabilized, restored, legitimated. Its privileged medium is architecture. Its method is imitation. Everyone imitates the one above them in the social order, just as the king imitates God, and the whole social order imitates nature. Classical humor, from Molière to Sacha Baron-Cohen, ridicules failed attempts at imitation. In Molière's satirical attack on the Precious movement, provincial ladies shun some nobleman as beneath them, so these retaliate by having their grooms pretend to be Precious sophisticates. Hilarity ensues, but classical humor serves order.

The romantic is a corrosive fluid that attacks the classical on every front. It is a refusal of obedience. It lurks in the dark, in the mist, within the eclipse. Time is out of joint. It favors the wave, the vibration, the curlicue. It mixes forms, detaches symbols from myths, and puts them in play against all that is legitimate. Its medium of greatest affinity is music. Its method is creation, which it claims as a human potential, not a divine attribute. For Lefebvre the romantic intersects with a certain strand of irony. Unlike Jorn he idolizes the achievements of the Greeks, not least Socratic irony, which is the undoing of any order of belief. The subjective irony of Socrates anticipates the objective irony of history, which sweeps order away in its aleatory currents.

Consensual Art—Interlude

Peter Laugesen: And I also think that, you know, connected with potlatch and art and all this stuff: Art is simply a gift. Art should be a gift. Art should be given freely to everyone. Not because they maybe want it, but maybe because they don't want it. That's potlatch. I think we should change the slogan we have here to exactly the opposite: "Fear Everything Expect Nothing".

"Fear Everything Expect Nothing"
in Expect Anything Fear Nothing (2011)
ed. Rasmussen and Jakobsen
p. 281

Living in Los Angeles has convinced me that this only works if people have a reasonable means of escape/abstention. Trapping those who "don't want it" in subway cars or in their own neighborhoods seems to me quite contrary to much Situationist thought. We become the bureaucrats this way, no matter our intentions or class position. The saying "captive audience" comes from a bourgeois idiom; radicals nonetheless ignore at their own peril.

Perhaps if people can escape then it's no longer a potlatch. Fine. Sending them running is warlike enough for me! But they don't all run, not even when you most expect them to, not even in San Diego, Bismarck, or Pocatello, and that is the wisdom of sentiments such as the above.

Subjectivity as the Beginning of the End

Richard Gombin
The Origins of Modern Leftism (1971)
trans. Michael K. Perl (1975)

on the Situationists:

p. 72—"This incorporation of the subjective dimension in the revolutionary quest is a completely new phenomenon in the tradition of the labour movement...
...the struggle of the subjective broadens the front of the old class struggle. ...this notion [is] completely foreign to Marxism..."

It's worth pausing to consider the last bit, ca. 50 or so years on, in light of PoMo, Intersectionality, etc., where this point is acknowledged only to widely varying degrees. Also to reiterate a point which those movements make abundantly clear, and which the Situationists didn't always acknowledge: subjectivity is messy, infinite regress is the rule, and hence this veritably railroads movements into "total contestation," incremental/single-issue work being impossible this way.

[from a post-it, 2018]

The All-None Problem

Richard Gombin
The Origins of Modern Leftism (1971)
trans. Michael K. Perl (1975)

per H. Lefebvre:

pp. 70-71—"...before life can become the art of living, art has to invade life. ...artistic activity enables participation by the individual in the world: art has always been the highest form of creative work. The individual can only become liberated if art ceases to be a specialized activity, ceases to be, in its mercantile form, a reified activity. ...men will only be happy when they are all artists."

And yes, if they are all artists, then none of them are artists. Hence "supersession." Is there more? If we deconstruct the "mercantile form" of modern art just a bit, we in fact find quite a few artists (both pros and committed hobbyists) seeming/claiming to derive their specifically artistic brand of fulfillment either directly or, more often, indirectly (yet unmistakably) from the receipt of external validation via the reified form of practice/reception. It is "reified" per se specifically for creating an exchange value, which is the quantificational vehicle of this external validation. The all/none issue, trite as it may be, thus asks us to consider whether art is really "the highest form of creative work" or whether it is, rather, merely the most powerful differentiator among subjects, hence the most powerful ego stroker. The latter is certainly ripe for supersession, but I suspect the result to be None rather than All, and that sounds less like utopia than a different kind of pestilence.

[from a post-it, 2018]

Vincent Kaufmann—Debord, Autobiography, Exemplarity

Vincent Kaufmann, trans. Robert Bononno
Guy Debord: Revolution in the Service of Poetry (2006)

Debord is one of the great autobiographers or self-portraitists of the second half of the twentieth century... He developed an unchallengeable form of autobiographical writing, through which a statement coincides with an act (and could coincide with an act only because it amounted to no more than "not showing himself".)

...

In this light, it is clear that it is precisely because of their exemplarity that Debord's autobiographical writings must at the same time be "theoretical," or that, at the very least, there is continuity between these and his autobiographical writings in the strict sense of the word. From Saint Augustine to Rousseau and beyond, this has always been the case. Exemplarity always serves ideology (religious, political), at least when the opposite is not the case. With Debord this continuity is especially obvious in the most autobiographical of his films [In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978)]...

...

The film does not start out autobiographical. It begins, like the film version of The Society of the Spectacle (1973), as a work of social criticism, with themes that will be familiar to anyone who has seen his previous films: the critique of passivity, of separation, of the vapidity of art in general and film in particular... But this tone is abandoned after some twenty pages (and a little more than twenty minutes), replaced by a long and explicitly autobiographical narrative, introduced in the following terms: "Thus, instead of adding one more film to the thousands of commonplace films, I prefer to explain why I shall do nothing of the sort. I am going to replace the frivolous adventures typically recounted by the cinema with the examination of an important subject: myself." There is no film, let's move on to a discussion, to conflict, that is, to me. Such a change of register is indeed an echo of the declaration of 1952, and it is emblematic of Debord's oscillation between "theory" and "self-portraiture," or, if you will, of their continuity. Autobiography is here a form of social criticism by other means; exemplarity, in a way, constitutes the proof of the relevance of theoretical discourse.

As I have already suggested, this exemplarity is negative. The period during which Debord was active, which he anticipated to a certain extent (if we imagine him beginning in 1952), is one in which autobiography, and more generally biography, triumphed. But it's just a short step from triumph to the most repulsive degradation. The death of the author foretold by Barthes and Foucault seems quite distant, and if there ever was a time when the author, modestly converted into an anonymous writer, signed his works only for the sake of form, he is now more alive than ever, and more desirous of proving this, of leaving traces of the life he so enjoys. Proof of this can be found in the recent success of intimate memoirs, correspondence, and biography, and more generally the autobiographical turn taken by contemporary fiction. Hasn't the right to create "personal fiction," as it is called, become as unquestioned as human rights once were? Everything would be for the best in the best of all possible worlds if contemporary authors still had the time, between book signings and television appearances, to lead a life that was unique enough not to depend on the clichés of sentimental personal fiction. It is one thing to have reestablished the author's rights, quite another to identify a life that is prestigious enough and, especially, unique enough to justify their use. The danger of the democratization of the right to self-expression is that when it is overused, the claim to authenticity and singularity that historically justified autobiography quickly fades into indifference and a lack of differentiation. It then becomes no more than a rhetoric of authenticity. Singularity is the condition of authenticity and authenticity is corrupted in the presence of the commonplace. From this point of view, the critical importance of Debord's actions lies in his ability to turn his epoch upside down, to make a break with it, to turn himself into its other." (28-30)

"At the very least, there is continuity between these [theoretical writings] and his autobiographical writings," and the reason is the "exemplarity" of this work, which is to say that "a statement coincides with an act" at all times. (28) VK seems to be getting at something deeper and more profound than mere consistency of words and actions, but I can't tell what. This consistency means that Debord's work is always "theoretical," even when it is also (and more explicitly) "autobiographical." "Exemplarity always serves ideology...at least when the opposite is not the case." (28)

"Exemplarity, in a way, constitutes the relevance of a theoretical discourse." (29) That is, one may prove (such a strong term, but whatever) the validity of a piece of Theory by practicing it oneself; and at that point, a chronicle of such life and living takes on a new relevance.

Importantly, "this exemplarity is negative," (29) meaning that it instantiates an example of living differently than the predominant examples in one's immediate midst. The "most repulsive degradation" of autobiography occurs when authors no longer "lead a life...unique enough not to depend on the clichés of sentimental personal fiction," when "the right to self-expression...is overused [such that] the claim to authenticity and singularity that historically justified autobiography quickly fades into indifference and a lack of differentiation." Seeing this, Debord achieved a certain "critical importance" by "turn[ing] his epoch upside down...mak[ing] a break with it...turn[ing] himself into its Other." This is Negative Exemplarity. Otherwise known as swimming against the current, zigging as others zag, or perhaps simply being born in the wrong era, city, country, milieu, etc. That is certainly not unique, but consistency is, so that as far as that goes the point is well-taken.

The critique of the prevailing practices in "personal fiction" is always timely. I hesitate to say that it is well-articulated here as I have had to reread the passage several times in order to fully grasp it. But let's just say I'll Take It, which is to say it's good to know I'm not crazy for groping towards more or less the same critique of the Autobiographical Turn. In fact I would say that VK actually doesn't go far enough vis-a-vis "the right to create personal fiction" becoming "as unquestioned as human rights once were." In fact the Autobiographical Turn has become an Autobiographical Imperative in many circles. One such circle is populated by the Arts Entrepreneurs or Arts Businessperson (-Milo's verbiage), who have found (or claim to have found) that the personal sells. It would of course be quite fruitful to attempt to ferret out the essential from the contingent here, as well as the simpler question of whether the seeming infallability of this business plan is the reality or merely the perception.

The consequences are rather different for each combination, including one logical impossibility. But regardless of the truth, I'd expect that this Imperative is here to stay for a good while. It is, let's say, quite overdetermined, no?

[from a notebook, 2017]

The Rosetta Stone of Hipsterism

Jean-Michel Mension
The Tribe: Conversations with Gérard Bérréby and
Francesco Milo (1998)
trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith
p. 79

On the "Meeting of Failures" event (1950):

But when you announce that you are good-for-nothings, aren't you really thinking that you're everything?

Yes, of course—it's very pretentious.

Lipstick Traces—Détournement Is Quick, You Are Slow

Greil Marcus
Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (1989)

[My notes say:]

p. 403—"On its own page, "The Cathars Were Right" is funnier and more ominous than I can make it. My translation is slow and détournement is always quick—a new world in a double take, in the blink of an eye."

Even as a skeptic, I can probably grant this much as far as it goes. In fact the quickness angle suggests an unassailable test for the skeptic to deploy in making an empirical or anecdotal study of actual works: if someone doesn't Get It right away, as GM would have it here, the device has in that instance failed.

To me, GM's particular phrasing of this observation suggests comparison with the moment of enlightenment in koan study and similar Adept domains of Buddhist thought. The comparison ends only where the preparatory/groundwork phase is concerned: ironically, the Buddhist version is in some sense consciously cultivated whereas détournement ostensibly plays on conditioning that subjects are mostly unaware they are receiving, or if aware they receive it passively.

[from a post-it, 2017]

Détournement and the Form-Content Binary

Anselm Jappe
Guy Debord (1993)
trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1999)

...Debord's whole conception of society is founded on détournement: all the elements needed for a free life are already at hand, both culturally and technologically speaking; they have merely to be modified as to their meanings, and organized differently. (61)

In other words, nothing is new under the sun; but does that truism point to the Timelessness of what we've always had, or to its changeability via being "modified as to [its] meanings, and organized differently"? That question indicates that the form-content distinction is maintained intact here; or perhaps materials-process (i.e. "elements"-"meanings") would be more accurate. In any case, if such a distinction were specious or unimportant, it would certainly not be necessary to recapitulate it the way this passage does. And if it is thus indicated to be meaningful, the next question is why this should be so. There are several answers, I think: the statement is far less controversial with regard to production/consumption than it is regarding culture; it is less controversial regarding a Bird's Eye View of society broadly than it is regarding individuals, for whom production/creativity/agency of the type said here to be superfluous may in fact be a basic human (i.e. psychological) need; and is every artefact just this amenable to having its meaning reframed (willfully) by individuals and/or groups according to the ephemeral needs of the moment?

[from a post-it, 2017 or 2018]

Détourn or Deform?

"A Maximum of Openness: Jacqueline de Jong in conversation with Karen Kurczynski"
in Expect Anything Fear Nothing (2011)
ed. Rasmussen and Jakobsen
p. 195

JdJ: ... If you look at it, you can see that I printed it in the smallest font possible so that no one could read it. And it was on purpose. I was already at that moment not very happy with the guys in Drakabygget, mainly Thorsen, I must say. The Drakabygget people were making détournements of articles of mine, such as "Gog and Magog," in their magazine. They even did it with articles by Jorn. You could say there was a degree of faking in what they were doing. One thing that has not been mentioned is that we, the Situationists, always had an anti-copyright declaration in all the magazines. ... Of course it means that everything is permitted, but you don't expect your comrades to deform your texts as they were meant to be serious.

KK: Deform or détourn?

JdJ: Deform, I think. It's a good question.

Vincent Kaufmann on Détournement

Kaufmann/Bononno, Guy Debord

It's true that détournement is also based on a technique of dissimulation, if we insist on using the term, even though it would be more correct to speak of it as a ruse or feint. But it is at the very least problematic to attribute such a technique to the practice—considered shameful or inadmissable— of autobiography, a larvatus prodeo to which no more than a handful of self-proclaimed scholars hold the key. Reading Debord is not like a game of Trivial Pursuit, and I doubt that he was the least bit ashamed of his image or self-portraits. The concept of détournement entails the notion of detour, the intent to circumvent an obstacle, and contains elements of game playing and warfare. Détournement turns the reader or public into a warrior. It incorporates a strategy of blurring appearances, the rejection of comparative quotation demanded by the spectacle, which is currently so intrigued by the cliché of authenticity. Consequently, it also involves a rejection of an entire order of discourse, a logic of allocation, of pigeonholing, of signatures and responsibility through which everyone is in some way put back in his place or finds himself back there. But Debord, the lost child, did everything he could to avoid discovery, to not remain in his place. The spectacle has made authenticity a cliché we are assigned to, it continuously demands that we signal our presence. It is this imperative that détournement rebuffs; it is also, and perhaps especially, a technique of appropriation (which has never concealed its intentions), a technique for making the best possible use of words and texts. "Plagiarism implies progress," wrote Ducasse, it's least improbable inventor, a man Debord deeply admired. With détournement the cliché is taken over for special purposes, as were the Sorbonne much later and, more ephemerally, the Odéon Theater and a handful of factories. There was jubilation rather than dissimulation, none of the sorrow associated with hidden mastery. A challenge was launched against the cliché by a singularity whose self-rediscovery involved abandoning the cliché and reappropriating the belle langue of the century, as Baudelaire—here appropriated—had wanted to do. And Baudelaire, like Debord, was horrified by philanthropic journalists short on inspiration, who wanted to be considered equals or even friends. Charity leads to the spectacle, religiosity to the religious. (37)

dissimulate (v.)—"to hide under a false appearance"
(merriam-webster.com)
larvatus prodeo—something about a mask (The Internet)
feint — (n.) "a deceptive or pretended blow, thrust, or other movement, especially in boxing or fencing" (Google)
So, for VK it is "more correct" (37) to speak of détournement specifically as a tactical maneuver in a physical confrontation ("feint"), or as a "ruse," which seems not all that different from a "dissimulation." One can only hope that something was lost in translation here, because the difference seems stylistic rather than substantive. And the concept further "entails the notion of the detour, the intent to circumvent an obstacle" (37), from which it follows that the nature of the obstacle in question and one's reasons for attempting circumvention are factors which ineluctably color any potential judgment of the maneuver. In this case the obstacle is "comparative quotation [as] demanded by the spectacle," the "cliché of authenticity," "allocation," "pigeonholing," "signatures and responsibility" (37); in short, the way the spectacle "continuously demands that we signal our presence." (38) Fair enough as a goal, I think, but appropriating existing material seems at best a curious means, at worst an impotent one. Can one's location/presence not be triangulated perfectly well (or well enough) from a series of appropriative maneuvers as from ostensibly original ones? Certainly for me coming to this oeuvre without much of any common background with Debord et al, the attributed references are jarring enough on account of this dynamic as to constantly remind me of the author's presence in a different time and place, while the unattributed passages may as well not be appropriations at all since I'll never catch them. Which is to say that Debord, like most authors who for whatever reason continue to command our attention, is no more or less formed/defined/limited by the unique profile of his intellectual pedigree. That this dynamic is through appropriation manifested as a sort of jigsaw puzzle rather than as a tapestry of Influences is rather meaningless vis-a-vis tactical combat with the spectacle, to which both modus operandi signal one's proverbial presence perfectly adequately. Failing that line of reasoning being convincing, it is a simpler route perhaps to point out that Debord signed plenty of his works with his own name, and that unsigned or pseudonymous works, as VK occasionally chronicles below, while certainly part of Debord's toolkit were the exception rather than the rule.

As for "making the best possible use of words and texts" (38), this is segued into rather facilely as if it were an obvious implication of the above, but I would insist that as a question of valuation (comparative!) it is certainly not so simple. At best this position hews to one far-off endpoint of a continuum, at the other end of which lies the whole-cloth ideal which is responsible for supplying the plagiarist's ammunition in the first place. i.e. There is nothing to plagiarize (or nothing fresh and unspoiled) without the products of the whole cloth conceit, and similarly no getting off the ground for practitioners of this conceit without first making a certain peace with the inevitability of influence and the fact of its multiple pathways to manifestation. This much is noncontroversial; but to posit appropriation as the search for an ideal repurposing opens up another, discrete can of worms. Certainly the unquestioned reverence for an author's use of his/her own material is neither necessary nor constructive; this phenomenon (The Composer's Intent is a pop-musicological phrase which comes to mind) would seem to fall under the heading of "authenticity" as it appears in the text here, and the problematizing of this impulse on grounds of resistance to The Spectacle certainly is timely and proper. But the same principles which support an irreverence for authenticity point equally clearly and strongly toward an irreverence for the appropriator's conceit to having found, if not the "best possible use" (!!), then even a better one, quote-unquote, than anyone else (the original, "authentic" author included) has or could. The end run around this obstacle is of course to objectify such value based on function within a social system. This is exactly what VK seems to be claiming Debord was interested in. If that is so, I think that is precisely where the Intentional Fallacy can rightly be called. There is no way to control the reception of such a work by anything as complex as even the most rudimentary social system worthy of the name.

[from a notebook, 2017]

Détournement as Resistance to Ownership of the Commons

McKenzie Wark
The Beach Beneath the Street (2011)

pp.40-41—Détournement as resistance to ownership of the commons

The only problem I have with this is that it deprives the person making the reclamation of the transformative struggle which comes with striving for a unique, original accomplishment. Perhaps wholesale appropriations are crucial for their potential to remind collective society of its collective aspects; but the perpetrator has, as I take Debord to have said repeatedly, not accomplished much for themselves. They have Never Worked in one important sense, and again, while someone's gotta do it, a whole mess of such someone's isn't socially sustainable.

[from a post-it, 2017]

[The passage:]

Michel Foucault (1926-84) undermines the romantic theory of authorship by speaking of discourse as a distribution of author functions. For Foucault, a statement is authorized by a particular form of discourse, a regime of truth, a procedure for assigning truth-value to statements. It's not hard to see why this captivated the minds of academics. It made the procedures in which academics are obsessively drilled the very form of power itself. As if that by which academics are made, the molding of their bodies to desks and texts, that about which they know the most, even more than they know their allotted fields, were the very index of power. Reading Foucault is like taking a masterclass on how the game of academic scholarship is to be played, and with the reliable alibi that this knowledge of power, of knowledge as power, is to be used in the interests of resistance to something or other. Détournement, on the other hand, turns the tables, upends the game.

The device of détournement restores all the subversive qualities to past critical judgments that have congealed into respectable truths. Détournement makes for a type of communication aware of its inability to enshrine any inherent and definitive certainty. This language is inaccessible in the highest degree to confirmation by any earlier or supra-critical reference point. On the contrary, its internal coherence and its adequacy in respect of the practically possible are what validate the symbolic remnants that it restores. Détournement founds its cause on nothing but its own practice as a critique at work in the present. Détournement creates anti-statements. For the Situationists, the very act of unauthorized appropriation is the truth content of détournement. (40-41)

Debord and Wolman—Détournement

Guy Debord and Gil J Wolman
"A User's Guide to Détournement" (1956)
in Situationist International Anthology (2006)
trans. and ed. Ken Knabb
pp. 14-21

It is not just returning to the past which is reactionary; even "modern" cultural objectives are ultimately reactionary since they depend on ideological formulations of a past society that has prolonged its death agony to the present. The only historically justified tactic is extremist innovation. (14)

Unfortunately it is not only our various underlying "ideological formulations" which are products of the past but also the whole of our knowledge. Hence "extremist innovation" can be extreme only relative to current conditions; it cannot be any more or less rooted in the dead past than can any other point on this continuum.

Any elements, no matter where they are taken from, can be used to make new combinations. The discoveries of modern poetry regarding the analogical structure of images demonstrate that when two objects are brought together, no matter how far apart their original contexts may be, a relationship is always formed. Restricting oneself to a personal arrangement of words is mere convention. The mutual interference of two worlds of feeling, or the juxtaposition of two independent expressions, supersedes the original elements and produces a synthetic organization of greater efficacy. Anything can be used.

It goes without saying that one is not limited to correcting a work or to integrating diverse fragments of out-of-date works into a new one; one can also alter the meaning of those fragments in any appropriate way, leaving the imbeciles to their slavish reference to "citations." (15)

Imbeciles being now and forever a sizable majority, I would imagine the fate of this device to be thusly sealed. If the artist has such high (that is, concrete) hopes for their productions, then it is up to them to design imbecile-proof strategies for realization of this objective. Even the notion that "a relationship is always formed" is perhaps too charitable; some relationship or other may arise, but different imbeciles may harbor different imbecilities; and in extreme cases the "juxtaposition" itself may not be perceptible, or not equally to all. Again, the specificity of the intent necessitates a proportionate degree of responsibility taken by the artist. One does not detect a great deal of affinity here with the notion of responsibility, however.

the tendencies toward détournement that can be observed in contemporary expression are for the most part unconscious or accidental. It is in the advertising industry, more than in the domain of decaying aesthetic production, that one can find the best examples. (16)

A strikingly early mention of the affinity between marketing and pastiche. Much later, J. Wagner would remark in class that by the late 1980s Hollywood literally "couldn't afford NOT" to incorporate bits and pieces of damn near everything. So there is something prophetic here, but also a motivated inability to dig deeper and ask whether the appearance of these techniques first in the area of marketing is ACTUALLY accidental/unconscious, or whether the techniques are not in fact DEFINED by this marketing orientation. And from there it is but a small step to question the conceit to a total fluidity of relationships between détourned elements; if this were possible, advertising would not be limited to a few very particular tropes, nor would the industry need to expend nearly so much effort researching in order to determine which tropes might work.

the main impact of a détournement is directly related to the conscious or semiconscious recollection of the original contexts of the elements.

...

The idea of pure, absolute expression is dead... (17)

A characteristically Debordian irreverence for engaging with dynamic social processes on their own terms is very much on display here. He can see that absolute expression is dead, but not that "original contexts are every bit as dynamic and varied. The theory of détournement is every bit as dependent on being grounded at some archimedean point as is the romantic conception of expressive communication through artworks. Far from rejecting pure/absolute expression, the authors seem intent on using the pure/absolute/monolithic element in stultified marketing-oriented culture as a springboard to communicate tractability. And yet as monolithic as mass culture seems to get, this has remained impossible.

Détournement is less effective the more it approaches a rational reply. ... The more the rational character of the reply is apparent, the more indistinguishable it becomes from the ordinary spirit of repartee... (17)

Very true as far as it goes, but this should also be a clue that this is, as the above points would have it, not very far at all. If the "rational" and the semantic spoil the fun, this is because their own conceits to objectivity are immediately exploded when deployed in this way. The various irr-/pseudo-rational alternatives are not more effective, they merely conceal the process more completely, protecting their conceits.

It is a real means of proletarian artistic education, the first step toward a literary communism. (18)

This seems about right, actually. A "first step" in the sense of being inherently elementary, juvenile, unripe. Yet still the authors are ambiguous on the question of agency: is the prole to practice détournement as a vehicle of social and cultural agency, or merely to passively consume the expertly crafted détournements of Debord and Wolman according to the "laws" set down in these pages?

...Griffith's Birth of a Nation is one of the most important films in the history of cinema because of its wealth of innovations. On the other hand, it is a racist film and therefore absolutely does not merit being shown in its present form. But its total prohibition could be seen as regrettable from the point of view of the secondary, but potentially worthier, domain of the cinema. It would be better to détourn it as a whole, without necessarily even altering the montage, by adding a soundtrack that made a powerful denunciation of the horrors of imperialist war and of the activiites of the Ku Klux Klan... (19)

A smart and totally reasonable proposal which has become, alas, completely untenable on account of the trigger warning crowd, and also by way of what R. Gombin calls "total contestation." Debord having had a hand in establishing the latter, and also in declaring the death of film years before this article appeared, one wonders if this passage is not an instance of Wolman getting a word in edgewise. In any case, the Trigger Warning phenomenon is an apt devil's advocate avenue for contemporary skeptics of the cult of détournement, since it renders the proposal here totally untenable, intentions be damned.

In itself, the theory of détournement scarcely interests us. But we find it linked to almost all the constructive aspects of the presituationist period of transition. Thus its enrichment, through practice, seems necessary. (21)

The reluctant virtuoso defers. Détournement is simply an idea whose time has come. Artistic innovation, expression, and aesthetics are no longer possible, hence a bounded inventory of cultural artefacts with stable meanings from which may be selected and juxtaposed any and all of them according not to the personal whim of the artist but to the demands of the political situation.

[from a notebook, probably 2018]

Karen Kurczynski—Jorn: Critique Is Secondary, Creation Is Primary

Kurczynski, The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn

...the Lettrists stated in 1953, "Oblivion (l'oubli) is our dominant passion." The original term "oubli" signifies at once forgetting, intoxication, and anonymity. (165)

p. 183—excerpt from Jorn

What one expresses through destruction is critique. Critique is a secondary reaction to something primary which already exists. What one expresses through artistic creation is joy of life. Art is primary action in relation to the unknown. The French have brought critique into the revolutionary plan, but if critique also becomes the purpose of creative art, and the creative artist thus a "specialized worker," whose work should only serve the permanent revolution's permanent consumption, then these Situationists have lost any sympathetic contact with the artists who seek to create a joy of life for its own sake, and drive them precisely into the arms of the power elite, which always controls the destructive instruments that can crush the people down, and which always make sure to have a moral excuse to make it all good and thorough.

[from "a 1964 lecture, after the artists and the SI had split"]
[source="unpublished manuscript" in Jorn Museum archive, KK's translation]

KK continues:

Jorn perceived Debord's SI as going too far, so that its claims to destroy art effectively relinquished art entirely to those in power. This self-marginalization would allow art institutions to take control of the group's historicization by default and perpetuate the very apolitical conception of art that the Situationists wanted to overturn.

A Just Say It moment which unfortunately runs aground on a couple of key points. Jorn merely talks past Debord when he threatens a loss of "sympathetic contact" with artists "who seek to create a joy of life for its own sake;" this is certainly true, but Debord had already put forth a powerful theory justifying this total break with art and centering on the ways in which it is not nearly so easy to give the artists the generous benefit of the doubt that Jorn seems inclined to grant them herein. The notion that they will thereby be driven into the waiting arms of power is also rather farfetched and seems to deny these artists agency in their own political affairs. And of course the concept of expression is problematic for all of the usual reasons. Seems to me that a stronger strategy here would be to eschew any consequentializing and attack Debord where he lives, i.e. take his theory apart. What I think we find thereby is that the Marxist obscurantism has led old Guy to a blanket, total, monolithic, teleological interpretation of the situation, especially vis-a-vis the anticipated thrust from fragmentary to unitary life, which reduces the complexity of the situation beyond the point where such reduction is tenable. There seems little difference between the two when it comes to the more immediate issues: releasing human potential from institutional mediation, and thereby freeing this potential to manifest. Beyond that, it's hard to shake the impression that Debord simply had it out for art whereas Jorn had more invested in it; in absence of this there doesn't seem to be any reason that Jorn's "primary action" and "joy of life" could not be reconciled with Debord's unitary, unalienated existence.

[from a notebook, 2018]

Karen Kurczynski—Jorn on Functionalism as Totalitarian

Kurczynski, The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn

p. 34—on "collective creativity" and the "open work"

Given the context of Jorn's extra-painterly concerns in the early 1940s, the idea of openness implicit in the indeterminate compositional process also takes on social and political dimensions. Openness to the new would become one of Jorn's central artistic themes. He argues in Held og Hasard that curiosity about the new and unknown is the beginning of all aesthetic activity.

Is this orientation indicative of a moral purpose per se? Only by way of analogy/metaphor/mimesis/poiesis/etc. Where it takes hold at all, it is necessarily only at a distance from so-called Everyday Life, or at least this is so in this case because the result is an artwork. As an artist by vocation and calling, Jorn can model "openness" in the way he goes about his work, but he usually won't succeed in communicating per se to this effect, nor does the fact of his modeling seem likely to get over to much of anyone outside of the social world immediately surrounding art and artists. This is of course all well and good until KK would attach greater pretensions.

Jorn did not intervene to save them; in fact, he writes that the quick and inexpensive painting techniques and temporary lifespan of the murals were important aspects of their meaning. More broadly, the emphasis on the social experience over the finished work exemplified the way the collective practices of Cobra anticipate contemporary Relational aesthetics. Jorn believed that the role of artists was to inspire by example, through their embrace of a creative life, rather than either to create finished works which would only end up decorating the homes of the wealthy, like a painter, or to redesign the everyday lives of the working class, like a modern architect. ... The Bregnerød murals attempted to redefine "painting" from a noun to a verb, considering painting a process of redefining a space, transforming it into something at once more social and more artistic, in a new holistic statement that was simultaneously personal and collective. (83)

All of this begs all of the same questions as do so many later bubblings-up of "Relational aesthetics," itself a rather oxymoronic/contradictory turn of phrase, and most clearly so by the logic of its most vociferous supporters. If "social experience" is paramount, why pursue it through an activity which indeed results in, if not necessarily a "finished" work, certainly some kind of work? Does such a choice of vehicle not indicate that there is something about the process of creation, whether or not this process has clear starting and ending points, which facilitates the specific type of social experience desired? And if so, how could the fate of the work be quite as trivial a matter as such theorists would insist? It seems not merely illogical but actually fully disingenuous to have designated a destination while subsequently insisting that the journey is the priority. Of course who knows what scenarios could arise spontaneously; but as far as both internal logical consistency and empirical resonance, Debord's theory of the supersession of art and its absorption into Life actually seems to me to have quite a bit more going for it. As does, IMHO of course, Modernism writ large, which is perfectly transparent in its internal logic, aims, social role, etc., perhaps without much empirical resonance in the Everyday realm (which is of course intentional).

Needless to say that "inspir[ing] by example" as against "decorating the homes of the wealthy" is rather over-reductive and quite the false dichotomy.

Despite his interest in architectural murals inspired by Léger and Le Corbusier, Jorn rejected the emphasis of those artists on designing a complete socialist environment, which he felt only led to the rationalist plans of Functionalism. He critiqued the notion of design creating a new modernist lifestyle for its technocratic and authoritarian tendency. Jorn argues that, "we need an art that is living, a part of itself," adding that the most useful goal for artists is to attack the artistic establishment that prevents the working classes from understanding their own creative potential. (83)

The terms "technocractic" and "authoritarian" serve to highlight the concealed power differential between the designer and the end user. This much, I think, is worth granting and ruminating on (and possibly even connecting to, say, the current design-driven power dynamic in the Music Production/Distribution sector, where those thought to possess privileged knowledge of packaging methods exert strong gravitational pull on the scarce revenue streams while content (let's understand this usage of that word as a double-usage, as in the classical duality Form-Content AND the internet-oriented sense of a Content Producer) generators are, as they always have been but not always for the same reasons, the last to get paid). All of that having been duly noted, granted, ruminated upon, etc., the concealment of such power dynamics is only sometimes, or only partially, attributable to power's own interests/objectives; in the case of Functionalist design, I would say they are concealed in part because they are unavoidable. It is indeed perfectly accessible to the rhetorical "working classes" to paint murals on the walls of their apartments; it is rather less accessible but not insurmountably so for them to produce and distribute their own sound recordings; but it is scarcely possible for them to design and build the apartment building, the audio editing software, or the Internet themselves; and much more to the point, neither is it necessary for them to do so, unless they experience a Foucauldian level of anxiety over the fact that the specialists in design and construction of each of these items hold, it is true, some modicum of power over them. And so, again having granted the mere fact that such dynamics do in fact exist, it is a long way from there to technocracy and authoritarianism, these sorts of terms representing (or they did before people began throwing them around carelessly) a sort of total-ness of top-down power, complete with mechanisms of accountability which flow in only one direction. Obviously I need to brush up on architectural functionalism, because it seems from a distance that it could not possibly have risen to this level.

...Jorn produced so many more murals in private settings throughout his life; the Kindergarten and Bregnerød house were the exceptions. Unlike the 1930s murals of Le Corbusier, his were meant to inspire in the broadest possible sense, rather than to instruct or to enforce social ideals upon a population. For this reason, the gestural nature of both sets of murals was essential to their message of free expression. In rendering personal expression at a public scale, they broke down the strict opposition of public and private space, countering the ideals of public order inherent in the architecture with a seemingly chaotic organicism. The unprecendented combination of automatic drawing, popular motifs, and dynamic monumental imagery at Bregnerød created an aesthetic tension that suggests the mutual interdependence of collective space and personal expression, the situation Nancy describes as "being singular plural." (84)

So, the Direct Path of "instruct[ion]" is eschewed in favor of "inspir[ation]," ostensibly similar to Eu. Rousseau's opposition of intellectual understanding and emotional realization, of just telling a student the answer versus optimizing conditions for them to arrive at the answer themselves. There is indeed much to be said for this idea, but there's no disputing that it progressively loses its appeal as the scale of interaction is increased, i.e. as the range and quantity of distinct outcomes vis-a-vis individual social agents eventually increase enough to become intractable. Hence if a word as strong as "enforce" is occasionally (or, uh, perhaps all too frequently) appealed to, this reflects the necessity of both reductionism and brute force (hopefully merely of the rhetorical variety) in any mass-/macro-scale communication; these are the techniques which yield tractable outcomes. The theory of "free expression" that is presented here forfeits this tractability in exchange for liberation, but not for progress; or not UNLESS one believes in an exceedingly optimistic human nature which simply needs to be unleashed without being told where to go or what to do. More likely it will go everywhere all at once. Is this a bad thing? Perhaps not, but progress will not be achieved via chaos, which theorists of the latter tell us illustrates a certain Sensitivity to Initial Conditions, which is to say the rich get richer.

Perhaps those of us living now can be thankful that Jorn and others thought to pose an alternative to the comparatively naive First Wave progressivism of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Yet where we go from here is as unclear as ever: the enforcement-inspiration opposition presented here really only marks out the poles of a spectrum, both of which have well-known flaws and limitations. Having learned this much, we may deploy one or the other strategy and hope to learn more about the strategic deployment of each. It is nonetheless hard to imagine resolving the central problem: you can't tell people what to do, and you can't expect them to figure it out for themselves.

Questions of scale arise more specifically as the passage continues. These muralists "broke down the strict opposition of public and private space" by "rendering personal expression at public scale." Seriously?! Just because this act, for instance, highlights the public/private distinction, displays a certain irreverence for it, invites consideration of its nature and implications, in no way necessarily encompasses as well the fait accompli that is related here. In fact the modifier "public" is a rather strange one to apply to the concept "scale," since both physical and intangible objects of all scales comprise the public sphere. As such, a "personal expression" made "public" can have all manner of implications rather independent of its physical scale. Concealed by this rhetorical maneuver is the potential that such ostensibly well-intentioned public displays of personal work reach various absolute statuses at various absolute increments of physical size (and perhaps also, but not necessarily, "scale"). Hence, the general principle enumerated here is quite suspect, and the specific case of "murals" is not exactly an ideal exemplar. The theory runs aground via the same oversight as in the previous case of "enforcement" versus "inspiration:" the sender of communication (in this case the artist) does not exert perfect control (nor anything approaching it) over its reception by any particular individual, or not unless (to recapitulate the previous issue) a degree of simplification and/or reduction is embraced which artists are generally loathe to even consider (and certainly Jorn's larger oeuvre as related throughout this book would give the impression that this sort of truly populist compromise was not in his vocabulary).

[from a notebook, 2018]