 |
STUPID UNDERGROUNDS - MANN spectacle has never been more dominant, when the most exorbitant utopian and dystopian claims have been made about the screen, when the commodity has long since assumed the dimensions of the entire society, to such a degree that one no longer seems to be saying anything when one resurrects this critique. Hence also its utter irrelevance: the SI's critique of the spectacle reveals its utter poverty and offers what even now proposes to be a new wave of critical energy to the spectacle itself. Just as nothing came of the critique of the spectacle but a spectacle of critique (the marxian chiasmus was, after all, the SI's favorite rhetorical form), so also nothing will come of the current neo-revolutionary era but another set of imaginary gratifications. And in fact not much more is proposed. As for the renewed interest in the Situationist International itself: now tenured former pro-situs can engage in the pettiest and, in terms of their bio-bibs, most profitable and narcissistically stimulating squabbles with pop critics who would gladly reduce Debord and Vaneigem to a footnote in the history of a few rock bands, the most important of which was a front for a clothing store. If not articles of clothing, then critical articles. This, in a way, is the fate of every criticism: to be replayed and replayed until its only force is the force of stupidity in the face of criticism itself. And all of this was already there in seed form in the neo-stalinist antics of the SI itself, with its central committees, its purges, its campaigns of ideological reeducation, its failed imitations of political diplomacy with other groupscules. In its own way, the SI paved the way for its own spectacle through its stupid devotion to purifying its position, to defending its ideological identity through factionalism, alliances, corrections, and expulsions. The "position" constituted the SI as a spectacle of criticism. And now its true destiny is bearing fruit in countless formal analyses, colloquia, and career opportunities. One should have predicted that the derive would end up leading us only through a few footnotes; nothing is left of the withering negation that gave the SI all its energy. [38] How much can be made of a brightly colored scar? Only yesterday the tattoo was presented--and who was there who would have bothered to argue against it?--as a radical form It is |
