|
Notes Toward a
Situationist Manifesto
A qualitative leap has been made in the period since the SI ceased its
experimentation around 1968.
The proletarian assault, gradually rediscovering the need for a revolution and defining
through its struggles the conditions and stakes of a “new era,” has been
decisively confirmed and clarified. The nature of this assault now enables us to reject or
modify certain premature and overly simplistic hypotheses and slogans of the old theory
and also reveals certain limits, the overcoming of which would create the
conditions for a qualitatively different era.
In obvious connection with the return of social revolution, we are witnessing the unprecedented
development of a partial-reformist opposition that is abandoning its traditional themes
and drawing its inspiration from modern themes taken from revolutionary
struggles. This phenomenon dovetails with the new orientation being taken by the ruling
circles of the present society. Faced with the assault of the negative, they have
concluded that it is essential, by any means necessary, to induce people to actively
participate in their own alienation. They are exploring and setting up the futuristic
conditions of such participation, envisaging significant changes in everyday life, in
mores, in the social utilization of space and time, in proletarians’ role in
production, and in this production itself. This is what is behind all the liberalizing
experiments, all the questionings of the assumptions, goals and power of the economy
itself, all the declarations, studies and programs promising the transformation of
existence, which are accompanied, by an irony of the logic of statist power, by a
sector-by-sector reinforcement of the means of control over social life. This is
one of the contradictions that is going to dominate all social life in the next few years:
the economic and state power structure cannot confront the present collapse and consider
liberalizing the society without reinforcing its own bureaucratic control, and it
can’t reinforce its bureaucratic control without substantially liberalizing the
anachronistic social structures whose negative and negating consequences have become
uncontrollable.
The ruling power cannot know how far it will be swept along by this course. This is why
it so willingly leaves it to the diverse shades of contemporary critical thought to
explore its possible stages, including the worst envisageable ones, and why it encourages
experimentation with solutions aimed at transforming populations into credulous and
cooperative actors of a renovated alienation. Its main concern, since it has already
resigned itself to the fact that it can’t get out of the present period in one piece,
is to keep the damage to a minimum and avoid generating irreversible instabilities. It is
this process, taken up on a global political scale as well as internally in the various
states and modified or delayed according to local necessities, that has given rise to a spectacle
of opposition and social transformation (in contrast to the pre-1968 spectacle of a
triumphant and euphoric economy).
Opposition has, of course, always been allotted a place in the world of the spectacle,
but until recently that place has been peripheral and negligible. Now it shares center
stage, openly competing with satisfied submission’s eulogy of existing conditions.
The capitalism-Stalinism opposition that was the basis of the spectacle of the preceding
period has now been replaced by the familiar imagery of the present society grappling with
the forces and processes announcing its internal negation.
Throughout the highest political spheres we are seeing the still-groping emergence of a
neoreformism that is reinforced by the foil of a certain revival of
rightist or semifascist manifestations.
Considered as a whole, Western capitalism’s various attempts to reexamine itself
and prepare the ground for its essential restructuring reveal the pivotal and even profoundly
historical character of the present era. In response to the increasing signs and
risks of a total negation, a terrain of experimentation is being formed whose
purpose is to develop an ideology capable of propping up the faltering system
during its reorganization over the next few years. This reorganization will involve a Stalinization
of Western capitalism, in the sense that the restructuring necessary to safeguard state
domination must be conducted in the most centralized and controllable manner possible, no
longer in the name of the natural requirements of economic functioning but to save the economic
order itself, in the name of an ideology imposing a new worldview and
preparing the way for cybernetic society. In order to carry out this operation, however,
the ruling power finds itself obliged to temporarily enter the favored terrain of
revolutionaries, a terrain that terrifies it: that of adventure. Even if its
goals are clear, it is far from controlling the process it finds itself engaged in. This
is a key point for historically understanding the present period and the manifestations of
the revolutionary adventure that is challenging it. None of the rulers can predict the
ultimate consequences of the reformist measures they are forced to take. They all see
their time running out and are aware of the last-ditch palliatives they urgently need to
develop or generalize, but they hesitate to implement correctives whose processes and
results are so uncertain. This paralyzing uncertainty leads them rather to give a clumsy
and inadequate priority to the only one of their instruments that remains without
surprises and that they know well — their police.
Revolutionary theses are being parroted and coopted everywhere, inspiring
state-supported thinkers and future technicians of social control. With equal cynicism
they are used both to praise modern commodities and to justify the possible need for to
bureaucratically planned privation of many of these commodities. In a sense, those theses
have never been so well known and popular; but only on rare occasions are they understood,
used and developed on their own terrain. The spectacle effect obliterates their origin and
their meaning. They don’t appear as the ideas of revolutionaries — ideas linked
to a specific experience and project — but rather as exceptional outbursts of
lucidity on the part of the rulers, stars and vendors of illusions.
This spectacular popularity of our anesthetized theses points to a major difficulty in
the composition of a situationist manifesto. Such a manifesto will have to be conceived in
such a way that the viewpoint it expresses cannot be pigeonholed as the “extreme
left” of the existing currents of opposition. It must embody as unambiguously as
possible the critique and supersession of those currents. That is, it must shatter the
subtle but powerful “in” status that situationist theory holds today. The main
purpose of the manifesto is in fact to implement such a break.
Guy Debord, for example, in putting out his recent film [The
Society of the Spectacle], has ceased carrying on an offensive position and has
actively contributed to entangling situationist theory in the contemporary oppositional
spectacle. Not, obviously, because cinema is necessarily more “spectacular” than
writing (though it is a domain that revolutionaries are nowhere near being able to
dominate in the current context), but because seven years after the appearance of his book
— well into a radically new period — he has made a film which is no more than
that book and which is thus only a self-admiring glorification of an act of the past. But
even if there is an excessive degree of flaunted self-satisfaction in this film, it
isn’t our intention to deny Debord the talent that unquestionably remains to him and
that can still manifest itself in certain partially effective and revolutionary ways.
That’s not the problem. The problem is that in the field of situationist theoretical
activity where he commands a well-merited respect Debord is devoting himself less to the
theory of negation than to cultivating a personal glory for his achievements in the art
of the negative, which the present society integrates as one more peripheral and
entertaining art. This is an example of the path that a good manifesto and its authors
must not follow.
As a prelude to drafting a manifesto, there is a huge backlog of unfinished business in
revolutionary theory that must be dealt with. In particular we will need to develop a
firmer grasp of various phenomena that (due to their scope or their novelty) are peculiar
to the “new era” and that have thus far received little attention or
interpretation. In so doing, we may well discover some new ideas that will be decisive in
the struggles of the next few years.
A good manifesto, for example, should not address the revolutionary movement in that
tone of frantic optimism that many feel obliged to adopt whenever they talk about
revolution, overemphasizing the radical aspects of any situation (even inventing some if
necessary) and constantly insisting on the inevitability of final victory. This
doctrinaire position only reveals the doubts of those who adopt it.
The manifesto will have to consider the real revolutionary movement —
including, of course, the admirable element of what has already been accomplished, which
justifies the very notion of a revolutionary movement, but only in the sense that
what has already been done is going to be superseded. It must also consider all
the regrettable defects that jeopardize revolutionary development, all its forms of
complicity with existing conditions. The accurate analysis of a single step of the real
movement is worth more than a hundred discourses on the timeless certainties of the
ultimate outcome. The era when the mere arrogant declaration of such certainties had a
certain provocative value is now over.
The manifesto will take precise and incisive positions on the reality and the
development of the revolutionary movement. It must locate and name this
proletarian movement’s truly situationist tendencies, as well as those that can in no
way be considered as situationist and those that may become so and under what conditions.
It will avoid that habit of contemporary revolutionary prose which sees an unadulterated
confirmation of its theses in virtually everything that’s happening. It will be
necessary to clarify what has already been done and the present activity of
consequential revolutionaries, by showing what the revolutionary proletariat is necessarily
going to be obliged to do in the next few years. That is, what questions struggles are
inevitably going to hinge on, what forms they are necessarily going to take, and what precise
alternatives the dominant society and its revolutionary opposition are going to be
faced with. Revolutionary theory can no longer content itself with presenting the final
stage as the foreseeable negation of what exists; it is now necessary for it to conceive,
in an ever more practical manner, all the eventualities of the intervening periods and to
present various debated hypotheses on these periods.
We need to put ourselves in a position to confidently announce certain foreseeable
developments while ruling out others; to reveal the function catastrophism fills for the
ruling power and its opponents; and to discern which catastrophes can be reasonably shown
to be avoidable and which are unavoidable. We should be able to foresee the principal
socio-historic developments arising out of all the aspects of the present social
breakdown, that is, to foresee the immediate context in which the proletariat is going to
have to develop its struggles.
The point of a situationist manifesto is more to present a series of clear positions on
problems hitherto left in abeyance than merely to make a more rational and striking
presentation of points drawn from already existing theory. It will be a sort of guidebook
for the revolutionary adventures of the next twenty years. Not an idyllic travel agency
brochure but a practical document calling attention to the dangers and obstacles that have
already begun to manifest themselves and to the scientifically evaluated and situated
chances of success.
What will distinguish us from the pseudorevolutionaries who today monopolize attention,
both in the manifesto and in the activity we are going to continue to develop, is
that we are going to talk about revolution as a concrete and global enterprise
for the last quarter of this century and that we are going to specify under what
conditions it can succeed as a total revolution. Due to the conditions in which
we and others are conducting our activity, and because we are conducting it in such a way
that it cannot be directed by anyone, no one can say who will be the authors of the
situationist manifesto or manifestos. One thing, however, is sure: our era really
needs theoretical works, and it itself is going to create the forces necessary for the
satisfaction of that need.
JEANNE CHARLES, DANIEL DENEVERT
Notes pour un manifeste situationniste appeared
in the journal Chronique des Secrets Publics (Paris, 1975). Translation by Ken Knabb (slightly modified from the 1975 translation that was later
included in Public Secrets).
No copyright.
|