In response to the last post, a correspondent to the sinister science asks, “do you write the text bubbles or just use what you find?” Excellent question. Answer: I use what I find, I manipulate what I find (both physically and digitally), I write the text bubbles, I rip them off from other non-bubble sources, & etc. I do all of these and more (possibly, impossibly…).
Yesterday, I posted a scan of a physical collage made up of glue and cut-up paper from magazines:
fig. 2. ‘I want my daddy’ (2023) by antyphayes.
My source for ‘I want my daddy’ was a copy of the national geographic and two different comics. The photo of the two divers are from a National Geographic (thank you Jacques Costeau and friend). Both of the stuck on heads are from one comic (Low), and the word balloons from another (Ares: God of War). I have not altered the word balloons, apart from cutting them out of their original context and pasting them in. Both of the balloons are ‘found’, and even though both balloons are from the same comic, each one is from a different page. You can see in the scan the rough cut I made of the top balloon.
The collage at the very top of this post, ‘Fiddlesticks!’, is also taken from a magazine.
Here is the original:
fig. 3. Original image.
‘Fiddlesticks!’, unlike ‘I want my daddy’, is a digital cut-up. No pages were harmed in its construction, no scissors blunted. Unlike the multiple sources in ‘I want my daddy’, in ‘Fiddlesticks!’, I’ve used only the original source as raw material. After scanning the original I’ve altered the image using Gimp. One could have achieved something similar to the this by physically cutting-up the original image, though it would have looked a lot rougher than my digital version–like in ‘I want my daddy’ (those rough cut balloons…). However, I only have one copy of this Dan Dare comic, and like it too much to be hacking it up for a single collage, so I scanned the image instead.
As ‘Fiddlesticks!’ implicitly demonstrates, there is no reason why any other word or words can be inserted into the word balloon, whether from the original source words and letters, or another source altogether. In the following collage that uses the same image as ‘Fiddlesticks!’, I’ve substituted a phrase that I first typed up on a portable typewriter (a Hermes baby), before scanning it. Again, I could have cut up the typed phrase itself and pasted it onto the original image. But as I’ve mentioned, I’m keen to preserve the original:
fig. 4. ‘modern art’ (2023) by antyphayes.
The words in the collage ‘modern art’ are my translation of a phrase from the Situationist International. The original text reads ‘les retombées imaginaires d’une explosion qui n’a jamais eu lieu’. Ken Knabb translated this as ‘imaginary repercussions from an explosion that never took place’.
Here are two earlier digital collages I made:
fig. 5. ‘from the depth of a shipwreck’ (2020), and ‘no poetry for the enemies of poetry’ (2021) by antyphayes.
I love Frank Hampson’s Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future comic. An endless source of inspiration. Here is another digitial collgae, made up of a found image from Dan Dare, and some added text, also typed:
fig. 6. ‘all cops are bastards’ (2023) by antyphayes.
Finally, here another new digital collage, fresh of the same session that produced ‘Fiddlesticks’, and ‘all cops are bastards’, and also made from Dan Dare, though this time using only the original source material for its electronic modifications:
fig. 1. Advances in alienation. The first color photograph of the whole Earth (western Hemisphere), shot from the ATS-3 satellite on 10 November 1967.
It is sixty years since Internationale Situationniste number 7 was published, dated April 1962. Partly in commemoration I plan on posting new translations of several articles from the seventh issue over the next month.
Our world is arguably less distant from the situationists, sixty years past, then theirs was from 1902. Certainly not in terms of clock time, but rather in lived time. No equal of the revolutionary insurgency and capitalist disasters of 1914 to 1945 have marked the decades since 1962. But more pointedly, the fitfully globalising capitalism of 1962 has come to fruition in the sixty years since. The commodity-spectacle has not only triumphed across the planet—remarkably expressed in the first colour photograph of the world-globe from space, taken the same year Debord published The Society of the Spectacle—it has ramified down the years, taken on new, more intensively reified forms as it has extended its reach throughout the social-natural metabolism.
The absence of revolutionary contestation in the 60 years since 1962, at a level equal to that of Russia in 1917, Germany in 1918-19, China in 1926 and Spain in 1936-37, can be attributed solely to the success of the global commodity-spectacle. The unification of the capitalist world over the past six decades has been singularly aimed at preventing a repeat of the revolutionary insurrections capitalism faced between 1914 and 1945. A more thoroughly integrated, quiescent proletariat has been perhaps the single greatest project of capital—a project, moreover, that has been achieved without the dangers of the old social-democratic politics that offered a working-class community of sorts in which the dream of a post-capitalist world was kept alive, albeit in a largely religious, and so ineffectual form. The contemporary spectacle, in which the communal moment of the old social-democratic politics has been thoroughly replaced by the fractured and atomizing pseudo-communities of mass consumer culture, is by far more successful at integrating and undermining any pesky proletarian aspirations for a world beyond capitalism. Alongside the full spectrum dominance of commodified dreams, whether of the cinematic, televisual, or computerised variety, even so-called radical theory and politics is churned out to the hum of machines and mass produced profit. Unsurprisingly much of it reiterates the impossibility of a revolutionary project.
The situationist project, 1957-1972, was an attempt to make sense of the legacy of the first half of the twentieth century, in both artistic and political terms, to the end of the immediate revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. On the basis of a thoroughgoing critique of the nostalgia that dominated the far-left and artistic avant-gardes of the 1950s and 60s, the situationists outlined a revolutionary project that targeted the weakness of not only their artistic and political contemporaries, but more pointedly the nature of the vast commodity-spectacle that had come into being in the wake of the Second World War. Unlike many of their erstwhile disciples and followers today, the situationists did not simply propose a theory of the present; even more they argued that the desire for a different future was already present amidst the misery of capitalist alienation, albeit in an often disguised, marginalised or unconscious fashion. Thus, their belief in no compromise with the forces of spectacular integration. One can only throw off the domination of the past if one’s eyes remain firmly fixed upon the future, and so necessarily against all the alienations of the present.
fig. 2. Illustration from Internationale Situationniste no. 7. The image is taken from a contemporary US ad for family-sized nuclear shelters. It is a deeply ideological rendering of a mid-20th century US family. No doubt if such a campaign was launched today, canny capitalists would be more attuned to using a “diverse” array of models to flog their grim wares.The aim would nonetheless remain the same. As the situationists mordantly noted at the time, “If this system were to go to the point of bluntly proclaiming that it imposes such an empty and hopeless existence that the best solution for everyone would be to go hang themselves, it would still succeed in managing a healthy and profitable business by producing standardized ropes”.
*
The seventh issue of International Situationniste was a pivotal one in the life of the situationist group. It was the first issue to be published after the so-called ‘break with the artists’ in the first quarter of 1962, and the first issue to take up the project outlined by Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem, Attila Kotányi, and Alexander Trocchi in the enigmatic Hamburg Theses of September 1961.
In the articles of Internationale Situationniste no. 7 (hereafter IS no. 7), the group was chiefly concerned with outlining a distinctly situationist revolutionary project. Following on from their turn to critically appropriating the council communist perspective Debord found amongst comrades in the Socialisme ou Barbarie group, and announced in IS no. 6 (August 1961), issue seven finds the group more forcefully transforming itself from a group on the margins of artistic experimentation to one in which a ‘new type’ of revolutionary practice is being proposed. For instance, here we find not only the concept of ‘survival’ through which the SI would criticise the cult of work that then dominated what passed for a revolutionary left, but also the distinctly situationist notion that revolutionaries have more to learn from the glorious failures of the past, like the Paris Commune of 1871 and the German Revolution of 1918-19, than erstwhile “successes” like the so-called ‘really existing socialism’ of the then contemporaneous Soviet Union.
Today, IS no. 7 is perhaps best remembered for four articles: the first part of Raoul Vaneigem’s ‘Banalités de base’ (Basic Banalities, part 1), the lead articles, ‘Géopolitique de l’hibernation’ (Geopolitics of Hibernation), and ‘Les mauvais jours finiront’ (The Bad Days Will End), as well as ‘La cinquième conférence de l’I.S. à Göteborg’ (The Fifth SI Conference in Göteborg [excerpts]) in which details of the arguments that laid the groundwork for 1962 split were finally revealed. As linked, all of these articles exist in good English translations made by Ken Knabb. However, this selection, arguably the most important of the articles in IS no. 7, constitutes only about half of the written content of the number.
Nonetheless, the other articles from IS no. 7 exist in English translation, available here (The Role of the SI, Priority Communication, Situationist News, and the complete The Fifth SI Conference in Göteborg) and here (Sunset Boulevard). Links to all of the available translations of IS no. 7 are usefully available in one place, here. Unfortunately, these other translations, made by Reuben Keehan and Not Bored, are not always of the same high quality as Knabb’s. Indeed, many are desperately in need of an overhaul. At best, Keehan and Not Bored have made available many situationist articles that had previously only been available in the original French. At worst, they are traps to the unwary reader who either cannot or will not compare them to the original French.[1]
However, I cannot spare myself from all the critical barbs I’ve aimed at others. Over the last decade I have published the occasional translation of situationist and para-situationist texts on this blog, and elsewhere. Whereas I stand by my more recent efforts—for instance, my translations of Guy Debord’s Surrealism (2021) and Mustapha Khayati’s Marxisms(2016)—I cannot recommend the more distant ones—for instance, from my very first published translation of a situationist text, On the Exclusion of Attila Kotányi (2012), up to and including the equally awkward and flawed Socialism or Planète (2013). As such I feel that I bear some responsibility for any confusion or misinterpretation that has flowed from my less than adequate translations, alongside those of Keehan’s and Not Bored’s. To that end, and in the hope that I can continue to aid in the communication of situationist ideas, I offer more recent efforts in an attempt at exculpation. Indeed, one may say, like Hegel and Marx, that error is the surest road to the truth. Accordingly, none of my translations should be considered done with or finished, but rather works in progress—as, indeed, are all things,including the original situationist texts.
Over the coming weeks I will offer my translations of the following articles from IS no.7: ‘Du rôle de l’I.S.’ (The role of the SI), ‘Communication prioritaire’ (Priority Communication) and Attila Kotanyi’s ‘L’Étage suivant’ (The Next Stage). Though perhaps not as important as some of the other articles in the issue, all three of these are important for understanding the turn carried out by the Situationist International over 1961 and 1962, and further, shed light upon the influence that the mysterious Hamburg Theses exerted on the group. To that end I will also offer up my translation of Guy Debord’s 1989 text on the latter, ‘Les theses de Hambourg en septembre 1961’ (The Hamburg Theses of September 1961). Indeed, the two extent translations of this text of Debord’s (available here and here) both share an identical flaw—a mistranslation of a central phrase that inverts the phrase’s meaning. That these continue to be the only widely available translations of this important text is testament to the perilous state of much of what passes for scholarship, exegesis, and translation of the works of the Situationist International.
What we really need is not only well-made translations of all the article in IS no. 7, but also of the entire run of the Internationale Situationniste journal. Considering that Knabb’s large selection, collected in his Situationist International Anthology, is now more than 40 years old (originally published 1981, and substantially revised 2006), it is way past time that a complete collection was published in English. If anyone reading this is interested in such a project do not hesitate to contact me: antyphayes [at] gmail [dot] com
fig. 3. The metallicized cover of Internationale Situationniste no. 7.
Anthony Hayes April, 2022
FOOTNOTES
[1] An example of the latter can be found in James Trier’s recent book, Guy Debord, the Situationist International, and the Revolutionary Spirit (2019). However, Trier’s errors cannot be solely put down to the inadequate translations that he relied upon. To present just one example: on the third page of the introductory chapter he attributes an article by Guy Debord, All the King’s Men (title originally in English), to Michèle Bernstein—a mistake that he compounds by continuing to refer to her as the author throughout his book. Perhaps being distracted by Humpty Dumpty’s great fall, Trier has confused, or inadvertently associated Debord’s article with Bernstein’s similarly titled novel, Tous les chevaux du roi (All the King’s Horses). But such a mistake does not bode well for an author who claims to offer new information on the situationist group. At best, Trier’s work is a relatively straightforward and unimaginative description of the works of the situationists. However, the authors efforts are hamstrung by his inability to engage with their works in the original French, and so judge the worth or usefulness of the extant translations.
The catastrophe that we are approaching is unavoidable. It is no longer a question of preserving civilisation intact against the forces of barbarism. Civilisation is barbarism—this civilisation, our shared present. Now, it is the question of which catastrophe we face: one completely out of control, with all the terrible anonymity that capital conjures in chasing itself across the global climate; or one we consciously face together, joined in a human community that we create amidst the disaster to save ourselves and the planet. Guy Debord once wrote that “victory will go to those who are capable of creating disorder without loving it”.[2] Today, the disorder of capital creates us, and we must find victory amid this disorder and through it, whether we love it or not.
*
The world overturned would be charming In the anti-man’s eyes[1]
Last year, we were presented with what at first sight seems to be a paradox. Beside the heightened anxiety and fear accompanying the outbreak there was also a palpable sense of excitement. In our part of the world the pandemic has been far from the devastating blow that has maimed and killed millions. Rapidly, the initial panic of the unknown that lay in our immediate future gave way to blissfully quiet streets. To be sure, this was far from a catastrophe. But meanwhile, it was impossible to forget that this brief respite from the intensities of capitalist life had, as its condition of possibility, precisely the disastrous events unfolding across the globe.
Finding pleasure in this brief slowdown of global capitalism, I was reminded of something I had stumbled across in Ghérasim Luca’s writing. While finishing his work, The Objectively Offered Object, I was struck by two passages. The first, followed upon Luca’s declaration of his belief that he had foretold a devastating earthquake in Bucharest in 1941—an earthquake through which he lived:
During, or else immediately after, the earthquake, either the sole or the first human erotic desire is to masturbate. […] This explanation is accompanied by the enormous excitation provoked in the unconscious by infantile rocking motions. When describing their experiences during the earthquake, almost everyone spoke about the rocking of objects—and above all of light fixtures—with a masturbatory hand gesture. The desire to masturbate was being satisfied by this symptomatic action in each account. [3]
I find Luca simultaneously a puzzling and compelling figure. On the one hand, he and his comrades in the 1940s held to a revolutionary position that was intransigent, against both the depredations of Stalinism and those tendencies that threatened to drag the Surrealist movement back into the art ghetto from which it had emerged and fought against. On the other hand, Luca appeared to be immersed in what can only be described as the most intensely idealistic aspects of surrealism, namely the growing tendency to relate the surrealist theory of objective chance to the mysticism of astrology and magic. Certainly, Luca attempted a materialist reckoning with this, but so far, I remain unconvinced.
In the quote above, Luca’s symptomatic reading of the hand movements of survivors of the earthquake is suggestive but far from persuasive. To my mind, a more fruitful line of enquiry would be found in attempting to unveil the general erotic and sensual sublimations and expressions associated with disaster, as much as the absence of such. For instance, in the wake of situations that induce panic and rampant anxiety I have felt this urgent need to fuck or masturbate. More often it has been simply the desire to hug someone else, to reach out and feel the warmth of life and the living. Conversely, it has also manifested as the traumatic desire to avoid others. If not exactly erotic, perhaps all expression of Eros, in Freud’s and Herbert Marcuses’s sense of the word.
However, it was another passage immediately following upon the one above that struck deepest:
Two years earlier [in 1939], during a conversation with my friends in Paris, I had claimed that I would find great satisfaction in a major catastrophe—the destruction of the Earth by a comet, for example, as foretold by astronomers. In a time of violent revolutionary pessimism, like that during which this conversation took place, several weeks after France’s entry into the war, it seemed justifiable to exchange one desperate but vital solution for another that was so natural yet so alien to us. At the level of desire, such a catastrophe being predicted in advance would have offered me, hastily and for a limited time, the satisfactions a revolutionary transformation of the world would have given me over a whole lifetime.[4]
I believe that this desire for the world to be thrown off of course rather than continue along the same dreadful trajectory—with or without a positive sense of revolutionary transformation—can be closely correlated with the experience of alienation and estrangement under capitalism. Often, as an imaginary escape and recompense for my existence as a plaything of capital, I have revelled in the most brutal and brutalising visions of destruction. A particularly memorable one was visited upon me as a sales assistant working in a bookstore. It was toward the end of a particularly boring day’s labour, while cast adrift on a sale table in the main concourse of the mall, without the company of my fellow proletarians. Stupefied by the never-ending stream of masses jamming the shopping corridors and their bland enticements, I pictured myself manning a 50-calibre machine gun, and methodically shooting every person and thing that crawled and slithered. Inevitably I laughed manically all the way.
As André Breton once mordantly noted of such fancies,
Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in the crowd, with his belly at barrel level.[5]
To be sure, Breton was not suggesting that such a dream was a reasonable solution to the unreasonable demands of life under capitalism, but rather that such brutal fantasies are at least as sane as the insane social relations that nourish them—and perhaps, in an objective sense, saner than meekly accepting the nigh unbearable contradictions and humiliations of daily capitalist life.
Such fantasies are almost always related to the emptying out of daily existence at the hands of the oppressive and atomising effects of wage labour—a grim, fantasy recompense for the actual reality of having your lifetime stolen because of the unfortunate need for money in this world. In part, this must explain what Ghérasim Luca was attempting to describe above. The fantasy of catastrophe and destruction, if viewed with an eye to the depredations of capitalist subjectivity, is akin to the dream of revolution. That such fantasies are not dependent upon the practical replacement of capitalism by a better, more rational social order is beside the point. Rather, it is a question of the simple desire for thispresent state of being to end—suddenly and totally. The great refusal of this reality and its much-vaunted necessity. Surely, without the ability to imagine the end of the world—even its utter destruction—we cannot begin to imagine what we would put in its place.
Perhaps this is why I am unconvinced by a belief, proposed by Slavoj Žižek, Frederic Jameson and Mark Fisher (take your pick), that has recently become a platitude: that today it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. Visions of the end have been common coin in European culture long before the ascendency of the Christian tale of apocalypse—and in fact, the latter drew upon a longer tradition of apocalypse in Indo-European cultures. More proximally, the end of the world—or more precisely its destruction by various forces—has accompanied the rise to dominance of industrial capital. Indeed, some even conceived of this rise in terms of the clarion of universal destruction, spewing forth from the Satanic mills. What is more striking, to my mind, is not the opposition of hopeless disaster and utopia but rather their proximity: not just socialism or barbarism, but rather socialism and barbarism.
In truth, behind the guise of the cultivated critic who would sooner wield a phrase than a rifle, Žižek, Jameson, Fisher, and others, disguise their nostalgia for the actual dystopias of “really existing socialism” as a mourning for the passage of the utopian project. But such a project was never the property of the various socialist and communist Internationals that laid claim to it—at best they were the expressions of a desire that emerged from the everyday experience of proletarians themselves. At worst, they were the counter revolution incarnate.
For those like Ghérasim Luca, and other revolutionists caught between the Charybdis of fascism and the Scylla of Stalinism, the end of the world was palpably underway in the 1940s. In drawing attention to the similarity between the desire for catastrophe and revolution, Luca clearly posed the palpably destructive moment of revolutionary desire. This is not to fetishize destruction for the sake of it, but rather to be clear that not only is the destructive moment of revolution unavoidable, it is already happening under the guise of the much vaunted peace of the global market—replete with runaway climate change and wars that are in truth the never ending conditions of this “peace”.
To not merely preserve but rather revolutionize the idea of human community we must overturn this world. But before we can even do that, we must be clear: the present is already the destruction we fear. Nothing can wish it away; it is the truth we must not only better understand but more fully embrace.
Note on the détourned images, above: Words: after Ghérasim Luca; images: from Jack Kirby’s The Eternals.
FOOTNOTES
[1] From the poem, ‘Useless Stake’, in André Breton, René Char, and Paul Éluard, Ralentir Travaux, trans. Keith Waldrop, Cambridge, MA: Exact Change [1930] 1990, p. 50.
[2] Guy Debord, ‘Theses on Cultural Revolution [1958],’ in Situationist International Anthology, trans. Ken Knabb, 2006, p. 54.
[3]Ghérasim Luca, ‘The Objectively Offered Object [1945],’ in The Passive Vampire, trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Prague: Twisted Spoon Press, 2008, pp. 59, 60.
[5] André Breton, ‘Second Surrealist Manifesto [1930],’ in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1998, p. 125.
sf & critical theory join forces to destroy the present
the sinister science 