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Disinterest Compounded Daily
A Critique of Point-Blank
as a Revolutionary Organization
and a Few Proposals for
the Supersession of Situationism
Chris Shutes was a member of Point-Blank from its inception in 1971 up
until May 1973. Gina Rosenberg was peripherally involved with Point-Blank in 1973, also
until May. While it is only appropriate that the first section of this pamphlet, concerned
with the critique of Point-Blank, be told from Chris’s perspective, the experiences
of both of us, and a collaboration in writing, are reflected throughout. (G.R. & C.S.)
The time has come to crash this party, or more precisely, the fashion show of pro-situ
ideology staged by the poseurs of the organization Point-Blank. Yes, it is indeed the
fashion for Point-Blank and their imitators to peddle their wares (“theory”)
hereabouts, and even as far away as in France — in Berkeley it has become as
predictable as it is banal. Point-Blank’s activity, which, owing to its apparent
novelty, was once able to arouse a smattering of interest from curious onlookers, has now
revealed itself as pathetic, pure and simple. This advanced deterioration is hardly
surprising, however (and it would be surprising only to those who were taken in by its
mini-spectacle, of whom there are precious few) — the decline of Point-Blank is
directly related to its development.
The task before me is a critique of this outfit, Point-Blank, of which I was a member
from the spring of 1971 until May 13, 1973. It should be noted from the start that during
the time I was a member of Point-Blank, I was in no way conscious of what Point-Blank was
or of what was happening to me in it. I simply flowed with the tide, and if I was unable
to see beyond the surface of things, it was because I was caught in the ebb too. If
Point-Blank can be described as a thoroughly pro-situ organization, then I was thoroughly
pro-pro-situ. Unable to participate in any more than a marginal capacity in the practice
of the organization, I ended up agreeing with almost all of what was done by the other
members, believing that I would eventually find the key to the apparent coherence of the
two people (Jacobs, Winks) who always accounted for (and presumably still account for) the
vast majority of the material produced by Point-Blank. In the meantime, I stalled, hedged,
settled for occupying myself with banalities such as layout, hassling with printers, etc.
I simply repressed, or forgot, or avoided the feelings of uneasiness, the awareness of
separation, the recognition of alienation from the other members of the group and from the
group as a whole, all of which appeared again and again, especially around the times
projects were being composed. Rather than having the courage and the intelligence to
critically view the wall I kept encountering, I just kept banging my head against it.
I have no intention of concealing my impotence in relation to Point-Blank’s
practice, or of excusing it. What matters is to understand and supersede it, for the sake
of myself first of all, but also for the benefit of others who undertake the task of
situationist organization in the future.
When I resigned from Point-Blank in May, at the same time that Gina Rosenberg broke
with Point-Blank, because, as she put it in her letter to them, “I no longer care to
attempt to have relations with a group which at every turn has presented only obstacles in
the way of my participation in it,” it was certainly not because we had developed a
conscious critique of the organization, but because we could simply no longer ignore the
immense accumulation of falsehood that permeated every aspect of Point-Blank’s
activity. But we were getting there. We thought and talked about Point-Blank and about the
future. Coming across Ken Knabb’s translation of J.P. Voyer’s Reich: How To Use and a poster entitled We’re Tired of Playing With Ourselves
(Cronin, Smith, Hammer) in July, we were prompted to reread Knabb’s pamphlet Remarks on Contradiction and Its Failure. The first time I
had read Voyer, I had ignored it; Gina had not seen it before. The first time each of us
had read Knabb’s pamphlet, we had both curtly dismissed it as a product of misery.
And no wonder! At the time of those first readings, we were still involved with
Point-Blank, and having little inclination towards viewing ourselves critically, we
certainly had no use for them. But once we allowed ourselves to question everything
about Point-Blank, and had already started to do so, we recognized the importance of these
pieces. Despite some disagreements we have with these pieces, their essential perspectives
provided a focus for the formulations we had already arrived at during the summer. We
realized that my practical impotence in Point-Blank was a product of my character.
A total critique of Point-Blank follows from this basic realization.
* * *
“We hold that people can only dissolve their characters in contesting the
entire society . . .; whereas, on the other hand, the function of character
being accommodation to the existing state of things, its dissolution is a preliminary to
the global critique of society. We must dissolve this vicious circle.”
—Voyer
When a person decides to become a revolutionary, i.e. consciously aims at opposing the
spectacle in its totality, this implies, to begin with, opposing the accumulation of value
in himself, that is, his character. Whether he calls it “character” or not is
incidental (according to the motto: if there had never been a Wilhelm Reich, it would be
necessary to invent one), but he’d better oppose it all the same, or all his good
intentions will remain just that, at best. He lapses into the state of being merely
pro-situ when he fears starting his critique of everything from himself. As a result, he
becomes incapable of really criticizing anything, for no other reason than the fact that
his critiques don’t proceed from his passion to liberate his own daily life, from his
own subjectivity. His adhesion to the Situationist International’s theses become (or
remain) essentially intellectual; his modus operandi? simulation. The pro-situ
has not recognized his subjectivity in that of the S.I. or anyone else, because he
doesn’t have the guts to be subjective. Nonetheless, the apparently
avant-garde nature of his ideas appears to separate him from the milieu he emerged from
(almost without exception, from his fellow students); his novelty, in turn, often combined
with an abstract rejection of the Left (sacrifice and so on), he takes for his
subjectivity. And because he is thus subjective, character doesn’t concern him, no
sir! He appeals almost exclusively to those who are most like he was before his great
metaphysical break — his abstractions are as far from ad hominem as could be
imagined. He expects the subjectivity of others to emerge just like “his” did
— precisely because of how he defines his own illusory subjectivity. The pro-situ is
different than he was before he became a “situationist,” but only in the sense
that the most important determinant of the pro-situ’s character is precisely his
resistance to the practice of theory. Which is a big problem, seeing that the
pro-situ’s major preoccupation is his desire to practice theory! It follows that his
apparent novelty is itself the greatest barrier to his assaulting his character
(and even to the recognition of the existence of his character). The pro-situ, who appears
at first glance to be closest to the breakdown of character, is actually one of those
furthest away.
The process described above is not necessarily absolute — the struggle against
character can be partial, partially conscious. It may be that the seeds of subjectivity
are there, but the necessary lucidity concerning it is limited, or sporadic. What then?
Eventually one tendency must win out: coherence, or a relapse into the inauthentic. This
process itself may take place over an extended period, and may develop unevenly.
From this, it is clear that for the pro-situ, the critique of his character and the
critique of the pro-situ organization are inseparable. Both are preconditions to the
supersession of the pro-situ stasis (the supersession itself can of course only take place
in the organization of an ongoing revolutionary practice). But it is not enough to state
in these critiques what one’s character and what the pro-situ organization are;
it is crucial to understand how they got to be that way. To get to the root of this
matter, one must go back to the origins. By understanding the process which led to the
structuring of one’s character as a pro-situ, and to the structure and activity of
the pro-situ organization, it becomes easy to understand the consequences. Otherwise,
everything remains out of reach. Point-Blank always wanted to patch up the cracks without
getting down to the rotten foundation — if I had to single out our greatest
organizational weakness, I would say without hesitation that it lay in the fact that we
never understood how to “interrupt ourselves constantly in our own course, come back
to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh” (Marx).
Point-Blank’s major task remains to unplug their noses (an unlikely eventuality). My
job is easier: to analyze the stench.
* * *
Point-Blank (though that name was not adopted until July 1971) began at the University
of California at Santa Cruz in the winter and spring of 1971. David Jacobs and I arrived
at Santa Cruz in the fall of 1970 — confronted with the sordid spectacle of student
poverty in its most hideous form, and a motley melange of Stalinists and eclectic leftists
“opposing” it, we proceeded to compose an anarchist leaflet (“Black Flag
Bulletin #1”) which included a short, somewhat confused but generally intelligent
critique of the university, and a call for nonhierarchical revolution à la Murray
Bookchin. David met Chris Winks in a class early on, and the three of us soon became known
as “the anarchists” at Santa Cruz. We shared similar views of the university and
the student life surrounding it — though we found going to school more tolerable than
working. In combination with our political ideas, which did not hold any real conception
of how revolution was to come about, we quickly developed a contempt for just about
everything. We began assaults on whatever or whomever we could find to go after (whether
via a leaflet, graffiti, a fire extinguisher, or just plenty of insults), having a great
deal of fun all the while.
We had run across a copy of the Situationist International’s On the Poverty of Student Life, liked parts of it, integrated
parts of it into our anarchist ideology, ignored the rest. Our first encounter with anyone
who was prepared to defend On the Poverty in its entirety came about when Isaac
Cronin (later a member of the organization Contradiction) looked us up, having by chance
seen a copy of the “Black Flag Bulletin.” He criticized the Bookchinist
tendencies and anarchism in general, and the leftist “issues” we had accepted in
our leaflet (the War, ecology, racism), and talked with us about On the Poverty.
He gave us a copy of Debord’s Society of the
Spectacle, which David undertook to criticize from an anarchist-Marcusian
perspective. Which led where it would. By December, David had accepted a situationist
perspective (including its critique of anarchism) — Chris Winks and I soon did the
same. It is worth noting, however, that beyond some initial general questions and ideas we
had about situationist theory, we never really discussed it in any but a most occasional
and haphazard way.
These origins of Point-Blank had a profound influence on our subsequent development, an
influence which is ignored entirely by Point-Blank (see, for example, the article
“The Practice of Theory” in Point-Blank! #1). To begin with, we were
always anti-students. At Santa Cruz, and afterwards, we operated under the
principle that because we were powerless over the use of our lives, we were proletarians,
and therefore did not have to worry about the problems that would arise through our real
differences from other proletarians, in terms of background, language, and immediate view
of the world. We were isolated from the rest of the world at the university,
though not in the ridiculous leftist sense of somehow existing outside society. In failing
to consider our isolation, we in fact arrived at a position 180 degrees opposite that
leftist mystification: we viewed Santa Cruz as though it was exactly like the rest of the
world. In undertaking the work of the negative, the object of negation almost inevitably
ended up being the university and student life; and when we attempted to speak to workers
(or high school students, or even students at other universities), we treated their
positions in society as though they were essentially the same as ours was at the
university, that is, as it was at U.C. Santa Cruz. Hence, in confronting an
extremely sophisticated pacification program at UCSC, the emphasis of which is on a
personalized, humanized alienation, we lost sight of the obvious, admittedly archaic forms
of conditioning and repression that the vast majority of people in bourgeois society are
subjected to. It was as though capitalism had already reached the point where everyone was
afforded the chance to organize his own alienation — this tendency was regarded as an
almost universal fait accompli. The isolated quality of the hill outside the
student-resort-rest home town of Santa Cruz compounded another problem, itself the product
of our own backgrounds: a gross overestimation of the importance of the New Left. While
the Movement was in 1971 already in a rapid state of decomposition all over the country,
and was able to attract the attention of increasingly small numbers, the New Left found at
Santa Cruz a haven for holdovers of its illusions. The ultraliberal structure of UCSC
(itself largely in response to countrywide campus turmoil in the early sixties), and the
mythology surrounding it, catered to a student body who could act out the paltry
dreams of the Left and the counterculture. Every sort of communalized misery found its
institutionalized realization there: for the atavistic, a garden and Renaissance
“festivals”; for the enterprising, heavy into people’s survival, food
co-ops to organize for five units’ credit; for the “artistic,” a whole
college devoted to reified creativity; for the average student, lots of dope in the dorms,
or in his mountain hovel; for the diehard militant, university facilities at his disposal,
plus plenty of issues to protest and a whole city to “organize.” And so on.
Combined with the fact that the Left had recently been such an important part of our lives
(and with our zeal to make a clean break with it), it is hardly a wonder that, in the face
of this spectacular onslaught, the New Left became the focus of the majority of our
critical attention.
In light of this, it was only natural that student life and the Left were the targets
of our first practical attempt to make our new ideas public.(1)
The Citadel and Other Sordid Tales, printed and distributed on five Bay Area
campuses in the spring of 1971, was the product of our tenure at Santa Cruz as outlined
above. We soon recognized numerous weaknesses of this piece: verbosity, a definite
“in” joke quality of several graphics, and others. The major weakness of The
Citadel, however, was its essentially abstract perspective. This abstraction did not
come about because The Citadel “did not start from a specific
situation” (Point-Blank! #1, p. 92); on the contrary, it started from the
situation of student life at Santa Cruz, and abstracted that basically sound, and
in parts very lucid critique, onto universities everywhere. The very genesis of The
Citadel demonstrates this: it arose from the synthesis of two comics written about
specific classes at UCSC, with some revisions and additions.
Directly tied to the abstractness of The Citadel was a pronounced negativism.
This was largely a reflection of the fact that at UCSC a practical disruption was
virtually impossible. The decentralized nature of the place made anonymity impossible; and
even if the authorities didn’t get you straight off, there were always a couple of
loyal little assholes to squeal on you. Our own nihilist past compounded this objective
difficulty. The image of ourselves as different from everyone else at UCSC, which we had
cultivated during our first few months there, led to an enforced isolation from just about
everyone throughout the entire year, despite the fact that we also wanted to establish the
basis for a radical dialogue with others who shared at least some of our disgust with the
university. It may well have been the case that at Santa Cruz there was in fact no one
worth talking to; the point, however, is that we scarcely even tried. We viewed
each student only as part of a mass, abstractly condemning all individual students because
of our critique of student life in general. It came to a point where it was considered
incoherent, a subject for jokes and tease, to try to speak with anyone, other than to
insult them. Our “faculty of encounter,” except among ourselves, died of
loneliness. This cliquishness was never superseded, and remains right up to the present.
As regards The Citadel, our negativism was reflected in the fact that we failed
completely to place the positive aspect of our critique in the context of concrete
possibilities at the university. Instead, we could only oppose the “right”
situationist slogans about organization, ideology, and workers’ councils to the
slogans of the Movement.
* * *
“It is said, for example, that a man ten times regrets having spoken, for the
once he regrets his silence. And why? Because the fact of having spoken is an external
fact, which may involve one in annoyances, since it is an actuality. But the fact of
having kept silent! Yet this is the most dangerous thing of all. For by keeping silent one
is relegated solely to oneself, no actuality comes to a man’s aid by punishing him,
by bringing down upon him the consequences of his speech. No, in this respect, to be
silent is the easy way. . . . And yet, by not venturing, it is so dreadfully
easy to lose that which it would be difficult to lose even in the most venturesome
venture, and in any case never so easily, so completely as if it were nothing . . .
one’s self.”
—Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death
Our shortcomings in viewing the world were at once a product and producer of our lack
of rigor in considering ourselves as an organization. Up till the time The
Citadel was published, we hardly considered the matter of organization at all —
to the degree that we did so, it was always in opposition to the Movement (rejection of
sacrifice and hierarchy, etc.), but not for ourselves. We didn’t lay a clean
groundwork for ourselves; we simply “did” things without discussing how we went
about them, why we were doing them, or what we hoped to accomplish in a long-range
perspective. Our organizational relations were in fact simply the continuation of the
social relations we had had with each other since the beginning of the year. We were
afraid to be precise and critical about each other as comrades out of fear of losing each
other as friends, out of fear of breaking down the familiarity and informality that often
made our day-to-day relations so interesting. The question of who was a member of
“the organization” (when we finally, after being queried by Cronin on the
matter, decided that was what we were) was never broached openly — it was given that
it was the three of us. This was in spite of the fact that David had written most of The
Citadel, and that Chris Winks and David had collaborated together much more
effectively than I had been able to do with either or both of them (though I do take pride
in the fact that I contributed to The Citadel the majority of what others found
most exciting about it: the spontaneous and imaginative use of graphics). On many
occasions, especially when we were working on a project, I would become flustered, at a
loss for words. The question was not whether I had appropriated the theory, but rather the
use of theory as a weapon — sifting through the ideas I found so invigorating and
important (and there sure were lots of them!) and using them in analyzing real situations.
Compounding the problem was the fact that it seemed so easy for the others to produce; I
found myself constantly comparing my apparent inadequacy to the “ability” of the
others, rather than considering first of all myself in relation to the spectacle.
My desire to act radically became increasingly mediated by my image of what radicality
was, i.e. to be like David and Chris. The fear that arose out of this mess only engendered
further difficulties — I considered myself (how stupidly!) a tentative member of this
phantom organization, not yet good enough to criticize or initiate anything until I had
something to show for myself (and not clear enough about what we did and who we were to do
so in any case). Halfway positions in organization are like flying across the ocean with
half enough fuel.
The question of my character, or, as always formulated by Point- Blank, of unequal
participation in organizational activity, first came to a head over a “scandal”
we had prepared for distribution at Santa Cruz. Following its writing — by David and
Winks — I took it to Berkeley to look after printing, and to San Francisco, where I
showed it to Cronin and one of his comrades. They made obvious criticisms, to which I
stammered a few words in reply; I could no more defend it than I had been able to help
write it. Their criticisms were basically sound, however, which led me to question the
point of the whole thing in the first place. I called Santa Cruz, and told David I thought
we should jettison the project, or at least totally rework it. He said he could not
discuss it on the phone, so I returned to Santa Cruz the next day.
The discussion that ensued was characterized by two major things: first, my inability
to defend what I had done. I agreed that I had been unrigorous in performing my tasks, and
especially that I should have written down the criticisms from S.F. and returned
immediately to Santa Cruz to discuss them. The second characteristic of the discussion was
David’s defensiveness over the content of the project itself. He took on an air of
artificial formality, saying I had failed to carry out my “mandate” (a word
which had never been used by any of us with regard to that or any other of our
activities). In the course of the conversation, it came up that I had written almost none
of the piece, a fact that we all recognized; thereafter, the focus was not on the whole
affair, but only on my part in it. For half an hour I argued that my inability to perform
was directly related to how we were living, that we were becoming engulfed by a
stultifying, passionless routine (and had we considered the thing intelligently, it would
have become equally evident that the negativist perspective of the piece was largely a
direct product of our nihilist lifestyle). But the conversation was continually pushed
away from our collective activity, and especially from the subject of our daily lives.
Eventually I backed down, agreeing that what was at issue was solely my participation in
the organization. My retreat itself is partially attributable to the fact that my
character caused a block in my ability to argue my case. David proposed that we undertake
practice exercises — playing together with comics and so on. The rest was left the
same, although the project was abandoned.
What is important here is not the details of the incident, but the method used to
approach it and “solve” it, and the precedent this method set. I was caught in a
vicious circle — while we realized that I had not been able to defend our position,
it is equally true that what I was supposed to defend was indefensible. My own resistance
to participation was concretely reinforced by the resistances of David and Winks to
criticism of what they had done. To overcome my own block necessarily entailed a
collective, total re-evaluation of our collective activity; which, however, because it had
not been really collective, left the solution on the terrain of my own personal
difficulty. We approached the thing ass-backwards — formulated in this way, awareness
of “my problem” (itself being awareness only of a symptom) served to maintain my
stasis. I was placed more on the spot, in a more contrived situation, further convinced
that there was something wrong with me and me alone. In such a situation, every simple act
becomes an existential trauma, part of an ongoing battle; there is constant tension, and
consequently chronic incapacity. Furthermore: inasmuch as I personally had to shoulder the
product of the resistances of the others (to criticism), I developed a resistance to
working with them. Our exercises, which left our relations and perspectives
fundamentally intact, failed.
This contradiction between unequal participation in organizational activity and the way
we went about attacking this inequality — a contradiction internalized in my
character — remained permanently intact; but it was never again as
accessible as it was in the discussion of the aborted Santa Cruz “scandal.” The
sting of this contradiction, however, was ameliorated by the living situation that
developed following our departure from Santa Cruz. In July ’71, David, Chris Winks,
and Sara Chetin moved into a flat in Berkeley — I joined them in September. Francis
Rubinstein, with whom we had been in contact from the beginning, was to work with us on a
critique of high school, but was not to become a member until we felt capacities were more
equal. After this initial decision in June ’71, Francis’s membership was never
again openly discussed; Sara’s membership was never discussed in the first place.
Eventually some time in the following spring, they, along with our friend Alan Alpert (who
moved in with us in September ’72) became members, which meant in effect that they
would sit around the table at our infrequent discussions, write a few letters (but not the
important ones!), contribute money, help collect graphics, distribute material and so
forth — they had no more shown autonomous critical capability than any of our
correspondents. But they all had as much right to be members as I did, and one case of
lack of rigor led to another. For Point-Blank, social acceptance meant organizational
acceptance. And we lived with all our friends, excepting Francis, with whom we would have
resided had it been possible for him, and Greg Dunnington, who entered the picture later.(2)
In our social clique, all of the separations could be forgotten. In the womb of this
apartment or the next, we could drink, joke, exhibit the lightness that should have been
part of our organizational relations, but wasn’t. On the one hand, playfulness
without content, on the other hand, content (of sorts) without playfulness.
After we left Santa Cruz, the relations that existed within Point-Blank never changed
in their essential quality (which is to say, their lack of it), simply because those
relations were predicated on the unsuperseded incoherence of previous experience. What has
since transpired is merely the spectacular outgrowth of these consistently spectacular
relations. There is no reason to delineate the particulars of our later
intra-organizational activity, other than to point out that their excessive development
led to my resignation in May 1973. Where quality is absent, the quantitative flourishes.
But since the quantitative measures itself solely in terms of quantity, it reproduces
itself endlessly. I leave Point-Blank to contemplate the quagmire of inauthenticity it has
accumulated for itself — for everyone but themselves, interest is now elsewhere.
“To know things, one must not know the details. As it is finished, our
understandings are sound” (Lautréamont).
* * *
A lack of rigor and transparency in internal matters invites the same in relations with
other organizations. A reciprocal arrangement of this sort was inevitable in our relations
with Contradiction, who had plenty of problems of their own. The process leading up to
Contradiction’s break with us took place in an ideological environment, a whirl of
confusion in which no one could escape being dizzy. Each group was demanding of the other;
neither was demanding of itself. If we did not share all the illusions of Contradiction,
ours were often at least related, in many cases fundamentally. Our development was in fact
intricately connected to our relation to Contradiction — another fact conveniently
overlooked by Point-Blank. An analysis of these relations can shed a great deal of light
on the demise of each group.
The backgrounds and basic orientations of Point-Blank and Contradiction were similar:
like Contradiction, we represented “less the supersession than the most avant-garde self-expression
of the ‘movement’ and the ‘counter-culture’.” The fact that we
were introduced to situationist theory largely through the mediation of the organization
that became Contradiction is itself of no small importance. For several months, they took
on the stance of playing teacher to us. It was unavoidable that we would incorporate some
of their mystifications — notably their vague concept of “the worker
milieu” and (for a time anyway) their Manichean view of coherence/incoherence, which
at least for me had a strong impact, reinforcing my sense of inadequacy. As we recognized
the destructiveness of Contradiction’s initial demeanor towards us, our more
permanent attitude towards them emerged: we rejected not only the end results of their
organizational activity, but also denied the importance of what they were trying
to do. In the process, we dismissed a lot that we would have done very well to make use
of.
It is scarcely surprising that we were most defensive about Contradiction’s
attempts to concretely place situationist theory in the context of their daily lives. In
rejecting some of the excesses that their efforts in this realm reached — especially
a tendency toward fetishizing sexual encounters, which we criticized fairly early on
— we dismissed taking their basic intentions seriously at all. Any collective concern
with the daily life of the revolutionary became in our view “daily lifist.” It
was obvious that Contradiction’s failure to set their sights precisely in terms of
their organizational activity left them with an empty ideology of pleasure, passion, etc.,
that became farcical as it was abstractly applied in their daily lives — however, we
never even got as far as that ideology of pleasure. Our own rigid separation of
total/fragmentary (which itself arose partially from our fear of confronting this sort of
question that Contradiction was grappling with) led us to a position of separating
organizational activity and daily life completely. Our reasoning (though not openly
formulated) went something like this: life in capitalist society is boring, represses
pleasure and so forth — so real pleasure is not possible until there is revolution,
so talking about and collectively endeavoring to explore and expand our own desires, as
part of our project, would be incoherent, etc., etc. (This whole framework is the result
of an undialectical view of pleasure itself. It is not that making love, meeting
interesting people, (or whatever) contain no pleasure — the point is that the
internal logic of the pleasure afforded by them is broken off, interrupted, sooner or
later, — and usually sooner! — by the constraints of the everyday. Left
unextended, pleasure becomes a moment, negatively experienced, in the ongoing movement of
despair. The point is to avoid that moment of rupture; but in trying to do so, one moves
closer and closer to a revolutionary perspective. Each satisfied desire in turn creates
new ones — to take one’s unfulfilled desires seriously is inseparably to take
one’s pleasure seriously.) Our inability to understand the positions of the
organization Contradiction resulted from the fact that we did not take seriously the
contradictions we experienced within daily life. “The misery of daily life” did
not form the basis of our activity simply because our collective daily life (at least in
its essential aspects) was accepted as a given (and which, operating with the logic of an
external fate, mitigated against any of us having any lives apart from what we did as a
group). “The misery of daily life” was for us simply an ideology, a vague idea
vaguely taken for granted, which served as a defense against our talking to one another as
individuals. Isolated from ourselves at the same time we isolated ourselves from the rest
of the world, we became enmeshed in a collective malaise, whose effects were most
noticeable in our meetings with people who wrote us — we had little of ourselves
to share with them, because we shared so little among ourselves (other than
“banalities,” which there was no point in discussing, or which had been lumped
into the category of “banalities” out of fear of discussing them). With our
correspondents, we had only past and upcoming projects, and “theory” to discuss;
when questioned by others regarding such things as the visible hierarchy within
Point-Blank, or Sara’s role in the organization, we tried to pass it off quickly and
move on to another, less ticklish subject. Is it really so surprising that almost all of
those correspondents eventually disappeared?
If we used Contradiction’s lack of rigor in organization as an excuse to dismiss
much of what was most radical about their activity, it is equally true that they gave us
plenty of reasons to do so. It is not, as Knabb maintains in Remarks on Contradiction
and Its Failure, that we did not make “practical decisions” about
Contradiction — rather, we made decisions on the basis of the consistent abuse we
suffered at their hands, and it was this very abuse that served to obscure more
fundamental questions. In this respect, the summer of 1971 began on a bad note and got
worse. David worked with Dan Hammer of Contradiction for a couple of weeks on an article
about Weatherman (an article destined for Contradiction’s ill-fated journal) —
an extended outline for this piece was left in the hands of Hammer for completion,
inasmuch as David had contributed almost all the essential ideas and perspectives up till
then. That article was never completed. David and Chris Winks were asked by Contradiction
to write short pieces “for the journal” about Bookchin and about rock music
— these were written, accepted by Contradiction as satisfactory, then unilaterally
discarded when the form of Contradiction’s journal changed for the umpteenth time.
Other articles written by David and Chris for the proposed “practice of theory”
section of the phantom journal were returned with the semi-legible criticisms of five
people scribbled all over them, in a manner that was just plain insulting, sometimes in
content as well as form. By the time we had finished our high school critique, we were
justifiably fed up with Contradiction — when a copy of that which we had given them
was returned covered with the traditional Contradiction scrawl, we had pretty much had it.
Bogged down in a “critique” that was already incapacitating them, they had
nothing in the way of new formulations, of positive alternatives, to offer us. It is
always easier to criticize than to come up with something original. We wrote an irate
letter of defense of our position, leaving the next move up to them. They then broke with
us.
It must be re-emphasized that behind all the debris that cluttered and confused the
issues at hand, the content of Contradiction’s criticisms of our high school
pamphlet (The End of High School) was for the most part valid. The End of
High School was a pastiche of assertions about the life of the high school
student that appeared with no references whatever to real examples of what we were talking
about, excepting ten lines of a newspaper article about low classroom attendance. As
usual, we gave capitalism far too much credit — we posited an orgy of humanist reform
in high schools everywhere (e.g. “everything in the classroom is permitted except the
thought that would reveal everything”!), a stance which reached the pinnacle of
absurdity when we distributed our pamphlet at some of the most backward inner city
schools. Only a year and a half before the publication of The End of High School,
David, Sara and I had all been among the most radical participants in a movement of
agitation at Palo Alto High School that shook the educational structure down to its very
foundations (our struggle succumbed in the end only to New Left illusions; it was defused
by the invasion of Cambodia only because those involved lacked consciousness of what had
already been accomplished). But rather than using our own, often very exemplary
experiences as a beginning point for the positive aspect of our critique, we treated the
revolt in high schools by means of hollow formulas. Out of nowhere, “the
nihilist” appears, who has “already rebelled against all schools.” Then,
right alongside him, emerges the revolutionary (underlined) according to the principle
Nihilist Consciousness = Revolutionary. At the end of the pamphlet, the situation in high
schools has undergone a surprising transformation: the revolutionary struggle is now
there, and had better watch out for recuperators!
The best part of The End of High School is to be found in its form. In several
cases, comics and images were used in a very exciting way. However, these comics, which
would have served as excellent clinchers to analysis of high school life, were left
hanging for lack of that analysis.
* * *
Of the remaining “practical” projects undertaken by Point-Blank before May
1973, two essential groups can be distinguished. The first includes “Out of
Order” and “Still Out of Order” (summer 1971, the latter done in
collaboration with Contradiction), “People’s Victory” (summer 1971),
“All Students Are Junkies, All Teachers Are Cops” (fall 1971), “On
Contradiction” (fall 1971), and a phony edition of the workerist newspaper AT&T
Express (winter 1972); the second group includes a series of agitations done at and
around the University of California, Berkeley, in the spring of 1972 (two phony
questionnaires with Sociology and Psychology department letterheads; “Riot or
Ritual”; the fake “7 Point Program of the P.R.G. [Provisional Revolutionary
Government of Berkeley]”; a phony issue of the student newspaper, the Daily
Californian; and the comic “He Who Laughs Last”). To the second group can
be added an inconsequential agitation attempted at Stanford University in the autumn of
1972.
In their journal, Point-Blank, to their credit, state that the essential failure of the
phone worker agitations (“Out of Order,” AT&T Express) arose due to
a “contrived conception of practice.” This, however, is true of all the pieces I
have placed in the first group above. More precisely, what was contrived in most of them
was our conception of situations — in “People’s Victory,” AT&T
Express, and “On Contradiction,” the “situations” we were
“intervening” in were prefab manufactures on our part. In “Out of
Order,” “Still Out of Order,” and “All Students Are Junkies,”
what was contrived was the pretension that we were intervening in anything.
“People’s Victory” — distributed to workers at Stanford University,
when we could find them — centered around a union (United Stanford Employees) that
affected less than ten percent of Stanford workers; around the mini-Stalinists of
Venceremos, who affected fewer still; and around a “radical” sit-in at the
Stanford hospital in April 1971 that we knew next to nothing about.
The fake AT&T Express imputed the consciousness of a struggle that took
place among a group of phone workers in New York onto phone workers everywhere. Hardly any
workers in the phone company had even heard of the AT&T Express, and barely a
handful had any concern with the various workerist groups that we tore into at length. We
only succeeded in directing attention away from daily life towards a “false
opposition” that did not even appear to oppose anything.
The pamphlet “On Contradiction” attempted to use what we ourselves called the
“cheap sideshow” of the H. Bruce Franklin hearing at Stanford University as an
opening for a critique of the university — since most Stanford students could not
have cared less about Franklin (the majority of interest generated by this little
Stalinist punk coming from other Stalinists, journalists, and professors, in that order),
it is understandable that nobody took notice of us. And if “On Contradiction”
went beyond The Citadel in that we used our own words to attempt to describe the
real movement of the proletariat, we only showed that we could formulate abstractions
“autonomously.”
The leaflet “All Students Are Junkies, All Teachers Are Cops” (intended as a
preliminary to the more extensive End of High School) was actually better
than The End of High School for the simple reason that it was specifically
directed at a school (Palo Alto High) that we knew plenty about. The format of the piece
was splendid; the graphics were shocking enough that we were quickly stopped by police and
had many leaflets confiscated. The aspect of the critique that discussed the present order
at Palo Alto High was quite adequate, if slightly stilted. The discussion of supersession,
however, left everything to be desired: we could only announce that students had to
“create a situation that goes beyond the point of no return” and exhort:
“Don’t Be Students! Don’t Be Teachers! Be Revolutionaries!” How one
was supposed to “be a revolutionary,” what had already been done in terms of
radical struggle at Palo Alto High School, and what could be done by a revolutionary
organization there in the present, was left to be discovered in the process of a struggle
that didn’t exist yet, by an organization that didn’t exist yet either. In
short, we failed to establish a beginning point for anyone or anything, consigning revolt
to such time as someone understood everything we had said, and, endowed with our
enlightened state, concocted ex nihilo a strategy for the concrete realization of
our till then unrealizable abstractions.
“Out of Order” and “Still Out of Order” had the advantage of being
directed at a visibly radical situation — as a result, our imposture was revealed all
the more quickly. Our desire to say something to the workers involved in the wildcat
against the phone company and against their union fell flat, because we ourselves could
not imagine what we would have done had we been phone workers; this, in turn, was largely
due to the fact that we didn’t have any idea what phone workers were up against (e.g.
what would be involved in the occupation of a phone company building). And we lacked the
creativity and the guts to find out. The fact that some members of Point-Blank and
Contradiction snuck into an important union meeting in San Francisco during the strike and
simply observed the show, and that we could only egg the workers on without
demonstrating the slightest reason why their struggle posed the immediate question of
self-management, were mirror reflections of our impotence. We were militant spectators at
the same time we were spectacular militants. The comic strip form of the two agitations
did serve to separate us somewhat from the militants of the bureaucratic Left; all we were
lacking was content.
Of the second group of agitations — those done at and around U.C. Berkeley in the
spring of 1972 — the fake edition of the Daily Californian stands out as by
far the best, for the obvious reason that here, we were criticizing what we ourselves
confronted daily. This piece could have gone a long way towards bringing the university to
its knees. Could have, but didn’t, for reasons that were obvious even to
administrators: “Spokesmen for the University said disciplinary measures were
unlikely because the campus was not disrupted by Point-Blank activities” (Daily
Cal, May 30, 1972). Our critique demanded an appropriate practice. But instead, we
hoped to stir up some vaguely conceived movement of class disruptions by others,
when we did not even begin this ourselves. Never once did we effectively disrupt a single
class. We remained the ideological pretenders to a nonexistent current of agitation; while
we gnashed our teeth and proclaimed how seriously we took our desires, we spent the last
weeks of the quarter doing just what everyone else at the university did: “jerking
off for our professors.”
The fake sociology and psychology questionnaires were intended to be preliminaries to
our phony Daily Cal; through them, we hoped to prepare the ground for the sowing
of more fertile seeds, and to find a few more new comrades to enable us to expand the
scope of our game. Indeed, we could hardly have hoped for more: the questionnaires could
not stand on their own. To those who were interested, we only offered the chance to write
to us. But in writing us, all they could ask was who we were; there was no basis
established whereby they could write and propose what radical activity we could undertake
together. We were left to construct a “dialogue” out of nothing; all we could
discuss was our ideas (i.e. pro-situ ideology).
The piece “Riot or Ritual?”, written in response to riots and looting in
Berkeley that followed the mining of Haiphong harbor (May 1972), further demonstrated our
position as pure “theorists.” We decided to “intervene” in —
write a leaflet about — a situation that we did not feel was worth participating
in. Along with the fake “7 Point Program of the P.R.G.,” “Riot or
Ritual?” gave an exaggerated importance to the momentarily resurrected New Left; in
taking two leaflets to define ourselves in opposition to the New Left (and it was for the
most part through these that anybody in Berkeley first heard about us), we were largely defined
by the New Left.
The fake edition of the Daily Californian certainly had its moments. It was
successfully concrete in analyzing student life in Berkeley; several parts
contained extremely subjective approaches. Swiping and replacing a newspaper was an
excellent subversion of unilateral communication, and the process of doing so was very
exciting. Yet we allowed the very novelty of this to work against us; in the absence of
other equally exemplary acts on our part, the theft of the Daily Cal became a
spectacle by default. We let attention focus on the specific act of replacing a
newspaper, rather than making it clear that this act was only one of many possibilities of
subverting banalities at the university. After the fake paper was distributed, we were
left with nothing more to say: later on during the day that we replaced the papers, we
went back to watch people read them (i.e. consume our ideas). In simply waiting
for “something to happen,” we became spectators of the spectacle we ourselves
had created.
The comic “He Who Laughs Last,” distributed on campus a few days after the
publication of our Daily Cal, attempted to “expose” our recuperation by
the media, when we had in fact encouraged the media to recuperate us. The day the fake Daily
Cal came out, we had attempted to cause a “scandal” by taking copies of our
paper to newspapers and TV stations; now it was our turn to reveal the fact that we really
had been scandalous. We voluntaristically posited that students were no longer doing their
work and were insulting professors. Meanwhile, we called for class disruptions, while we,
like scared little school kids, sat on our arses.
The “agitation” done at Stanford University in September 1972 was simply a
bad joke. Since Francis Rubinstein was starting school at Stanford, we of course had to
“do” something there. The result was mostly an attempt by David to delegate
“autonomy” to Francis; Francis had no desire to do the pamphlet. The
pamphlet was even more stupidly distributed than conceived; a farce from beginning to end.
* * *
Our “theoretical contribution” to the revolutionary movement, the journal Point-Blank!
#1, was the accurate expression of our organizational existence: it combined an
appropriately didactic style, a swarm of repetitions, a pattern of dryly applying
“theory” to specific situations with all the imagination and variety of a pile
driver, and a few interesting and important theoretical perspectives.
Most all of the worthwhile material contained in Point-Blank! #1 is to be
found in the article The
Changing of the Guard, which analyzes the structural crisis of bourgeois society
resulting from its uneven development. The reform of the ersatz nature imposed by
the bourgeoisie in its world — e.g. replacement of urban glut by a hygienic
environment of exploitation, with the dutiful assistance of ecological and other
ideologists — reflects the needs of the ruling class to bring the physical terrain of
society up to date with overdeveloped modes of production.(3)
The hierarchies formerly concentrated in the cities are being diffused; simultaneous to
this geographic decentralization occur the increasing planification of all aspects of
life. At the same time, the advanced technical apparatus of the modern spectacle is
employed to develop a reified subjectivity on the part of the proletariat. Strictly
unilateral communication is recognized by the spectacle’s most advanced functionaries
as no longer adequate, and is giving way to a “bilateral monologue,” where the
spectator’s response to images determine the next transmission (e.g. two-way
television).
This article is the best in the journal precisely because it contains the fewest
immediate implications for Point-Blank’s daily life. However, when daily life is
discussed, Point-Blank’s poverty is once again revealed. Daily life is viewed only in
terms of the spectacles that attempt to define it, avoiding consideration of how people
(Point-Blank included) respond to daily life. Thus, for instance, Point-Blank mechanically
passes off the subjective dynamic of rebellion in the sixties under the banal rubric that
“the sterile vapidity of reified existence was all too easily seen through” (p.
21). Equally mechanical is Point-Blank’s conception of recuperation — it is as
though hierarchical power has everything under control, and that no real problems lie
between recognition of the problem and its alleviation, that it is only ceremony, a
“changing of the guard.”
The remainder of Point-Blank’s journal is primarily concerned with “covering
bases” — bringing the American proletariat up to date through a repackaged
version of previous formulations. In trying to take in everything, we were taken in by
everything; none of the remaining articles is adequate even in terms of what it sets out
to do.
It is not that Point-Blank does not sometimes recognize what should be done.
We recognized, for example, that very little theoretical elaboration had been made
concerning problems that would confront future workers’ councils; the article The
Power of the Councils was intended to renew discussion of this crucial issue. Yet the
article in no way goes beyond “the psittaceous repetition of certain phrases and
certain traditions in current ‘situationist’ texts” (p. 88); it only
invents new phrases. The finished product is merely a drawn-out restatement of our ideas
about what needed analysis and expansion; analysis and expansion themselves are lacking.
This kind of reified language appears repeatedly elsewhere in the journal, just as it does
in our “practical” projects.
The article Self-Management
and the Spanish Revolution is much more concerned with the events of the Spanish
Revolution and the ideologies which surrounded it than it is with self-management. Here,
an essentially historicist perspective is combined with “critical” commentary,
centering mostly around a critique of anarchism. The result is pretensions to criticism
which in fact lead to several blatant contradictions as the article progresses — thus
on page 74 we see that the “Spanish proletariat participated as much for itself
as against Franco,” while on page 78 we read that the organs of the Spanish
proletariat (councils) “failed to give positive practical and theoretical
expression to their own existence.” On page 75, we note that the Spanish councils
achieved a “qualitative supersession of the relations of capitalist production,”
but on page 80 we are told that “the Spanish revolutionaries were never able to
complete . . . the self-management of the means of production.” And so
forth. Academic logic makes for strange commentary.
Our article on the American proletariat, “(Wo)men and Equipment Working,”
exemplifies the same approach as the piece on Spain. It is preoccupied with vindicating
the fact that the historical movement of the proletariat still exists (pure historians),
refuting leftist and unionist ideologues, and exposing agents and modes of recuperation.
On the positive side, it states merely what wildcat strikes and sabotage (in general)
exhibit, not how a particular struggle marked an advance, or what specifically was notable
about it.
The closer to home we get, the more miserable we look. Our article on the New Left,
“The Storms of Youth,” while able to expose various isolated mystification and
tendencies within the New Left, is extremely inconsistent in placing the New Left in
perspective with relation to the spectacle as a whole. While we note from the start that
“the New Left was a product of the American spectacle,” we end up viewing the
New Left in spectacular terms, as a “false start in the process of genuine
revolution.” What we expose as a fragment of the spectacle — apparently
departing from the spectacle only in order to reform it — is eventually imputed a
totality unto itself: the critique of the Movement becomes the last barrier to the
critique of bourgeois society as a whole (“from now on, no one can have any illusions
as to the meaning of real change” — p. 4l).(4)
This confusion is simply the product of our unknowing proximity to the New Left and the
counterculture. In attempting to lay bare spectacular “revolt,” we often lumped
in with the Movement activity which was actually very radical (e.g. Civil Rights, Free
Speech Movement), using the Movement rather than the spectacle as a whole as the primary
reference point for this activity. This in turn arose from our inability to state just
what was radical about, or what was missing in, these partial revolts — the New Left
becomes the absolute recuperator of these absolutely “total” rebellions, which
somehow concerned absolutely everybody. So the works is subsumed under the New Left and
left to rot. After all this, all that remains for us to do is to reassert some banalities
about the individual, subjectivity, etc. — and wait for all those ex-militants to
rush to our ranks. The storms of ideology proceed in a self-perpetuating haze.
“The Work of Ideology” had the merit of starting from one of the more
avant-garde modifications of bourgeois society: the reform of the labor process currently
taking place all over the world at a very rapid clip. Yet most of the article was already
out of date: the councilist ideologues we tore into had already received more than their
due from the S.I. and others. And while we stated that these recuperators failed to
consider the “subjective dynamic of revolution,” we left explanation of this for
other articles, which in turn did not really explain it. Our article on “The Power of
the Councils,” as mentioned above, only confused what was written in “The Work
of Ideology” — our conception of councils does appear as an
“idealized replacement” for the reified conception put forth by others.
As in “The Storms of Youth,” The
Show Is Over accepts its subject matter as it is presented by the spectacle. The Cold
War is depicted as simply an “ideological ruse,” a spectacle, which is described
as being almost consciously planned by the rulers of various nations. We fail to uncover
the internal dynamic of the various hierarchies in their respective countries: the fact
that the end of the Cold War is primarily due to the fact that every bureaucracy must now
fight for itself is concealed under the proposition that an international
counterrevolutionary alliance, fully aware of all its implications, is now being formed.
The ideologists of the world, and those served by them, no more recognize the false nature
of their consciousness of society now than they did during the Cold War. They themselves
believe in their own lie more than anyone else; they know only the exigencies of
spectacular development, which is all they are defending by putting their resources in
common. The second part of “The Show Is Over” is simply a chronicle of some of
the proletarian struggles that had occurred recently in the world, with a few slogans
about intervention and the like thrown in for form’s sake.
Our Reader’s Digest guide to the Situationist International — “Beyond
the Point of No Return” — reveals more about us than perhaps any other piece in
the journal. We state on page 57 that the S.I. was “able to elaborate the most
radical theory possible” — as if some absolute radicality could exist. It is
rather Point-Blank that presents themselves as absolutely radical: after their conception
of the S.I., they want to be at “the center of the new revolutionary movement”
because of their “absolute refusal to compromise with the ideologies and
organizational forms of the old world.” They eat, drink, spit, and breathe
“totally.” On page 58, it states: “In 1968 the modern revolutionary
movement . . . became a social force and not a mere theoretical
conjecture.” Contrast the S.I.: “Naturally we had prophesied nothing. We had
only stated what was there” (I.S. #12). When Point-Blank speaks of
the S.I carrying out “theoretical agitations,” they could not be more candid in
describing their own impoverished attempts at practical activity. Aside from these stated
stupidities, Point-Blank reveals by omission their own inability to understand
revolutionary organization: they take no stand on the various exclusions and breaks in the
S.I. after 1969, except for the case of Vaneigem, who, according to them, sat down one day
and decided not to participate anymore. Nor do they attempt to explain the breakup of the
S.I. as a whole — why it “turned in on itself” — except to state that
various sections lacked “autonomy.” (Point-Blank also eats, drinks, spits, and
breathes “autonomously.”) Thus Point-Blank goes beyond the S.I.
I have reserved for last the article which is the most incredible as far as outright
blockheadishness goes: the piece “Of Sexual Poverty.” For Point-Blank, in their
totalistic myopia, real sexuality is “absent” in this society — their
purity becomes almost puritanical in their assertion that today, only the spectacle of
sexuality exists, and that consideration of sexuality must be subsumed to
“total” revolt. No more love, no more sex: stop loving, stop fucking!
Point-Blank’s impotent ideology has them by the genitals.
At this point, nothing more need be said about Point-Blank’s article “The
Practice of Theory.” Suffice it to say that they lack both revolutionary practice and
revolutionary theory.
Bringing It All Back Home
The desire of each revolutionary to change life must now be situated more concretely
— beginning with his own daily life. To posit the absolute “fact” that our
daily lives in capitalist society must be totally “miserable,” is as much a
submission to the terms of the old world as the voluntaristic attempt to transform
one’s life in abstracto. Each revolutionary should at least be passionate,
rigorous, imaginative, interesting, negative enough to create sufficient pleasure in
living that he wants to expand it, to realize it. The question so often asked by people
who have come into contact with situationist theory for the first time, “What do you
situationists do in your daily lives, how do you have fun?” is one that every
revolutionary would do well to frequently consider for himself, and act on accordingly. We
can hardly expect to interest anyone in revolution if the process leading to it is boring.
Equally, in his taste for the new, each of us must recognize and break the habits and
routines which stifle his passions: first of all, we have to maintain our own interest!
All we are saying is, give chance a chance. Let’s face it: whether out of
lethargy, or inexperience, stupidity or fear, vanity or activism, the
“situationists” in this country have been caught with their pants down time
after time. With very few exceptions, always the same story: too little too late. On an
individual level, each of us can easily start improving our chances immediately, by
actively exercising (and thus improving) his faculty of encounter. If every banality
contains the possibility of a subversion, then it seems to us that the most humiliating
type of banality of them all — the nonmeeting of people everywhere we go, the
repulsion of human objects — should be the type with the most multifaceted and
explosive potentialities. When we consider how artificial the whole setup is, we realize
how ridiculous are our fears in the face of apparently lifeless people, in the face of
their masks, their characters. Henceforth when we meet with an utterance of disgust made
by another person in public, a defiant gesture, a smile, a stare, we should consider that
as a possible beginning point for the creation of a situation, however small. Our ability
to make use of these opportunities will depend on our capacity to come up with a
one-liner, an insult, or a phrase that immediately reverses the perspective of that
particular situation. The point is not to persuade — to engage in a political
argument — but to invite.
We do not expect miracles from revolutionaries. It is to be expected that in this
day-to-day struggle many mistakes will be made, many opportunities will be left
unrealized. Yet, when we consider the immense amount of verbiage expended, the grandiose
schemes concocted, in order to “cleverly” interest people in our project,
isn’t the small risk involved in a spoken critique (so what if we get laughed at by
some idiot?) a much better use of time and energy than most of the “practical”
efforts of the past? Our success in making encounters is at once a very direct measure of
our radicality and an incitement to new conquests. It is enough to recall how often
written material has served as a defense against meeting people — and to
recall how boring it is for each written project to “confirm” how colonized
everyone else is, how “difficult” the struggle to destroy the spectacle is, and
thus how “radical” you are — to realize how much fun a little guts can lead
to! Extremism implies recognition; being “radical” by default is your
own fault.
These daily struggles of individuals can in no way substitute for organization; they
are presuppositions for collective activity, and they presuppose collective activity. On
the one hand, it is precisely the individual, his desire to change life, and his ability
to contribute to that project, that forms the beginning point for revolutionary
organization. On the other hand, the very logic of the individual’s longing for
authentic social contact, for genuine communication, leads him to seek others who share
both his desire for realization and the critical capabilities which make it possible. It
is not that a person acting on his own cannot be effective in developing revolutionary
theory and commensurate practical activity, but that several individuals with a diversity
of talents, acting together in a manner that affirms and enriches the achievements of
each, and that provides a collective perspective for the solution of problems and failures
— that this is so much more effective (and also lots more fun) than an isolated
individual acting on his own, this is what makes us partisans of organization.
Up till now, revolutionary organization has been too little talked about and too little
understood, especially by those who have created organizations, or have tried to. Perhaps
least has been said about the formation of organizations, although it has become
self-evident that this is not something to be taken lightly or to be discussed in passing.
The formalist conception in which potential members of a potential organization undertake
together some sort of “trial” project seems to us to be an inadequate
prerequisite for effective organization, even if all the individuals involved were able to
satisfactorily participate in such a project. What is needed is no less than an extensive
discussion of organization itself prior to any actual formation of an
organization. This must be in terms of organization generally (e.g. appropriation by
everyone of the S.I.’s Minimum Definition of
Revolutionary Organizations and other relevant texts), but must also specifically
define what kinds of activity individuals want to pursue in this particular organization.
In other words, given that revolutionary organization is essentially experimental in
nature, the terrain of experimentation should be defined in advance (granted that this is
itself tentative). In constructing such a foundation, the individuals involved will have
already begun work on a designated practical task; those who have nothing to contribute to
such a discussion can be eliminated from further activity. What remains will be precisely
what is needed: an organization in which the desires, passions, and recognized abilities
of each member of the group form — when taken together — the core of the
organization’s basic perspectives. While there is never any guarantee of
organizational efficacy, an organization formed in the manner outlined here will at least
have a fighting chance at avoiding the purely abstract “democracy” of impotence
which all those in the past who have merely imitated others have wallowed in.
Organization must be considered for what it is: a practical example of radical social
relations. The method of an organization is as important as what is actually
produced by the organization — after all, the method is at the root of those
products. If the collective environment of an organization is to be historical, then it
can only be one of historical consciousness — each member must “know what he is
doing when he is doing it,” and must know that the others know and do the same.
Contrariwise, an organization must know when it should be doing what:
the method of the organization must situate organizational activity historically, i.e. it
must be timely and must be conscious of its existence in time.
By “method” we mean here not simply how an organization goes about dividing
and accomplishing tasks, but also how it arrives at those tasks in the first place. Much
previous “practical activity” has been not so much the expression of organization
as it has been merely organized activity; the origin of projects has been
essentially individual, and only the execution has been collective. As we see it, this can
be reversed only when organizational practice is placed at the level of the daily lives of
the organization’s members; it is from the daily relations of its membership that an
organization must draw its poetry. The recognition that in the daily life of each and of
all is to be found the source of subversion (its immediate objects and its subjectivity);
and the putting in common of all rebellions, ideas, desires, talents — it is these
that should determine collective projects, not the other way around.
What defines what is appropriate subject matter for discussion and debate in an
organization? Its use to the organization. While what is useful to the collectivity is
obviously tied to specifics, we can state generally, from our own experiences and what we
understand to be the experiences of others, that the scope of organizational discussion
has often been harmfully narrow. Many nascent ideas, formulations, and critiques have
remained sequestered in the individual’s subconscious, for a diversity of reasons:
their seemingly far-fetched, unusual, or undeveloped nature; their seemingly
“personal” nature; lack of self-confidence or lack of confidence in others;
inertia; fear of making mistakes. Organization should help to liberate these subjective
insights, not keep them locked up! Organization implies taking risks. But the risks
involved are almost never the romantic type that occur on the barricades, those
ultra-dramatic moments we read and dream about. These risks are much more mundane —
they occur daily. They are the kind of risk involved in pointing out something new in
something which is long familiar and apparently old — the risk of being original,
and proving it. The same absence of fear, the willingness to be daring, is what
makes informal meetings with comrades exciting, and allows the element of chance to run an
unfettered course throughout the spectrum of intra-organizational encounters. Without
abandoning lightness, comrades should take their informal meetings more seriously, try to
draw more theory out of their mutual enjoyment, surprise each other, meeting frequently,
but never out of lack of something better to do.
As “situationist” activism and active situationism proliferate (notably now
in the Bay Area), and pro-situ mystifications are flying every which way, particularly in
the form of supposed “interventions,” we need to be more precise about the
nature of our actions with relation to other proletarians and to the proletariat as a
whole. The quality essential to our practical activity, and this is exactly what the
active pro-situs’ “practical activity” lacks, is practicality:
i.e. it must be useful. People can read the pro-situs’ tracts, and sometimes even
agree with them, but always, it’s the same conclusions: “So what?” or
“So what should I do?” The pro-situ, who inevitably possesses too much useless
and pointless knowledge for his own damn good, has taken out a mortgage on words. In an
effort to add interest to his investment, he spices up his rhetoric with subversions of
phrases from his favorite authors. But it is not enough to use words in such a way that
they reverse perspective with regard to other words! Our words must reverse perspective of
situations. Practical-critical activity implies that written words leap out of
the page: the division between ideas and acts dissolves when words themselves are not just
the description of what is really happening and what has to happen, but are — in
their very mode of presentation — already the beginning of the form in which
their content can be realized. Our critique will not penetrate the masses solely on the
basis of its theoretical validity, but because we know how to express it and
because it helps others to know how to fight better. The dadaists, those eloquent
anti-economists of language, showed so well how a few words, deployed at the proper
moment, could alter the course of history; for us, the question is not simply the
specialized mastery of a particular style, but the style of mastery, the ability to affirm
subjective truth when it counts. This comes right down to the moment of attempted
intervention in a (potentially) radical situation — the “situationist” who
can only passively distribute his posters, tracts, slogans, etc., and leave the “next
move” up to others, may as well pack it up and head for home. When dialogue is not an
immediate possibility — and this goes straight back to the revolutionary’s
faculty of encounter — nothing is accomplished. A day, an hour, five minutes into the
future is already too late. Interventions in history must divert the present or
they are ideology (and not really interventions).
We must emphasize that intervention is not the sole practical task of organization.
Intervention is not an end in itself; it is simply a means towards the principal practical
goal of establishing an ongoing rapport, directed towards coherence, with other
proletarians — and beyond that, of course, the councils. (Those pro-situs who
consider their central practical task to be “intervention” only conceal their
absolute dread of talking with anyone, with the possible exception of potential pupils;
one consequence of this is that their “interventions” are tailor-made never to
succeed.) While situationist activity can by no means be confined to any one aspect of
social life, or geared exclusively towards any particular sector of the proletariat, the
most important task facing any situationist organization remains the establishment of a
radical dialogue with workers in key areas of production, distribution, and vital
services. No doubt, the process of establishing contacts will most likely be a long one.
But now that workers’ struggles are visibly proliferating in this country, the fog is
lifting from before our eyes. If we now know how to ditch the anchor of our characters,
then our fate rests squarely in our own hands. Surely there is no excuse to delay
beginning our journey into a new life, to find our selves, and to finally find ourselves a
home.
GINA ROSENBERG & CHRIS SHUTES
Berkeley, February 1974
[NOTES]
1. The imprecision of describing our initial practice with such a
vague expression is largely due to the fact that we didn’t stop and think very much
about what practice entailed. The Citadel can hardly be called an agitation
— we printed it more out of response to criticism by Cronin and his comrades (later,
Contradiction) for “failing to print your comix” than anything else.
2. Dunnington: the most proficient opportunist in Point-Blank’s
coterie — cashes in on Point-Blank’s “prestige,” but knows that if he
were working regularly with his idol Jacobs, then it would become obvious to everyone what
he really is — Jacobs’s vassal. His interest in something is directly
proportional to its ability to allow him to avoid confronting his own misery — in his
monk’s retreat of Isla Vista he imbibes huge quantities of liquor and Point-Blank, in
that order. He has organized a few situationist groupies who conscientiously mimic the
style, if not the words, of Point-Blank. This is his conception of autonomy.
3. This formulation is lacking in precision, owing to the fact that
Point-Blank disregards a fundamental aspect of the problem. While Point-Blank examines the
reform of the physical terrain of society, the necessary alterations in capitalist
production itself are left unaccounted for. “The recent appearance within the
spectacle of a flood of moralist speeches and promises for direct remedies concerning what
governments and their mass media call pollution, wishes to conceal that evidence
which it is simultaneously forced to reveal: capitalism has finally proven that it can
no longer develop the productive forces” (Guy Debord and Gianfranco Sanguinetti,
Theses on the Situationist International and Its Time).
4. Cf. also Point-Blank’s addition to a reprint of On the
Poverty of Student Life: “In the wake of Nixon’s visit to China, no one can
maintain any illusions as to what constitutes a genuine revolutionary opposition to
capitalism.”
I have not reproduced this text in order to revive a polemic about the long-disbanded
group Point-Blank, but because I believe its original publication was an exemplary act. It
takes courage to publicly examine your own mistakes and illusions; but such revelations
can have a healthy effect, deflating the fantasies that people often have about radical
practice, undermining the intimidating mystiques that keep them in the position of
admiring spectators. Readers who discover that subversive projects are more down to earth
than they had imagined, and that they are not carried out by superheroes but by people not
much different from themselves, may be encouraged to try their own hand at the game.
It also often happens that by really confronting some particular situation, however
dated or limited or trivial it might seem, you end up shedding light on more general
matters. Chris and Gina may not have been right in every detail (in an afterword for a
later reprinting of the pamphlet they themselves noted several places where their analysis
had not been sufficiently rigorous), but the issues they raised remain important for
anyone trying to engage in collective radical activity.
No copyright.
[Point-Blank
articles online]
[Ken Knabb’s
critique of Point-Blank]
(in Remarks on Contradiction)
[CROSSFIRE]
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