The same formidable question that has been haunting the world for two centuries is about to be posed again everywhere: How can the poor be made to work once their illusions have been shattered, and once force has been defeated? [2]
(Guy Debord)
With an increasing interest in contemporary art to break out from the utterly separated postmodern art scene and to find contact with society as a whole – a tendency that is logically exposed both by the traditional art spheres and by conservative political forces as a formal and trendy repetition of what happened at the end of the sixties – it seems crucial to evaluate the situationist experience, which is not an easy task.
Paraphrasing the quote, I could identify the ,poor’ with the contemporary artist in general and on bad days directly with myself. Debord had a role in making such a statement possible. I would like therefore to write about the interferences that my liaison with situationist ideas has produced. As I prefer not to start from very far back in time, a basic knowledge of the Situationist Internationale and their activity shall be necessary in order to follow my reasoning. My main sources are: the reading (and translating into Hungarian) of various Situationist texts and my acquaintance with Attila Kotányi, philosopher, architect and member of the S.I.
I.
Being an angry but tenacious reader of a „silver” copy of the Internationale Situationniste 1958-69 volume that I inherited from Kotányi (actually, I forgot to give it back to him) who was himself an editor of the bulletin from 1960 until his expulsion in 1963, and at the same time the only connection, beyond the famous Hungarian workers’ councils [3] of 1956, between the situationist movement and my home country, I have spent years trying to understand it. What obstacled me was on the one hand the inaccessible style of the situationists that at a first glance makes the texts seem like dada poems, and on the other hand by my initial aversion to dialectical Marxism, that I inherited from years of force feeding by the so called socialist regime.
It was these difficulties in understanding that led me to undertake the translation in Hungarian of The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, firstly, because generally I wanted to be absolutely sure that I know what I refer to when talking about it, and secondly, because I find it to be a perfect resume of what attracts and repels me at the same time, about the situationist movement.
When The Society of the Spectacle was written, the revolution seemed to be just around the corner and as this revolution did not occur, that makes it retrospectively one of the saddest books in the history of world literature. Rarely does it happen that a theory would go this far in devastating the land around and under itself, burning all its bridges and waiting for complete justification from a future historical moment.
Its all encompassing criticism that is difficult to challenge, had its roots in a movement deeply connected to modernist art, and I find this quite relevant and insightful from the point of view of that long battle that visual arts have been fighting in order to liberate themselves from their own bodily essence. The price that art had to pay was the loss of its separate identity, becoming conceptual and slightly frustrated. The price to be won can be found in that it became trained in being exposed to crises, to the extent that this vulnerability seems to be its real medium at present.
It was Marx who showed the „real stuff”, namely, that culture in general is dependent on the material bases of society, economics, politics, class power and its strategies. As art became aware of, and could never fully liberate itself from these conclusions, it has started – with the historical avant-garde – its long-term project of joining real forces operating in society. In that it sought to realise the complete transgression from art to life, through the supersession of art, the S.I. was the fulfilment of the avant-garde art’s assault on politics and on society, of its obsessions about total participation. It demanded fantastic things: a „realised Situationist culture against the spectacle”, a „collective and anonymous cultural production, an art of interaction, of dialogue”, against „the unilateral art” [4] of the past.
Naturally, ,supersession’ in general is a very tricky game to play, as it demands a continuous and careful occupation with the dichotomy of creation (i.e. art) and destruction (i.e. critique), from the part of those doing the superseding. In the light of what we can know now, the S.I. (with Debord in the first place) failed to fulfil this expectation, and tried to solve the dichotomy, namely around 1961/62, as signalled by the massive cleansing within the ranks of the members that forced many of the founders, mostly artists and architects, to leave and never come back. Beyond human motivations, the reason could have been that the chances of a real revolution appeared on the horizon, and that threw the genuinely creative experimentation of the first years, around unitary urbanism, psychogeography and derives into the background and put an overwhelming emphasis on subversive techniques, media criticism and detournement, all more conducive to making real trouble.
In his book, Debord describes the spectacle as a form of society where ideology has become a material force [5], primarily mediated by, and made efficient through images. He denounced art as something directly enriching the matrix of the increasingly co-optive system while apparently challenging it, thus ending up being something worse than the other spheres where the system at least needs to employ its techniques of „recuperation”. „Art” was increasingly eliminated, deconstructed and destroyed, at first with a reference to historical art, then to contemporary art produced outside the S.I., eventually to the one produced at the very heart of the S.I. [6] – in favour, as it were, of the prospect of becoming the „leading force” in the fight for a new society.
In other words, while the first stage of the S.I.’s history was characterised by opening up new ways of action, the second one closed and sealed most of the passages leading there.
To complete this cycle, long after ’68, in a small volume called Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (1988), Debord introduced the term of „integrated spectacle” describing the evolved form of the new world order, but it is probable that integrated spectacle is nothing less than the spectacle that knows that you know that it knows – that is, the spectacle that in the meanwhile integrated Debord himself.
Partly it was the boredom of the city appropriated by functional modernism that gave momentum to Situationist thinking, inspiring important essays such as the one by Ivan Chtcheglov or utopian city planning, in the case of Constant. If anything, this situation has been changed: the big city today is visually (and conceptually) saturated, and that can be considered to be the most important contribution of the Situationists: they launched the entertaining visual communication between power and its urban enemies, and improved the relative skills of both sides. In comparison to the extensive richness displayed by the late capitalist creativity industry and, in dialectical relationship with it, the creativity of pop resistance, contemporary art as a result appears „small”, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Nevertheless, or maybe exactly because of this, enough room is offered for a modest participation. Since the end of the Cold War, a new field with new rules, has been opened up in the cultural domain for reality-based activity. Hierarchical attitudes and expressions suggesting the presence of totalising tendencies have been replaced by activities and terms that, even in their loose way, effectively extend the possibility of participation, while trusting the weak power [7] to bring it on: spectacle today is called visual culture; proletariat is called multitude [8]; revolution is tactics of everyday life [9]; dialectical relationship is multiple engagement. [10]
What has not changed is that capitalism is still called capitalism, just as art is still called art. In many cases, talking about art is increasingly a talking about capitalism. At the same time, artists rarely speak about how sad they are and about how much they would like to be taken by the hand and walked through the forest. Current discourses defining activist tendencies in contemporary art lack the emphasis of the affirming subject which involves the danger that this discourse ends up being a vague empathy or sympathy, commonplaces that stand for social sensitivity. This discourse is set within an institutionalised framework which also extends over the most intimate domains of the individual unless the position from which to talk becomes more stable.
The situationists’ example is a strong warning, demonstrating in what way an overly stable position can annihilate everything that stays over that position. The missing stability should be gained by conceiving the inherited weakness of art as a strength, as the Debordian moment might have been the last when it seemed possible to speak so confidently to a public active and ready to create social and political change from the position of an impending power.
II.
Criticism is not suicidal so long as it doesn’t contradict itself, that it doesn’t do the same things it criticises.
[11]
(Attila Kotányi)
It was Kotányi who informed me about the existence of the situationist movement but he never spoke in depth about this period of his life. He was not the kind of man who spends his old years recollecting memories and, besides, I don’t even think he had many nice ones from those times.
As a kid, Kotányi was put in a military college but, because of his half Jewish origins, the introduction of Hungarian racial laws forced him to cut short a military career that had just started. He pursued his professional formation as an architect while simultaneously attending the circles of leftist intellectuals of the time and becoming a disciple of Lajos Szabó, a very influential leftist philosopher. This close relationship continued for twenty years, until Szabó’s death. The immediate post-war years brought the Polio-disease to Kotányi that left one of his arms completely and the other partially paralysed, and the proletarian dictatorship to Hungary that left the country unsuitable for human existence for about forty years. According to Szabó, for someone interested in philosophy that regime could not offer anything, so the two emigrated, using the chance provided by the ’56 revolt. In Bruxelles Kotányi completed his post-graduate studies as an urbanist. It was there that he got in contact with the S.I.. via Asgern Jorn and a three year period of close collaboration started. Expelled from the movement, Attila went to Germany, where he was a lecturer at the Duesseldorf Art Academy for twelve years. For about the last ten years of his life he almost repatriated to Hungary but, as he was understandably sceptical about this country, maintained his German citizenship. He died in Duesseldorf less than a year ago, following the complications caused by a stroke.
In his last years in Hungary his activity was largely limited to meetings and dialogues. For two years, along with a small group of people, I attended his regular „Saturday conversations”. I knew him as a philosopher, and, even though these philosophical conversations did not lack heated moments, I always found it difficult to imagine him as a member of a group of revolutionaries. In view of his statements contrasting sharply with hard-core Situationist views, such as „dialectics are the dance of Shiva, only to be contemplated and not to be used„ [12], it can be said, there is just nothing to be amazed about his expulsion, that occurred immediately after he submitted a proposal to Debord, on how to reform the critical attitude of the Internationale. The proposal has since disappeared, but I can imagine with a relative clarity what it could have been about: he mentioned once, how much he hated Brigitte Bardot’s tits in the bulletin. As he grew up in a different society, with a different kind of experience of dictatorship, the famous detournement might have seemed childish and also dangerous in his eyes.
He came from a philosophical background that related Marxism to Christosophia, understood mainly as dialogue, as a concrete preference of the spoken word to the dead one. In the S.I. there are only a few, and quite hermetic pages from him, although it is apparent from other parts of the bulletin that he was very active in the organisation. Later on he consistently refused virtually every kind of mediated communication: did not give interviews, did not publish, was hardly willing to speak to more than twenty people. He considered ’opinions’ as being products of the market.
What he did talk about at these conversations, beyond elaborating on different features of the ’unknown’ capitalism, seemed to be diametrically opposed to the situationists’ lessons: his main theme was the role of the Sabbath, as the most concrete suspension of participation, and, as a corollary, the importance of self-defence. In reality, this approach had the same roots as the situationists obsession with participation – only their evaluation of the power of „reality” was different. In Kotányi’s view, social-political reality is dictatorship par excellence that can be critiqued in a sufficiently subversive manner by at most two or three people saying „yes” and „no”.
As I became socialised under Hungary’s soft-communist regime, I perceived culture’s detachment from other aspects of social/political life, as absolute. It really was in a way, due to those special circumstances created by the ’double language’ system of those times – one was the official language that virtually none of its speakers and listeners perceived as real (formally quite similar, though, to the one used by the S.I.), the other was the one of that large scale hidden (and extremely cynical) consensus, dissident towards the communist ideology, which developed its content and conclusions largely out of the negation of the first one – reality itself was in a way simply independent from its perception. It was the second discourse where contemporary art could reign in its most independent, flourishing, quasi-philosophical appearance, out of the energies gained simultaneously from censorship and from the hidden consensus.
When capitalism came to rule, art’s philosophical character, its inherited detachment distance from ’reality’ had lost its basis. Dissident approaches towards the new master had been encoded within the official discourse of the previous regime thus they could not make room in the hidden one, so, after a short and extremely disgusting transition, we had to socialise again and re-discover what political and social mean. Situationist ideas at this point were extremely important, even though today I would say, they only work for me together with the corrections and limitations presented by Kotányi.
1 This text is a revised version of the article submitted to Art-Ist, under the title: How can the demand of playfullness turn into terror?.
2 From the preface to the third French edition of „La societe du spectacle„.
3 The Workers’ Councils were set up in almost all the factories in Budapest immediately after the revolt succeded in getting rid of the old party leadership, but based on their actual projects and impact, they were far from the iconographic position attributed to them by Debord.
4 All references in this paragraph are from: „Manifeste”, S.I. 4/1960.
5 ,The Society of the Spectacle’, chapter IX, ,Ideology in material form’.
6 At the 5th Conference of the S.I. in Gothemberg (1961) Kotányi himself proposes to term the artistic activity of the S.I. members as anti-situationist. This conference was the overture of the large-scale cleansing in the movement. Kotányi’s proposal though was a very intelligent solution to cut through the Gordian knot, being permissive towards artistic creativity, but distinguishing it from the essence of the movement, which was, as he put it: „(…) the elaboration of certain truths that have the power of a high explosive”.
7 Michel de Certeau’s term, see in: The Practice of Everyday Life, 1984.
8 Term launched by Michael Hardt/Toni Negri in ‘Empire’ (New York University Press, 2000.), appropriated later on by the anti-corporate globalisation movement
9 ibid.
10 From the point of view of changing dictionaries it is instructive to quote Kotányi’s Gangland et philosophie (in: S.I. n. 4. 1960): „I propose that sometimes instead of district we should read: gangland. Instead of social organisation: protection. Instead of society: racket. Instead of culture: conditioning. Instead of leisure: protected crime. Instead of education: premeditation.”
11 Lecture at Metaforum III., Budapest, 1996 October, with the title Is There Any Media Criticism That Isn’t Suicidal?, to be found in several sites on the Internet.
12 Kotányi Attila: Az írott ikon: emlékeztető eredeti természetünkre, in: ,Eikon’, Ernst Museum, Budapest, 1997.