B U R E A U O F P U B L I C S E C R E T S

Rapid Responses

(Selected passages from Ken Knabb’s correspondence)

Myopia of engaged Buddhism
Alternative education
Recommended reading list
Reply to a would-be suicide
Anarchism and primitivism
Critique of Theft magazine
Critique of CrimethInc
Classical music recommendations
Reformism and electoral politics (I)
Reformism and electoral politics (II)
The Frankfurt School
Reply to a Midwestern liberal
Understanding Debord dialectically
The situationists on economic crises
Translating Debord (I)
Translating Debord (II)
Translating Debord (III)
Pleasures and their limits under present conditions
Rejection of an academic invitation
Situationist Anthology bias?
Unavoidable hierarchies and specializations
Wilhelm Reich
Peak Oil?

Myopia of engaged Buddhism

[Response to Santikaro Bhikkhu, a Buddhist monk then living in Thailand and coeditor of “Entering the Realm of Reality”, a collection of articles on socially engaged Buddhism.]

I read Entering the Realm of Reality when it first came out, but was disappointed with it. In Dec. 97 I went to a small gathering re it at Berkeley Zen Center led by Alan Senauke and Jonathan Watts [the other two editors of the book]. Not wishing to interfere with an encounter that might be significant for some of the participants (their chance to talk with each other or with the book editors), I sat quietly through the readings from the book and the brief discussion. Then, upon hearing that the meeting would now wind to an end, I decided I really should say something. (Alan had invited me to come and “stir up some discussion.”) I attempted to condense the numerous critiques I had of the book, and of the various remarks that had been made, into five or ten minutes, and was met with shock and utter incomprehension. Actually not so surprising given the mixture of people and the brief time allotted.

I continue to be astonished at how myopic the entire engaged Buddhist scene is. The EBs made one good advance in the1960s and 70s by recognizing and declaring that it’s necessary, or at least okay, for Buddhists to have some sort of social engagement. Twenty years later they’re still at the same square one, though some of them have the delusion that doing voluntary social service work while endlessly rehashing a few timid social-democratic platitudes puts them on “the cutting edge of social change.” The Buddhist Peace Fellowship founding statement had the merit of calling for a two-way exchange: bring Buddhist insights to social movements, but also bring social-radical insights to Buddhists. This latter aspect, however, has remained mostly lip service. Almost never does one hear, or read, any EB saying: “We should investigate May 68, or the Spanish revolution, or the history of anarchism, or the radical aspects of Marxism, or the innovative tactics of the situationists, etc. Even though they may be mistaken in some regards, there are probably some things we can learn from them.” If I remember rightly, you made some such remark in one of your articles; but it was only one sentence and was never followed up by you nor by anyone else I know of. The only social movements that the EBs actually study or refer to are utterly predictable things like Gandhiism that are guaranteed to reinforce their Buddhist prejudices. It seems to be assumed that if a theory or movement has anything violent or angry or “divisive” about it, it’s not worth looking into, period. In some ways the more seemingly sophisticated EBs may be more hopeless in this regard than the more naïve, because, having been in some militant group in the sixties or having read some trendy postmodernists, they think they’ve already “been there, done that,” whereas such things actually have virtually nothing to do with what I’m talking about.

[January 1999]

[A few months later I elaborated on these points in
Evading the Transformation of Reality: Engaged Buddhism at an Impasse.]

Alternative education

[Response to a student who had just received a prestigious four-year research scholarship and was wondering what he might do to take radical advantage of his situation. “Presently, I feel very much like what I’d imagine the Student Unionists of the University of Strasbourg felt like when they were elected in 1966 — now that I’ve got a piece of power, I’m somewhat at a loss as to how to properly utilize it. . . . My question to you is: what should I do? Or, perhaps more properly, what would you do in my situation?”]

I don’t think your situation is at all comparable to that of the Strasbourg scandalists. The latter found themselves in an official position as elected leaders of several thousand students. However ridiculous such a position might be in most regards, it gave them the legal power to draw on University (and/or Student Union) funds to pay for the “Student Poverty” pamphlet; to use school buildings for alternative purposes; to issue press releases on official stationery; to officially close the psychiatric bureaus, etc. You are in no such position of influence, much less of “power.” The slight prestige one gets from receiving even the most exalted academic fellowship is trivial, and would turn into ridicule of your pretension the moment you tried to exploit it as if it were of any significance. Nobody is going to pay any more attention to what you say or do merely because you have such a fellowship. (In fact, many might pay less attention, assuming that such a fellowship merely indicates that you’re a docile “good student.”)

On the other hand, the fellowship puts you in a relatively comfortable and flexible personal situation. If I were in your position, I would use the time to learn and explore and experiment. Learn at least French, and maybe one or two other languages if you find you have the knack and inclination. Read the situationists, of course, and their various forebears (Marx, the classic anarchists, utopians, etc.). But also the general classics (particularly those discussed in Rexroth’s two Classics Revisited volumes). And history, sciences, religions, philosophies — there’s all sorts of interesting stuff out there, even though what’s relevant has to be extricated from the bullshit. This will provide a good background for whatever you decide to do, and is likely to suggest personal tangents for further exploration and various experiments to try. To put all this knowledge in perspective, mix it up with camping out and traveling to other countries. And also “internal” trips via drugs (carefully) or preferably via some form of meditation...

Well, I’m starting to feel like the proverbial Dutch uncle giving platitudinous advice. My point is simply: explore and experiment. By all means speak out, or write critical texts, or carry out individual or collective actions if you feel sincerely inspired to do so. But not just because you feel you should “do something” or imitate the situationists. Don’t worry too much about the “political” relevance of all this, or get into a guilt trip about being part of academia. Just use the opportunity to have fun. Out of that will come plenty of ideas for things you’d like to do (subversive or otherwise).

[August 1999]

Reply to a would-be suicide

[Response to a long and very moping letter from someone who said he was considering suicide.]

I’m sorry if I seem unsympathetic, but I think it’s usually a waste of time to try to convince someone that life is worth living if they seem intent on believing that it isn’t.

Personally, I might consider suicide if I was faced with torture or life imprisonment or a painful terminal illness. Otherwise I see life as continually interesting, though often difficult and upsetting. A thousand lives would not be enough to explore all the things I’d like to.

Of course the present society is depressing, and threatens to get even worse if we don’t manage to do something about it. So do something about it, instead of moaning about how your “right to life” (there’s no such thing) is being taken from you and swallowing that Steiner-Gaia hogwash in an effort to find some meaning.

“The thing that endures, that gives value to life, is comradeship, loyalty, bravery, magnanimity, love, the relations of people in direct communication with each other. From this comes the beauty of life, its tragedy and its meaning, and from nowhere else” (Rexroth).

“In a society that has abolished every adventure, the only adventure that remains is to abolish that society” (May 1968 graffito). That’s a rhetorical oversimplification — there are still quite a few other possible adventures within the interstices of the system — but you get the idea.

Here’s an excerpt from Rexroth’s autobiography, describing his experiences as a World War II conscientious objector working in a psychiatric ward:

The psychotic, to my mind, means business, while after you’ve done a certain amount of counseling with a neurotic, you feel like saying, “Oh, for God’s sake, go out and get a job. Have something happen in your life.” I once took out on my back porch a girl who was coming to me for counseling and said, “You see that woman next door? She is a scarcely literate Irish woman. Her husband is an alcoholic. One son is feeble-minded. Another son is a tail gunner flying out of North Africa. The other son is a rifleman with Patton, who believes in killing as many people as possible on both sides. Her mother is senile and incontinent. If all these things were happening to you, you wouldn’t be here talking to me. You wouldn’t have time to be neurotic. You need something to happen to you. You need to do something — to act.” The girl, incidentally, did act and get “well” shortly.

I don’t mean to equate you with that neurotic girl, but simply to stress that there are lots of possibilities. It’s up to you to take some initiatives, instead of waiting for something good to happen. The fact that your mother did not improve like you had hoped does not mean that people cannot fundamentally change their lives. Many do, every day. I don’t mean that all their problems are miraculously solved, but that they learn how to deal with what previously seemed like intolerable problems.

I’m unimpressed and bored with people who are constantly indulging in extravagant, apocalyptic alternatives. The choice is not always between “climbing a mountain” and doing nothing. A lot of possibilities are much simpler, but they get drowned out by the spiritual melodramas that people create for themselves.

Have you tried Zen practice, for example? I don’t claim that it’s a cure-all, but it’s certainly more effective than reading a lot of books or speculating on the nature of man and the universe for getting down to basics. Who am I? What am I doing here? What are my real choices? What things are important, what not? Some problems (e.g. our present social conditions) remain and still need to be dealt with. But others, whether petty personal frustrations or dramatic “existential dilemmas,” tend to fade away as you settle into paying attention to what’s happening right now.

You speculate about “the split in the western mind” and hypothesize about using the human body as a means to a resolution. Well, start with your own. Instead of yacking about seeking “a place to stand” like Archimedes, try just sitting.

If you think that’s too much of a challenge and prefer to kill yourself, bon voyage.

[February 2001]

[He thanked me for the salutary “kick in the ass.”]

Anarchism and primitivism

[Response to an anarcho-syndicalist upset by the rabidly primitivist tendencies that were then flourishing within the anarchist scene — tendencies which are still all too present, but which seem to have faded somewhat in recent years.]

I share your concern about this phenomenon. But I’d like to make the following points:

1) Part of the problem, or the origin of the problem, lies in anarchism itself. The largely ideological character of anarchism (fixation on one-dimensional Manichean oppositions between absolutist concepts like Freedom vs. Authority, Individualism vs. Collectivism, Centralization vs. Decentralization, etc.) has meant that the anarchist movement has always been chock full of “quackery and mysticism” of every sort. I don’t mean that those eccentricities have always been bad (they form part of the countercultural stew that in many cases has actually been much more significant and innovative than the orthodox anarchist movement); but that since “being an anarchist” has generally required nothing more than being ”in favor” of “total freedom” and other such vaguenesses, virtually any crackpot who wants to has always been able to claim to be one. As long as the orthodox anarchists accept this ideological terrain (particularly if they fear to upset “anarchist unity”), it is difficult for them to contest the various extremisms that constantly crop up, because these latter can always seem to be simply more radical, more authentic forms of the ”essential principles” of anarchism (e.g., if being anarchist means that you’re opposed to the State above all else, what could be further away from the State than a hunter-gatherer society?). This is why Marx and the situationists, in their different ways, explicitly avoided identifying with any ideal to be realized, but stressed a continually self-superseding engagement with “the real movement that is suppressing existing conditions.”

2) To a great extent these delirious forms develop because they speak to issues or feelings that the radical movement has failed to confront. (I made a similar point apropos of what I saw as the situationists’ blindspot re religion.) A movement that can only endlessly rehash musty councilist or anarcho-syndicalist dogmas (however many kernels of truth the latter may contain) is not enough. People sense that there are other things to life, and they will seek spokespeople who address those concerns, be they issues of culture, everyday life, “spiritual” experiences, ecology, or nature.

3) I suspect that any sort of de facto “united front against primitivism” would not come to much. If for no other reason than the fact that any primarily defensive movement has already conceded the terrain and the initiative to the enemy and therefore generally loses the battle (like the people who focus obsessively on combatting neofascists, and end up accomplishing little more than giving the latter more of the publicity they thrive on). I think it’s appropriate to attack bullshit wherever and in whatever form it appears; but you have to be careful not to get too caught up in defining yourself as “Anti-X”, not to see any particular form as the Number-One Enemy that has to be opposed at all cost.

4) I’m not interested in taking part in an ongoing discussion of this issue. Having made my original attack on technophobes in “The Joy of Revolution” and now the recent followup with Filiss [The Poverty of Primitivism], I intend to move on to other things. However I would be pleased to be informed of any new developments (copies of critiques you publish or of notable primitivist responses, etc.).

[March 2001]

Critique of Theft magazine

[Upon receiving a copy of “Theft” magazine (Melbourne, Australia) with a request for comments.]

I don’t have time to comment on Theft #2 in any detail. The most notable criticism I have is that the last chapter is sometimes rather simplistic. While I think it’s fine to recommend that people seek pursuits that are enjoyable and satisfying to them, it seems to me rather silly to declare that life “should be” “perpetual ecstasy” etc. This kind of “should be” amounts to little more than that you think it would be nice if things were that way. It’s ultimately pretty meaningless, like saying that insects “should” have “the right” to live freely without being eaten by birds. It’s a false reasoning which you have probably picked up from Vaneigem. He rightly criticizes traditional leftism’s overemphasis on sacrificing for the cause, but then flips into an equally unjustified opposite conclusion the pleasure is the supreme criterion for everything, and then to the even more absurd implication that a successful revolution will somehow magically produce endless unalloyed pleasure.

Again, I think it’s good that you encourage people to reexamine their lives, to reduce addictive consumership, and to make space for relaxation and reflection. But you have to be careful not to be too rigid in your recommendations. “The more you consume, the less you live” makes a good graffiti, it conveys a good general point. But it shouldn’t be taken too literally, as if it were a precise scientific formula. In your SHIT [“Self Health Index Tester”] percentage test, for example, you more or less equate “the more of yourself is actually yours” (a rather vague notion in any case) with lower SHIT percentages. This amounts to an inverse economic fetishization, a sort of anti-economic puritanism, as if enjoyment was always inversely proportional to the degree of economic taint. Actually, of course, in many cases an activity that creates profit for someone may nevertheless be more enjoyable than another activity that puristically avoids the market. The best things in life are not always free, even if they “should” be. If you frequently present this kind of over-simplified formula, people with enough sense to know better will not take you seriously regarding the many other areas where you have valid points to make.

It’s also important to resist the temptation to be too specific. It’s good to give a few examples to give people a clearer idea of what you’re talking about. But if you fall into the “positivist” trap you end up trivializing your points. Many of our problems do not have easy solutions. One person in one situation may be better off to quit his job and try to get by in a different way. Another person in another situation might be better off to get a job rather than spending his life half starved scrounging in garbage cans and living in the streets. The choice involves a lot of factors (does he have a family? what kind of jobs are available? what sort of social welfare is available if he doesn’t work? how risky are the alternative illegal expedients he might use? etc.) that are more complex than simply declaring that “work time” is bad and “free time” is good. Part of being genuinely “antiauthoritarian” involves recognizing that the ultimate solution to the “social question” involves leaving people to figure out their own solutions to many of their problems.

In this context, I would say that although your pamphlet contains many valid points, the general format strikes me as somewhat too similar to ordinary publicity — collages of slogans and ads that add up to an overwhelming barrage of frantic bits of advice: “DO THIS AND YOU’LL FEEL GREAT!” “AVOID DOING THAT, IT’S ALIENATING!” . . . To take just one example, you say “Day dreaming subverts the world!” But you could just as justifiably have said “Day dreaming helps preserve alienated society” (by providing a psychological safety valve). Try to resist the temptation to rigidly separate things into Good and Bad. Most things are much more subtle and complex, they contain different aspects, they may even become transformed into their opposites. It’s usually better to examine things as calmly as possible, so as to foster people’s own reflective thinking. Have the faith that if you have really said something relevant to their lives, they themselves will figure out some appropriate conclusion without having simplistic formulas shouted at them.

I realize that in other parts of your pamphlet you do go into many of these issues in somewhat more nuanced detail. But I think you will see what I mean about these general tendencies.

[May 2001]

Critique of CrimethInc

[Upon receiving a copy of the CrimethInc book “Days of War, Nights of Love” with a request for comments. When I replied, I was under the erroneous impression that the guy who sent it to me was one of the authors.]

Thanks also for the CrimethInc book. In answer to your request for comments, I don’t have time to go into any great detail, but here are some brief impressions:

On the positive side, the book is well written and communicates a number of good points. In this regard it’s more interesting than most anarchist writings, which usually just repeat the same few basic ideas for the thousandth time. And it is evident that your ideas are closely linked to actual experiences — when you talk about the feel of freedom, the reader senses that you know what you’re talking about based on your own experiments and adventures.

It seems to me, however, that there are also some criticizable aspects.

Despite your cautions against ideology, your book is riddled with simplistic, unqualified declarations. In some places you are admirably open and modest, but in others you come on like you have definitive answers to practically everything from the meaning of life to whether people should wear deodorant or not.

Many of your descriptions of radical struggles are rather simplistic. One minor example out of many: To describe the Paris Commune as “a sort of continuous anarchist festival for a few months, before the usual spoilsports regained control and slaughtered everybody” (p. 83) is a really gross falsification of reality. Even if there was a festive aspect that it is important to acknowledge, the Commune was also filled with suffering, self-sacrifice, patriotism, compromises, confusions, betrayals, sordid political intrigues, conflicting ideologies. And part of the interest and importance of the Commune is precisely that its repressors were not “the usual spoilsports” — i.e. the relation of forces and classes was complicated and in some ways unprecedented, the people involved were not totally clear about who were friends and who were enemies. Readers who know nothing about the Commune will get an erroneous and trivialized impression of what went on, while those who actually know something about it may conclude that your social analyses are not to be trusted — that you’re presenting things very selectively in order to reinforce your ideology.

Just as you present rebellious actions as almost purely GOOD, you tend to present the system as almost purely BAD. In reality, just as most revolts and radical movements have been full of mistakes and limitations, many aspects of the present society are positive, or at least potentially so. The very fact that humanity has survived to this point demonstrates this. We all have a natural tendency to define our perspectives in these good vs. bad terms — it makes it easier to drum up enthusiasm for struggle — but when it gets too simplistic it falsifies reality and thus actually hinders any serious struggle.

There is also a recurring moralizing simplisticness. It is good that you recognize the element of necessary hypocrisy and compromise in our lives. But a lot of your agonizing over whether this or that practice is hypocritical is, to me, a phony, nonexistent issue. I do not view my options primarily in terms of whether I am “implicated” in capitalism, as if that were some sort of sin to be avoided at all cost. Nor, conversely, do I consider that I am accomplishing anything very notable if I avoid some such compromise, as if radical struggle were a matter of more and more people gradually becoming less and less implicated in the prevailing system. That perspective is just as simplistic as pacifists’ feeling that we will arrive at peace by more and more people becoming pacifists (while failing to confront economic and other factors that engender wars despite most people’s preference for peace). While I salute the sense of experimentation of your friend who tried to live off garbage pickings instead of buying food, it does not seem to me that such choices have much to do with radical strategy. If you take May 68, for example, the outcome hinged almost entirely on whether or not the workers occupying their factories would take that one additional step of restarting up necessary production and distribution under their own control. In such a context, whether this or that worker had previously been “implicated” in the system can be seen as largely irrelevant. (It is true, of course, that the workers’ previous habits of working, consuming, TV watching, etc., undoubtedly contributed to their hesitancy to take that final step. But that’s not at all the same thing as saying that the way to overcome capitalism is for people to withdraw from it as much as possible.)

I think that you could have made most of your points in far less space (a pamphlet rather than a book).

There is also an impression of excessive self-importance. I realize that your opening bit about the “spectre of CrimethInc” is at least partially ironic, but there still is a sense that you “CrimethInc agents” believe you are really hot stuff, a pole of international subversion, and that you are trying to mythologize yourselves (so people will have an image of cool CrimethInc underground adventurers like they used to about Che Guevara or the Weathermen, etc.). Without judging whether your present or potential importance justifies such posing, I think it’s usually more important to go in the other direction, to demystify yourselves and the intimidating images people have of radical underground heavies, rather than building them up.

I apologize for not giving more detailed examples of what I mean. But I think that this should suffice to give you a general idea.

As it happens, a group in Australia recently sent me an issue of their Theft magazine (it’s also online at www.theftmag.com) and asked me for comments. Although you will no doubt find some differences between yourselves and them, I think there are also a number of commonalities. In any case, I am appending my remarks to them because I think that some of the more general points also apply to your book.

[Here followed a copy of the above critique of “Theft” magazine. The “theftmag” link no longer works.]

[June 2001]

[The correspondent and other contacts subsequently posted this response on various online forums. It has also been reproduced at the libcom website.]

Classical music recommendations

[Response to a correspondent interested in learning about classical music, who asked if I had any recommendations to get him started.]

Here are some of my favorites:

MEDIEVAL & RENAISSANCE MUSIC (various collections)

SCARLATTI, Harpsichord Pieces

J.S. BACH, Solo Cello Suites, Harpsichord Partitas, Brandenburg Concertos, Concerto for Two Violins

MOZART, Haffner Symphony, Jupiter Symphony, The Marriage of Figaro (my favorite opera)

BEETHOVEN, Piano Sonatas, Kreutzer Sonata (violin-piano), Archduke Trio, Symphonies (Eroica, Fifth, Ninth)

BERLIOZ, Harold in Italy

DEBUSSY, Afternoon of a Faun, La Mer, Piano Pieces

SATIE, Piano Pieces

STRAVINSKY, The Rite of Spring

PROKOFIEV, Piano Concertos 1, 2 & 3

ORFF, Carmina Burana

BRECHT-WEILL, Threepenny Opera (original German version)

It does make some difference which performers. But most of the ones you will come across should be pretty good. The best way to start, since there’s so much and you won’t know till you begin to get into it what sort of things you may like, is to check out recordings from the library. Besides the above, try various general selections that are, or purport to be, among the best (“Great Recordings of the Century” etc.). If you find you don’t care for one composer, don’t worry about it, try another. Eventually some of it may grow on you as you get more familiar with it. Bon appetit!

[January 2002]

Reformism and electoral politics (I)

[“So are you arguing for a revolutionary day when we abolish political representation and private property, and that it is futile to push for an authentic ballot initiative system within the current context?”]

I am not saying that such efforts are not worth engaging in. I am simply pointing out that by themselves such changes will not suffice. In Chapter 2 of The Joy of Revolution I tried to examine the pros and cons of various types of reformist projects. At the risk of oversimplifying, I can sum it up by saying that (1) it is necessary to work for reforms (or improvements), and (2) reforms are not enough. Some reforms are relatively clear, others are more dubious because they imply involving oneself in so many compromises, most are a complex mixture. You have to decide where to put your energy, considering both your own passions and your own judgment of how some particular issue relates to the society and social struggles as a whole.

I will soon be sending out some excerpts from that chapter relating to electoral politics. You will note that although my general drift is rather anti-electoral, it is not rigidly or absolutely so (as is the usual anarchist line). I am not saying Don’t vote, or Don’t campaign for “progressive” issues or politicians. I am simply saying: Know what you are doing, be aware of the drawbacks as well as the advantages of whatever actions you take; and of the fact that there are many other tactics, some of which may be more effective and more healthy (because they are more direct and less encumbered with hypocrisy etc.). . . . As long as enormous economic differences continue to exist in the society as a whole (so that millionaires can manipulate the public’s views through advertising, or influence elected officials so as to prevent a given measure from being enforced even if it is passed, etc.), it usually will not make much difference if people are provided a token “opportunity” to vote on a few more issues.

[October 2002]

Reformism and electoral politics (II)

[Response to a correspondent upset about my pre-election message about the limits of electoral politics: “I understand the limits of the electoral process, but leaning so far left as to be left out is not an option. The rich are using the electoral process to run over us again and again: in San Francisco we have props R and N and A, and we MUST get out and vote against them or there will be hell to pay the day after. So sending an e-mail that gives us 5 good reasons to stay home and throw our votes away is a rather reckless stance to take, no matter how hip it may feel. Save it for after we’ve all gotten out and voted to save our sorry skins one more time.”]

I don’t believe there was anything in my statement that said “Don’t vote.” On the contrary, I explicitly (though briefly) dissociated myself from the typical anarchist position (which is indeed to urge people not to vote). I simply pointed out the limits of putting all your eggs in this one extremely rigged basket, which is one of the main ways that people’s attention is diverted from other tactics and other possibilities.

Please note also that the message I mailed out was only a few excerpts from a much longer text, The Joy of Revolution. Here’s another passage from Chapter 2 of that text:

In the name of realism, reformists limit themselves to pursuing “winnable” objectives, yet even when they win some little adjustment in the system it is usually offset by some other development at another level. This doesn’t mean that reforms are irrelevant, merely that they are insufficient. We have to keep resisting particular evils, but we also have to recognize that the system will keep generating new ones until we put an end to it. To suppose that a series of reforms will eventually add up to a qualitative change is like thinking we can get across a ten-foot chasm by a series of one-foot hops.

Social issues are complexly interrelated. People must be encouraged to carefully examine these interrelations, and to think and act for themselves instead of merely reacting to an unending succession of “urgent issues” the spectacle presents to them, or the system will never be changed.

[October 2002]

The Frankfurt School

[Response to a query about what the situationists thought of the “Frankfurt School” (Adorno, Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, etc.), and what I think of them. I expressed only my own view, but my impression is that the situationists felt much the same way.]

Very briefly (we can talk at more length if you’re in Berkeley sometime), I don’t think the Frankfort School is essential reading. There’s no doubt a lot of meaty stuff there, but it’s significantly diluted by its academic orientation, which tends to reinforce/encourage studying these things for their own sake, as an academic game. Which is why the FS is so popular among academics and others who want to avoid practical decisions and commitment. This is verified by the fact that the FS people themselves had relatively little engagement, even if their rhetoric sometimes verged on it. When something like May 68 came along, I don’t think any of them had much idea of what it might imply, even if some of the participants thought they were fulfilling the FS insights.

I’ve seen a lot of people get lost in such swamps, concluding that it is necessary to seriously study them (or Marx, for that matter), and never coming up with any significant fruit. You have to weigh the pluses and minuses. There are things you could learn from the FS, but there are also things you can learn from Gary Snyder or Paul Goodman or Rexroth or Mumford . . . or Homer or Herodotus or Gibbon or Montaigne or Lao Tzu . . . . Part of it depends on your own tastes — what draws you, how do you feel after reading a particular author. After I read Debord, I’m charged up, full of ideas, having learned lots of good implicit lessons (noting how he addressed some issue, what he left out . . .). After I read Adorno, I’m mostly just bored and depressed. For you it may be different.

[June 2003]

Reply to a Midwestern liberal

[Reply to an old friend of my family who lives in a rather conservative region of the country. “I have read with great interest your autobiography. . . . We had not anticipated that anarchy is ‘where you are at.’ We’ll have to give some thought to that belief, since we just don’t know much about it. We consider ourselves pretty much garden-variety ‘liberals’ who still espouse political democracy. One obvious problem is that the U.S. can no longer fall into that category and has become sort of a corporate oligarchy. I do feel that capitalism is a failed system and needs to be replaced with a more just process which doesn’t reward the rich and penalize the poor. However, I guess that I have looked at the human race (6-plus billion of us now) and thought that some sort of governmental structure would be necessary to at least maintain some semblance of order — preferably a world government with total abolition of nation states. Therefore, I need to know a lot more about anarchy — perhaps you can supply some especially good reading references.”]

“Anarchism” is not exactly where I’ve been at since 1970, when I discovered the situationists (who, among other things, criticized anarchists for tending to be too rigidly and dogmatically attached to the ideals of that particular ideology). But it’s close enough for preliminary purposes.

As for how “practical” an anarchist (or situationist, or libertarian socialist, or whatever it might called) society might be, it should be understood that it would not, as popularly believed, be “anything goes” or “against all organization,” but merely against hierarchical organization. It could be seen as simply the fullest, most authentic form of democracy, democracy extended to the maximum in all areas of life.

But such an extension would ultimately require also going beyond capitalism, inasmuch as one person’s or group’s “ownership” of basic needs of life is obviously very undemocratic. As long as such an economic system is allowed to continue, it naturally tends to maintain its unequal power and to undermine any real democracy due to the disproportionate influence that money wields (e.g. by manipulating news through ownership of media, by controlling political candidates through bribes or “contributions,” and by countless other forms of pressure and grossly unequal “competition”).

Furthermore, capitalism cannot be overcome merely by “nationalizing” wealth, because this merely tends to replace individual capitalist companies by one big capitalist company: the State, which generates its own new types of ruling classes: bureaucracies, with their own vested interests.

An anarchist, or genuinely socialist or communist, society (as opposed to the existing societies that have very falsely appropriated the latter terms) would thus not only be noncapitalist, but also nonstatist. The State would be replaced by various types and levels of grassroots, “bottom-up” democratic organization, with the larger-scale or “upper” levels being carefully limited and controlled by the “lower” levels (e.g. via delegates with very limited power, carefully mandated to deal with specific issues in specific ways, as opposed to “representatives” who have the power to pass hundreds of laws on any and ever topic and stay in power for years before they can be replaced).

This is indeed a big and very complex project, and one that may never happen. But in my view it’s the only one that actually has a chance to work in the long run. Which is not to say that other, more modest “reformist” projects are not also important. But I think that the latter can most accurately be seen as merely defensive holding actions. To once and for all get beyond the system that keeps generating all these “abuses,” I think that a more fundamental change is necessary.

As for “good reading references,” if I may be so immodest, I think one of the best is my own magnum opus, The Joy of Revolution. It covers all sorts of areas, the pros and cons of all sorts of different political tactics and strategies, with some speculations about how a liberated society might function.

[July 2003]

Understanding Debord dialectically

[Response to a lengthy series of questions about Debord and the situationists.]

Your questions are rather long and involved. I hope you will excuse me for not trying to answer them all in detail, which would be rather time-consuming. Instead, I am going to take a little different angle and just try to make one very general point on your whole orientation.

It seems to me that your questions reflect what I consider to be a basic (and very common) misconception: namely, taking “the spectacle” (and various other concepts — e.g. “the subject,” “the commodity,” “capital”) as rigidly fixed logical categories. If you do this, you automatically run into all sorts of apparent dilemmas, or even paradoxes — Does Debord believe the spectator is totally dominated by the spectacle, or only partially? If totally, how can revolt ever happen? If only partially, how come he is always phrasing matters in such seemingly totalistic ways?

I believe that such problems lie in the way you are relating to the book. (For simplicity’s sake I’ll refer to “you,” but please don’t take it personally. Your questions and concerns are quite reasonable, and certainly more serious than most people’s half-baked reactions to situationist theory. The same criticisms would apply to virtually everyone who discusses Debord.)

In my opinion, Debord’s book — like Marx’s writings, and dialectical theory in general — is generally misunderstood when it is viewed “objectively,” as if it were an ordinary description of reality, using the ordinary categories of thought. Instead, I believe that it can be rightly understood only by being used. Not used in an imitative, rote way like a cookbook or a car repair manual, but used nonetheless in a practical way.

Consider the famous May ’68 graffiti, “Be realistic, demand the impossible.”

If you look at that phrase from an ordinary logical commonsense point of view, it seems like nonsense. By definition, the impossible can never happen, so how can it be realistic to demand it? Probably that was indeed how it seemed to many people who first saw it on a wall back in 1968. But many other people did understand it because they were then involved in practical-critical actions. Because of that involvement, they could then see that the usual, seemingly practical notion that one should limit oneself to striving for what is “realistically possible” was actually part of the problem, in that it presumed the existence of the system that actually needed to be fundamentally transformed. The things desired by the rebels were indeed impossible in the context of the present system, but they might become possible if one were to get beyond that system. And to a certain extent, even while the system persisted, the mere action of opposing the system already created a new mental space, liberating people’s imaginations so that they could envision things that would previously have seemed impossible. (The same point, with the same ironic playing with the apparent paradox, is made by Oscar Wilde in the epigram to Chapter 4 of “The Joy of Revolution”.)

Another similar graffiti from the same time: “In a society that has destroyed all adventure, the only possible adventure lies in the destruction
of the society.”

Here again, if you take this too woodenly literally it seems like a self-contradiction (one adventure remains possible, so clearly “all” adventure has not been rendered impossible). But if you lighten up and take the slogan just a little more loosely, there’s no problem understanding what is being said.

These examples may be a bit simplistic, but I think that much the same applies to many misconceptions of the theses in Debord’s book, even if his points are usually more complex and subtle.

At one point you say: “It seems to me that the very nature of Debord’s descriptions of spectacle, subject and situation effectively rule out any kind of interaction between these two figures (spectacle and its opposition) that might allow the generation of something new.”

If that were really the case, Debord’s theory would be stupid and absurd and very few people would have paid any attention to it. In reality, Debord’s descriptions deal with scarcely anything but such interactions. They are precisely what is being examined and analyzed in so many different ways in all his works.

Again, you say: “If something is held up by the spectacle, is it not spectacle itself?”

The answer is that, looked at from one angle, it may be, but from another it may not be.

And again: “the spectacle and the subjects within it are effectively locked into a vicious circle.”

That may be so if you look at them purely schematically, as if it were a mathematical formula that said “A causes B, and B causes A.” But you must keep in mind that both the spectacle and the various subjects are “fuzzier” than that, more complicated, more variable and changeable and multidimensional. Thesis #3, for example, says that the spectacle presents itself both as the society itself and as a part of that society. Many other theses look at it from many other seemingly mutually contradictory angles. There is enough “continuity” that it makes sense to refer to “the spectacle” (so that instead of a chaotic collection of disparate phenomena it’s more a matter of analyzing various developments and mutations of a single, more or less coherent underlying social tendency), yet enough variables that you need to be aware that “the spectacle” is not one distinct, eternal “thing.”

Again, you say: “I think that the theses like this one, which crop up throughout the book, show that the spectacle must penetrate the spectator. By ‘penetrate’ I mean to suggest something other than a totally resistant subject — a subject that is not invulnerable to the effect of the environment. The basis of a Situationist refusal of spectacle is the primacy of a subject that is in its essence absolutely distinct from the structure that constrains its possibilities.”

Why “absolutely” distinct? (Couldn’t it just be partially different?) Why does a subject have to be “totally” resistant? (Couldn’t it just be somewhat rebellious in certain circumstances and relatively subservient in others?) Don’t you see that you’re just painting yourself in a corner with these extreme statements about fantasized “pure” entities? Water can flood a “whole” country without necessarily turning that country into 100% water. People can resist the flooding, or try to stay above the water by swimming or getting in a boat, without necessarily being “totally resistant” to water. As a matter of fact, far from being “absolutely distinct” from water, people’s bodies are composed largely of water, and they would soon die if they were deprived of it. This may seem like a silly example — I don’t claim that the analogy is exact — but I’m trying to make you see that the problem lies largely in the way you’re posing it — this fantasy of pure, absolutely antagonistic entities.

That sort of manicheanism is inherited from religion and from political ideologies such as anarchism that unconsciously carry on the same rigid dualistic point of view. The idea, for example, that humanity is “inherently good” while something else (the devil, capitalism, the state, the spectacle) is totally evil. In reality things are usually much more blurry. “The spectacle” is not some totally evil entity, it is simply a social-historical process that happens to have gotten out of hand in recent centuries (or more precisely, it is a symptom of the extreme development of another such process: capitalism). There’s nothing inherently wrong with people passively looking at things (as if “active” was always good and “looking” and “passive” were always bad). Debord — like Hegel and Marx before him — is simply using very trenchant terms/concepts to make clear, incisive points. He is not trying to construct a “philosophy” or to provide a “scientific” description of reality.

These remarks don’t answer your questions, they merely amount to saying that things are more complex than they may seem if you stick too rigidly to Debord’s words (treating them as a spectacle, in fact). But I hope they may help you to step back (and/or move “forward”) and get a little different perspective as you try to deal with those questions.

For example, it’s true that Debord in SOS [The Society of the Spectacle] is a bit more “optimistic” re the possibilities of revolution, and more pessimistic in his later Comments [Comments on the Society of the Spectacle]. But even in the latter book, if you read carefully you will see that he doesn’t see things quite so totalistically as it may appear at first sight. I think the passages you refer to that seem to indicate a “total” defeat are more a manner of speaking. In the broad context, there has indeed been a major defeat in that many possibilities open a few decades ago are now (more or less) closed (for the moment). But here and there in Comments there are hints that this defeat may not be definitive, that the system also still has its own serious contradictions. Even if the integrated spectacle “permeates all reality” that doesn’t mean it totally and permanently dominates everything or everyone.

The point, I think, is that this issue can best be debated in a looser, more open manner, bringing into consideration all sorts of data and experiences, rather than getting caught up in tedious academic-ideological debates over such vaguenesses as “the nature of the subject” or how Debord’s “position” on “the subject as a generative process” differs from Althusser’s, etc.

The same thing could be said about the “psychological” issues you mention. They are real issues, and you can find lots of fruitful insights in Vaneigem’s Revolution of Everyday Life and in Reich’s early works. Voyer’s brief text on Reich is interesting (though I don’t think much of Voyer’s other writings), and I discuss some related issues in Double-Reflection and the Case Study and in parts of The Joy of Revolution. But I suggest that you not take seemingly “opposed viewpoints” too seriously — e.g. fantasizing a split between the supposedly more Reichian-Vaneigemist King Mobbers and the supposedly more “rigid” or “dogmatic” Debordists. (As is often the case in such splits, the real issues were to a great extent more banal — see the SI’s account in I.S. #12: The Latest Exclusions.)

By all means, in this examination do include close study of Debord’s writings. But I suggest that you take them just a bit more lightly than you seem to have been doing, bearing in mind that they were written by a real and very lively human being who assumed readers who were also lively, experiencing beings, and who therefore (even if he doesn’t always say so as explicitly as does Vaneigem) always assumes that life, revolt, etc. are always in play, despite surface appearances. His seemingly pessimistic statements are to some extent just jabs to arouse people about some issue or other. “Wake up! Get real! We lost in that battle over there, stop pretending we didn’t! Pull yourself together and let’s figure out where we go from here (taking into account the following factors . . .)!” That’s really what Debord’s writings are always doing, no matter how abstruse and complex they may seem to be.

[January 2005]

The situationists on economic crises

[Response to a query about “the extent to which Debord subscribed to the notion that capitalism had solved its objective, or economic contradictions.”]

Debord (and the situs in general) did not believe that capitalism had definitively resolved all of its contradictions. They pointed out that it had partially or temporarily resolved some of them — e.g., “objectively” through New Deal-type state intervention that served as a corrective to the previously unregulated economic anarchy, and “subjectively” through the development of the spectacle and the general reorientation toward “consumer” concerns (see SOS #43).

Contrary to the ignorant and mendacious pseudocritiques by Dauvé [Gilles Dauvé, a.k.a. Jean Barrot] and others, it is clear that Debord was quite knowledgeable about Marxian economic theory, even if he didn’t yap about it all the time or clutter up his writings with lengthy undigested excerpts from Capital.

In SOS #82 he ridicules the notion that economic crises are scientifically predictable, and in SOS #88 he notes that, predictable or not, such crises alone will not suffice to bring about a revolution. In SIA p. 228 [Situationist International Anthology, new edition pp. 291-292] he ridicules the ultraleftists who are locked into this fetish (he is talking about people’s retrospective debate on what “caused” May 68):

Overcome by their shock in May, all the researchers of historical nothingness have admitted that no one had in any way foreseen what occurred. We must acknowledge a sort of exception to this in the case of all the sects of “resurrected Bolsheviks,” of whom it is fair to say that for the last thirty years they have not for one instant ceased heralding the imminence of the revolution of 1917. But they too were badly mistaken: this was not at all 1917 and in any case they were hardly equal to Lenin. As for the remains of the old non-Trotskyist ultraleft, they still needed at least a major economic crisis. They made any revolutionary moment contingent on its return, and saw nothing coming. Now that they have admitted that there was a revolutionary crisis in May they have to prove that some sort of invisible economic crisis was taking place in early 1968. As clueless and complacent as always, they are earnestly working on this problem, producing diagrams of increases in prices and unemployment. For them an economic crisis is no longer that terribly conspicuous objective reality that was so extensively experienced and described up through 1929, but rather a sort of eucharistic presence that is one of the foundations of their religion.

Translating Debord (I)

[Response to a reviewer of my translation of “The Society of the Spectacle” (“Anarchy” #61). I do not usually reply to reviews, but in this case the reviewer specifically asked me if I had any comments about his review, which is online here.]

Well, I think it’s misleading to contrast my translation with Nicholson-Smith’s as being a matter of “obscurity” versus “approachability.” As if the issue was purely one of understandability, and my version was an attempt to make the book easier to understand at any cost (“often making choices that are stripped of a subtlety that would evade and frustrate a first-time reader,” which makes it sound as if I were composing a Debord for Beginners à la Larry Law). Although I will admit that there are places where one can disagree with my particular rendering, my aim was to say exactly what Debord said, the way a literate English speaker would say it.

For a simple example, take the first sentence of the #5 that you quoted. The French reads:

Le spectacle ne peut être compris comme l’abus d’un monde de la vision, le produit des techniques de diffusion massive des images.

The B&R version is:

The spectacle cannot be understood as an abuse of the world of vision, as a product of the techniques of mass dissemination of images.

Pretty literal but not necessarily accurate. N-S’s clarifies it somewhat:

The spectacle cannot be understood either as a deliberate distortion of the visual world or as a product of the technology of the mass dissemination of images.

His “deliberate distortion” is better than “abuse” (abus does not mean “abuse,” but something more like deception), but it’s still not totally accurate, as there is nothing about “deliberate” in the original (the latter gratuitous addition makes it seem more conspiratorial, whereas most of the spectacle’s working is blind, automatic functioning, not sinister plots). And N-S creates a false dichotomy (“either as a deliberate . . . or as a product . . .,” whereas the original clearly indicates that the second phrase is simply a restatement of the first (“comme l’abus d’un monde de la vision, le produit des techniques de diffusion massive des images” — Debord does not say “vision, ou comme le produit . . .”).

Here is my version:

The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual deception produced by mass-media technologies.*

Rather “free,” I will admit. But I daresay it is a more accurate expression of what Debord actually says and means (as well as being more “readable” and more “accessible”). “Mere” is not in the original, but is added because that’s how we would say it in English (setting up the contrast with the second sentence — “it is not merely A, but something more profound: B”).

For another more detailed example, see the bottom of www.bopsecrets.org/recent/reviews.htm.

Incidentally, there is nothing “unusual” about my translating Weltanschauung as “worldview.” That’s the exact meaning. The reason Debord doesn’t do the same is that there is no French equivalent for the German term, as there is in English (French having trouble making such condensed nouns — it would have to say something like “view of the world,” which doesn’t have the same punch).

It is difficult to defend one’s own translation without seeming like a pretentious pedant, but I think that on the whole my translation is distinctly more accurate, as well as more clear and idiomatic, than the previous ones. If I hadn’t thought I could make significant improvements, I wouldn’t have bothered to do it.

[September 2006]

[*A French friend subsequently called my attention to the fact that, while abuser does indeed mean “to deceive”, abus in this context means “excess” (in the sense of misusing or overdoing something). I have thus changed my translation to: “The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual excess produced by mass-media technologies.”]

Translating Debord (II)

[Response to a Hong Kong correspondent who is translating “The Society of the Spectacle” into Chinese, and who asked for any general pointers I might have.]

As for general pointers, you should check How Not To Translate Situationist Texts for a few examples of how I translate (as well as examples of what to avoid). In general, I suggest starting with a rather literal translation (just to make sure that each word or phrase is included and understood). Then carefully consider/investigate what the sentence means. Then step back and try to imagine how a literate Chinese person would express that meaning. When you have done that, then go back over the literal version to see if anything has been lost. If it has, you may need to rewrite your translation to incorporate that aspect, which may mean that it will sound a bit strange in Chinese. In some cases the best you can do is a somewhat awkward compromise. You must above all convey the meaning; but that meaning must be conveyed as far as possible in a reasonably fluent Chinese style. In most cases this will be possible, but it will require you to spend much more time and thought and experimentation. In some cases I spent several hours trying to figure out the best way to express some difficult sentence. Sometimes the best I could do was still not completely satisfactory. In other cases I finally arrived at what I consider to be a rather good rendering, as in the following sentence from thesis 178:

Dans cet espace mouvant du jeu, et des variations librement choisies des règles du jeu, l’autonomie du lieu peut se retrouver, sans réintroduire un attachement exclusif au sol, et par là ramener la réalité du voyage, et de la vie comprise comme un voyage ayant en lui-même tout son sens.
In this game’s space, and in the freely chosen variations of the game’s rules, the autonomy of place can be rediscovered without the reintroduction of an exclusive attachment to the land, thus bringing back the reality of the voyage and of life understood as a voyage which contains its entire meaning within itself. [Black & Red]
By virtue of the resulting mobile space of play, and by virtue of freely chosen variations in the rules of the game, the independence of places will be rediscovered without any new exclusive tie to the soil, and thus too the authentic journey will be restored to us, along with authentic life understood as a journey containing its whole meaning within itself. [Nicholson-Smith]
The ever-changing playing field of this new world and the freely chosen variations in the rules of the game will regenerate a diversity of local scenes that are independent without being insular. And this diversity will revive the possibility of authentic journeys — journeys within an authentic life that is itself understood as a journey containing its whole meaning within itself. [Knabb]

If you know English well enough, I think you will see how my version avoids several awkwardnesses and unclarities of the previous versions. The middle portion (“will regenerate a diversity of local scenes that are independent without being insular”) is not very literal, but I think that if you examine the original carefully, you will agree that it conveys Debord’s actual meaning both precisely and concisely.

In the great majority of cases you should stick closely to the literal sense. I give this example of an extreme case of not necessarily sticking to a literal version in order to remind you that what is ultimately important is to convey the meaning. Needless to say, I do not mean to alter or simplify the meaning in order to make it “easier to understand.” I mean to find out for yourself what Debord means and to express that meaning in literate Chinese.

If you find some problematic passage, feel free to mention it to me, and I will try to specify the meaning or to explain why I chose to translate it as I did.

[February 2007]

Translating Debord (III)

[Response to a message by John McHale suggesting a number of possible
revisions of my translation of Debord’s Complete Cinematic Works.]

Thanks very much for your critiques and suggestions re CCW. It is always gratifying to find people reading one’s work so closely and carefully!

This said, only four of them convinced me to modify my version. I corrected two typos that you pointed out (pp. 5 and 149) and added two new notes (re Swift and Wordsworth). I already knew about the Wordsworth but had not thought to mention it. I had searched in vain for the Swift quote, misled by Debord’s erroneous reference to an essay rather than to Gulliver’s Travels. A couple of your other points had already been noted in my online Errata and corrected in the online versions of the texts.

Of your many other remarks, some call for no response, e.g. when you cite a published translation of a quote but I have used another or composed an alternative version that I find preferable. In one or two cases, you are mistaken. E.g. cynisme (p. 134) in French has a slightly broader connotation than in English — it can (and in this context obviously does) mean “impudence” instead of or in addition to “cynicism.” Many of your other remarks present valid points, but do not convince me. I was aware of virtually all the nuances you point out, but as you know, you sometimes have to choose the least bad rendering since none will completely reproduce all the original connotations. In some cases, it’s a tossup: If I were starting afresh, I might go along with your suggestion, but could just as readily stick with what is there now. In others, I think that your suggestion would actually make things worse — either because it would blur or cancel out some other important nuance or because it simply does not read smoothly and lucidly. In a few cases, such as the sentence on p. 126, any choice is probably doomed to be both clumsy and unclear (as is the original French).

A general note: One of the key points about détournements is that they are supposed to be irreverently practical. Just as the main idea is to seize something and turn it to one’s own use, regardless of the original context, so, if the original (because of different eras or languages) is inadequate in some way, it makes no sense to preserve it rigidly word for word on the grounds that “it was detourned from Shakespeare” or whomever. In some cases, this can lead to the opposite of what is intended. For example, the actual Swift quote is downright misleading (“can possibly meet with no censurers” in modern English implies that it also could possibly meet with censurers; to say nothing of the fact that “censurers” now evokes the notion of censorship, which is a quite different matter), whereas the sense of the French translation cited by Debord is quite clear. Again, the French version of the Shakespeare passage on p. 75 is actually “better” than the original, in the sense that it conveys more clearly what Debord means (i.e. he is not determined to “hate” the idle pleasures, but to disrupt or spoil them). I cite these two examples as extreme cases. Normally, of course, I seek the exact quotation. But I would feel disloyal to Debord and to his viewers if I were to mechanically stick to the original quote at the cost of falsifying Debord’s actual meaning. The purpose of détournement is precisely to find the best expression, even if it is necessary to steal it from someone else; it is not to pedantically showcase the stolen original at the cost of the clarity and cogency (and poetry) of the current work, which would be a perfect example of the dead dominating the living.

(To use an example from my own writing, a sentence of The Joy of Revolution was originally taken verbatim from an English translation of Descartes, but when we translated my text into French I did not insist on reproducing the original Descartes sentence, because my co-translator said that a somewhat different sentence presented the same idea more clearly.)

Again, thank you for your thoughtful comments. I appreciate being forced to reexamine all the nuances and possibilities, even if I ultimately decided to stick with most of my original choices. Please feel free to direct the same careful attention to any of my other writings or translations!

I was also happy to hear that you had contributed numerous corrections to the forthcoming translation of a volume of Debord’s Correspondence. Although I have criticized some of the style of your own translations, I recognize that you are devoted to the most rigorous accuracy in these matters, so I expect that your contributions will make that volume much less inaccurate that it would otherwise have been.

[October 2008]

Pleasures and their limits under present conditions

[Response to a correspondent who felt that my enthusiasm for various personal activities (Zen practice, folk music, rock climbing, etc.) was insufficiently critical because such activities serve to reinforce people’s acceptance of the dominant system. “I not wish to deny that there are pleasures and benefits to be found in meditation and the other activities you mentioned. However, I think we must be keenly aware that contemporary spectacular society increasingly secures the acquiescence of ordinary people (including, of course, ourselves) less through crude repressions than by means of the pleasures it fosters and delivers. If we are not to enter the spectacle of decomposition as one more voice condemning the dominant society in abstraction while at the same time extolling one or another consumable niche, we surely must be critical of our own pleasures and the pleasures of others. We should acknowledge that any pleasure that is consistent with the persistence of spectacular society is in all probability at least partly spectacular in nature; and, in that spirit, we should seek out and expose the alienated origins (or distortions) of the tastes we pleasurably indulge. Equally, we should not deny or conceal the awareness that such pleasures are inadequate, that the multiple confinements to which our pleasures are inevitably subject within a society of separation render them more or less paltry, especially when the possibilities of the epoch are considered. What I have in mind is thus a balance between taking such pleasure as we can, if only to keep ourselves from depression, isolation and madness, and feeling and manifesting contempt and dissatisfaction toward those same pleasures.” He went on to stress the importance of “clear and public statements” to cut through people’s illusions and mentioned that in a forthcoming text on Berlin he intended “to attack the pleasures I take during my visits to the city.”]

I understand the points you are making and agree with them to a certain extent. But I believe that if you stick too narrowly to these notions you will arrive at nothing but a very silly and pointless souring of everything you do. Strictly speaking, your points could apply to virtually anything — enjoying food and drink, making love, taking a walk in the woods, relaxing, dancing, humming a tune, playing a game, etc., etc. All of these things are indeed “allowed” by the current social system and could be said to “support” or “reinforce” it insofar as they help keep people physically and mentally functional, help prevent them from going insane or committing suicide, make the society seem somewhat more tolerable, take up time that might otherwise be devoted to radical activity, etc. Does that mean that each time you sit down to a meal with some friends you should remind them that what they are about to do is not revolutionary, and urge them to guard against the possibility that the pleasure of the food and socializing may tend to make them feel a little less angry and alienated? When I sing folk songs with some friends, would you suggest that I preface each song with a grim acknowledgment that singing it is “consistent with the persistence of spectacular society” and “at least partly spectacular in nature”?

As for “clear and public statements,” I have made a number of relatively sharp critiques of the limitations of Buddhist ideas and practices (notably my two leaflets re engaged Buddhism, but also scattered remarks in “The Joy of Revolution,” The Realization and Suppression of Religion, my autobiography and elsewhere re the downsides of religion, the limits of nonviolence, etc.). Many of the people I have practiced Zen with over the years are well aware of my views, and some of them share them to some extent even if they do not fully grasp the whole situationist perspective. In any case, I don’t go there to discuss politics but to take part in the practice, which involves paying wholehearted attention to whatever it is we’re doing at the moment, however seemingly “paltry” and insignificant. Our present-day lives obviously fall far short of what they could be in a more sanely organized society, but I think it is missing the point to conclude that we should constantly “manifest contempt and dissatisfaction” toward the pleasures available to us now. A postrevolutionary society, if we are ever lucky enough arrive at one, will not be some nonstop orgasm. Its pleasures will still consist largely of simple little things like a kiss, a smile, a song, a cup of tea, a breath of fresh air, though such things will be multiplied and enrichened by the radically different social context in which they occur.

Just as I have no significant problem with many of these limited activities, I also have no problem if someone makes a more aggressive and explicit critique of them. I think that’s fine, I’m all for it if you happen to be particularly moved to do so. But you have to bear in mind that this sort of thing gets awfully old awfully fast. I disrupted a couple of poetry readings back in 1970 (the Gary Snyder reading and also the Ode on the Absence of Real Poetry Here This Afternoon that I read at an open reading), but I have not done so since then. If the issue comes up, I may tell someone that I like this or that poem but that on the whole I see certain limitations in poetry, and perhaps mention my Snyder disruption or the situationist ideas about the realization and suppression of art. I still feel very good about having done that Snyder disruption because it represented a personal turning point for me as well as a challenge for others — as I said in the autobiography, I believe that at that moment I was in a sense being more truly creative and “poetic” than Snyder was. But if I had continued to show up at every local poetry reading with substantially the same critique it would soon have become completely boring for me as well as for everyone else, and would have been unlikely to inspire any interest at all. You have to keep moving.

In this regard, I encourage you to approach Berlin with an open mind — ready indeed to call attention to its problems, but also ready to appreciate whatever you may discover that is new and unexpected. I will have no interest in reading a thousandth version of how alienated modern cities are, but I will read with interest a candid account of your experiences and experiments there, which will naturally include, but hopefully not be dominated by, your awareness of the city’s problematic aspects.

To sum up, if you feel deeply moved to express critiques of the illusions or limitations involved in this or that activity, by all means do so. But I think that people who dwell on such things rarely accomplish anything but souring their own lives and boring everyone else.

[January 2008]

[This correspondent, Wayne Spencer, has posted our complete exchange on this topic at his blog under the title A Discussion with Ken Knabb.]

Rejection of an academic invitation

[Response to a college teacher who wished to introduce her students to the situationists, in particular to their psychogeographical explorations, and who asked if I would be interested in speaking to her class.]

Thanks for your offer, but I will respectfully decline. For the most part, I (like the original situationists themselves) have maintained a pretty low profile and have declined invitations to give talks, interviews, etc. (see Public Secrets p. 140).* I don’t have a hard line on this — those local film appearances you mention represent a recent experiment on my part to see how such appearances might work out in that particular context — but on the whole I remain convinced that the things I have written or translated speak quite well for themselves without requiring any “in-person” presence. There is a rich mass of informative and suggestive material in those publications, including lots of articles on dérives, psychogeography, urbanism, etc. — more than enough to help any person with initiative to get started in their own experiments. If they don’t have such initiative but are merely trying to get through some class, I have no particular interest in feeding their passive curiosity.

I do not mean to seem dismissive of your efforts. If I was a teacher I’d probably try doing some of the things you are. In a separate message I will send you links to some of the psychogeography-related texts at my website to which you may want to direct your students. But I suggest that at the same time you ask them to read On the Poverty of Student Life so that you and they can also look closer to home, considering and discussing the more banal and less exotic social geography of the academia in which you find yourselves.

[January 2008]

[*The passage referred to, which can be found online here, reads in part as follows:

Since the original SI members have generally remained unavailable, I have sometimes been considered the next best thing, and have been asked to do booksignings, to grant interviews, to give talks, to be videotaped, to contribute to various publications, to provide information for graduate theses, to take part in radical conferences and academic symposiums, to be a “visiting artist” at an art institute, and even to furnish background material for a television program. I have refused all these requests. . . . Although I’m somewhat less rigorous in these matters than was the SI, when I am asked to present or represent “the situationist perspective” I feel I convey that perspective most incisively by refusing the kinds of things the situationists themselves consistently refused. Anyone is free to reprint, adapt or comment on the SI Anthology or any of my other publications. I can’t take seriously those who never do so while seeking some personal encounter or scoop designed to give spectators the impression they have gotten some inside dope about texts they often haven’t even bothered to read, much less put into practice. It seems to me that maintaining this distance puts things on the clearest basis.]

[As I said, I don’t have a hard line about these matters. I am usually happy to provide information or to answer reasonably pertinent and specific questions (as opposed to vague generalities like “Could you explain what situationism is?” or “In your opinion what influence have the situationists had on the world?”) and on occasion I have taken part in certain public events. During the last year, for example, I have been providing introductory remarks and answering questions at several Bay Area showings of Debord’s films. It may be that as time goes on I will do more of these sorts of thing if they seem like they might be useful and interesting. But my main point still holds: I am interested in contributing to inventive radical experiments carried out by autonomous participants, not in providing idle entertainment to feed people’s passive curiosity.]

Situationist Anthology bias?

[“Your selection of certain authors and removal of others in your anthology of the SI has been criticized. Do you have any comment? You are also described as having chosen the political side of situationism and left aside the artistic movement. Is that correct?”]

I believe that my anthology is generally very balanced and comprehensive. The academics and cultural avant-gardists who have a horror of social revolution, or who are cluelessly oblivious to it, naturally prefer the earlier, more “artistic” aspects of the SI (and even more, of the pre-SI period), which offer exotic intrigue for fascinated spectators without presenting any real challenge to their own lives. That early period is indeed very interesting, and it was that point of departure that gave the situationists a more profound experiential grounding in culture and everyday life than other radical groups. But conversely, those early adventures derive much of their interest from their connection with the later political adventures. Without those later adventures (Strasbourg, May 68, etc.), virtually no one would ever have heard of the obscure early adventures back in the 1950s. In any case, my “bias” in this regard is greatly exaggerated. One critic claimed that my SI Anthology includes “virtually nothing from the first third of the group’s existence.” Actually the SIA includes 7 articles (43 pages) of pre-SI texts and 22 articles (85 pages) from the first third of the SI’s existence (1957-1962) — a rather substantial amount of material, although I do indeed present even more material from the last two-thirds of the group’s existence. Incidentally, these critics do not seem to have noticed that one of the reasons for this imbalance is that the later period had a lot more substantial material to draw from. Issues 10-12 of Internationale Situationniste contain almost as many pages as the first nine issues put together, and in general the quality gets better as they go along. Does anyone really think I should have left out some of those superlative analyses of May 68, China, Czechoslovakia, Vietnam, Algeria, Watts, etc., so that I could include a few more early SI texts, or even some of the pompous twaddle by the excluded Nashists and other neo-artists who were only briefly in the SI and who never seem to have really grasped what it was all about? It was not I, but the SI that “left aside the artistic movement” in order to move on to a broader terrain of activity.

As I noted in my autobiography [1997]:

A few other critics claimed that I “concealed” the earlier, more cultural phase of the SI. The Anthology is admittedly weighted somewhat toward the situationists’ later, more “political” period (without which no one but a few specialists in obscure avant-garde movements would have ever heard of them), but the main features of the earlier phase could hardly escape anyone who reads the first dozen articles of the book. I probably would have included more selections from Potlatch and other pre-SI material if it had been available at the time [i.e. 1981, when Potlatch and much of the other pre-SI material was not accessible anywhere]; but if I didn’t go into the subsequent history of the “Nashists” and other artistic tendencies this is because I think they are of little interest and have little to do with the situationists’ most original and vital contributions. Since the book’s appearance these critics have had fifteen years to publish the vital texts I supposedly concealed; so far what they have come up with has not been overwhelming.

[March 2008]

Unavoidable hierarchies and specializations

[Response to a question about “the situationists’ and your position on specialization. To my understanding they/you are against it, and support eliminating jobs and rotating the remaining necessary tasks. How does this economy provide medical doctors, engineers, and other specialized positions that would still exist without the spectacle?”]

I touch on this issue in a few places in the last chapter of The Joy of Revolution. In the section “Consensus, Majority Rule and Unavoidable Hierarchies” I quote the situationists’ call for “abolition of hierarchy and independent specializations.” The key word here is independent, which in this context means a separate professional clique that is independent from popular control, capable of holding the rest of society hostage because they hold a monopoly on some type of technical expertise or “trade secrets.” A few paragraphs later I say:

A nonhierarchical society does not mean that everyone magically becomes equally talented or must participate equally in everything; it simply means that materially based and reinforced hierarchies have been eliminated. Although differences of abilities will undoubtedly diminish when everyone is encouraged to develop their fullest potentials, the point is that whatever differences remain will no longer be transformed into differences of wealth or power. People will be able to take part in a far wider range of activities than they do now, but they won’t have to rotate all positions all the time if they don’t feel like it. If someone has a special taste and knack for a certain task, others will probably be happy to let her do it as much as she wants — at least until someone else wants a shot at it. “Independent specializations” (monopolistic control over socially vital information or technologies) will be abolished; open, nondominating specializations will flourish. People will still ask more knowledgeable persons for advice when they feel the need for it (though if they are curious or suspicious they will always be encouraged to investigate for themselves). They will still be free to voluntarily submit themselves as students to a teacher, apprentices to a master, players to a coach or performers to a director — remaining equally free to discontinue the relation at any time. In some activities, such as group folksinging, anyone can join right in; others, such as performing a classical concerto, may require rigorous training and coherent direction, with some people taking leading roles, others following, and others being happy just to listen. There should be plenty of opportunity for both types. The situationist critique of the spectacle is a critique of an excessive tendency in present society; it does not imply that everyone must be an “active participant” twenty-four hours a day.

Later, in the “Blossoming of Free Communities” section, I say:

More than enough people will gravitate to socially necessary projects, in agronomy, medicine, engineering, educational innovation, environmental restoration and so on, for no other reason than that they find them interesting and satisfying. Others may prefer less utilitarian pursuits. . . .

The idea is that we need to abolish the sorts of specializations that entail a small group’s monopolistic control over some field, not specialization as such. Medical care is an obvious example of an area where we will continue to need some degree of specialization (though there will no doubt be some simplification as the emphasis shifts to widespread awareness of preventive medicine and healthier lifestyles, rather than supercomplicated surgical fixes). The point is that certain people will study and develop their skills in this type of specialization because they like it, sense that they are good at it, and find it satisfying to help people, not because they can make big bucks and block others from figuring out cheaper and more effective ways to accomplish the same goals. Once people have seen through, and gone beyond, the mass of artificially maintained pseudoneeds, they will soon enough figure out which specialized skills really are still needed, and they will then see to it that appropriate schools, hospitals, research facilities, etc., are made available to produce or implement such specializations.

[April 2008]

Wilhelm Reich

[“Assuming that you are still interested in Reich, are there any book recommendations you can make on practical applications of Reichian techniques? The material in your book [“Public Secrets”] gives the only hints I have come across so far. I have read a number of works by and about Reich, some of which are quite bizarre, particularly those that deal with his later theories.”]

I have never delved very much into “practical applications” of Reich beyond a few exercises gleaned from books by the neo-Reichian Alexander Lowen and a few loose, improvised experiments described or hinted at in my Case Study, where I played around with different combinations of free association, dérives, dream analyses, encounters, etc. In any case, I am very dubious about Reich’s later “orgone” theories, as well as about the post-Reichian trips like those you mention that depoliticize his works and concentrate exclusively on some sort of self-centered self-therapy. Some of Reich’s methods may produce significant personal results, but I’m not sure that they amount to anything very different from what can be obtained through many other types of physical and/or spiritual disciplines (yoga, tai chi, chigong, zazen, sufi dancing, etc., etc.). I think it is ultimately more important to navigate your way through life in a more open-ended manner, to continually experiment with sequences or combinations of activities that juxtapose different aspects of life, rather than fixating too narrowly on any one particular trip. I am not impressed by people who have achieved a certain psychological or sexual liberation if they remain politically clueless, just as I note that people who have some political awareness are often incapable of using that awareness in any practical way, in part due to their personal repressions.

The Irrational in Politics (by Maurice Brinton) is online at http://libcom.org/library/Irrational-in-politics-Maurice-Brinton. It’s also included in the recent collection of Brinton’s work, For Workers’ Power. I haven’t reread it in a long time, but I remember it as providing a pretty good summary of Reich’s most valid aspects.

[April 2008]

Peak Oil?

[Reply to a Spanish contact (I have slightly corrected his English style): “I write to ask you what you think about ‘peak oil.’ I guess you know what I’m talking about: the end of cheap oil and the collapse of global capitalism. . . . I think we cannot ignore the facts: the market economy is going to collapse in a few years. It seems that history is finally proving right all the people who tried to radically change the roots of society. But as we know, we have not succeeded. Market economy rules the world, and everyone is addicted to its paradigms. But now it will be every year more clear that this system is built on a big lie which cannot be believed anymore. It seems strange to me that people like you and me, who call themselves ‘revolutionary,’ don’t see the completely new situation we are in. Today more than ever there is the need to go out of the market economy and create and organize new ways of living, without any dependancy on the system. It’s futile to try to reform or subvert capitalist society today: this society is going to collapse in a few years. We have to spread the reasons why it is going to collapse (the irrationality of capitalism and the market economy) and quickly organize the alternatives, but now it’s not a matter of our ‘desires’ as it was for the situationists, it’s not only the mediocrity of modern society, now it’s almost a matter of survival! Councilist organization, self-management practice, and autonomous values are today a matter of survival for the whole society! . . . Don’t you think that revolutionary theory has to meet with these facts? I do think we have to check and reform our theories due to this completely new situation we are entering: the global decline of capitalism.”]

I am aware of the peak oil theory, and also of some other views that question that theory. In either case, I question whether our situation is “completely new.” It has been evident for at least the last 50 years that humanity is facing a series of crises of various overlapping kinds (ecological, economic, socio-political, “psycho-spiritual”) that will lead to global ecological disaster if we do not succeed in radically transforming the present social system. The situationists and others referred to this unavoidable choice (see, for example, The Real Split in the International ##15-18, 1972) and Rexroth evoked it even earlier and more often (see, for example, the two articles on ecology at www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/sf/1968-69.htm). There were differences of prognosis, some thinking that nuclear war would destroy the world within a decade or two, others that overpopulation would do so within the next half-century, others that the ecological point of no return had already been passed, though its ultimate effects would not be evident till some time later (Rexroth tended toward this latter view).

My point here is not that these earlier prognoses were wrong. (They were mostly on the right track, but other factors entered in to postpone the disasters for a few more decades.) It is to point out that people have a tendency to focus on some particular crisis and to panic — “Alas! This is the ultimate threat, and it’s coming right away! We must immediately drop everything else to avert it! We’re fighting for our very survival, hence we don’t have time to fight for the quality of our lives!” But as the situationists pointed out, if we merely fight for survival, we remain on the defensive, stuck on the terrain of the system, and thus we will inevitably fail. It is only by fighting for real life — for a truly satisfying, qualitatively different mode of life and society — that we can really challenge the mindlessly destructive forces and tendencies that are leading toward global disaster. As Vaneigem put it, “We can survive only as antisurvivors.” [www.bopsecrets.org/SI/8.basic2.htm #16] I expanded on that point in one of my leaflets 15 years ago:

One of the May 1968 graffiti was: Be realistic, demand the impossible. “Constructive alternatives” within the context of the present social order are at best limited, temporary, ambiguous; they tend to be coopted and become part of the problem. We may be forced to deal with certain urgent issues such as war or environmental threats, but if we accept the system’s own terms and confine ourselves to merely reacting to each new mess produced by it, we will never overcome it. Ultimately we can solve survival issues only by refusing to be blackmailed by them, by aggressively going beyond them to challenge the whole anachronistic social organization of life. Movements that limit themselves to cringing defensive protests will not even achieve the pitiful survival goals they set for themselves. [www.bopsecrets.org/PS/buddhists.htm]

It may be that the peak oil theory is right and we will experience some severe social collapse in the near future. Or it may be that its critics are right and that other factors will mitigate or postpone that collapse for some time (so that it is, say, 30 years away instead of 10). In that case, some other disaster may come first (global warming, the destruction of the oceans, some combination of increased environmental poisoning and/or famines and/or diseases, a chain reaction of wars or of insane fascistic or fundamentalist mass movements, etc.). These and many other crises and potential disasters have been around for many decades. They are indeed serious. We have to address them. But we have to address them all at once, as part of a comprehensive, holistic perspective. This is why I am leery of any tendency to make a fetish out of any one particular crisis. Such notions tend to make people panic and thus ignore other equally important factors. A crude example: if people see peak oil as the problem, they will tend to support some politician who promises to deal with it better than other politicians, even though all these politicians help maintain many other aspects of the system that is ultimately responsible for these crises.

I agree with you that it is important to call attention to these impending crises, but I think that (1) we should not be stuck too exclusively in one prognosis (“The system will collapse in the following way, within the following time frame, due to peak oil”) and (2) we have to be careful not to fall into the trap of our desperation giving rise to simplistic alternatives. When you say: “Today more than ever there is the need to go out of the market economy and create and organize new ways of living, without any dependancy on the system,” it sounds like you’re suggesting notions such as going off to create a country commune that raises its own food, etc. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with trying to do that if such projects appeal to you, but I don’t think that such things represent a genuine escape from the system. The system itself, with all its cities and factories etc., must ultimately be dealt with. It will not just neatly collapse, leaving people free to set up nice alternative ecological lifestyles “outside” of it. You are right that it is not enough to just “reform” it. It must be actively and creatively transformed from top to bottom. This is a very complex project, and we may not succeed. But I don’t think that anything less will work. When people fetishize some bad thing (“This is the crucial problem, so urgent that everything else pales by comparison!”) then they tend to rally to some alternative, equally simplistic fetish (“We must all immediately stop driving, raise our own food, form country communes, become vegan . . .”) which tends to produce a narrow, sectarian, survivalist mentality among a supposedly enlightened minority (“We are doing our part, but all those other clueless people are still living within the system”) while leaving the system free to grind on in its destructive way.

To sum up: I agree that our theories must address these kinds of crises. But I do not agree that these crises are “completely new.” They have been around for some time now, and certain theories, including (in rather different ways) that of the situationists and that of Rexroth, have already addressed them pretty profoundly and explicitly.

[August 2008]

Most of my correspondence involves personal matters or translation projects or more or less routine exchanges of information that would be of little interest to anyone else. In other cases, discussions that were once topical are now rather dated, or the most pertinent points have been incorporated into my published writings. But occasionally some text or query incites me to go into issues that may interest other readers. As an experiment, I am reproducing a few examples here. —KK (December 2007).

[February-August 2008: In response to a fair amount of positive feedback, I have added several more.]

No copyright.

Hit Counter visits to this webpage (beginning 11 December 2007).

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Bureau of Public Secrets, PO Box 1044, Berkeley CA 94701, USA
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Rapid Responses

Myopia of engaged Buddhism

Alternative education

Recommended reading list

Reply to a would-be suicide

Anarchism and primitivism

Critique of Theft magazine

Critique of CrimethInc

Classical music recommendations

Reformism and electoral politics (I)

Reformism and electoral politics (II)

The Frankfurt School

Reply to a Midwestern liberal

Understanding Debord dialectically

The situationists on economic crises

Translating Debord (I)

Translating Debord (II)

Translating Debord (III)

Pleasures and their limits under present conditions

Rejection of an academic invitation

Situationist Anthology bias?

Unavoidable hierarchies and specializations

Wilhelm Reich

Peak Oil?

Bureau of Public Secrets, PO Box 1044, Berkeley CA 94701, USA www.bopsecrets.org knabb@bopsecrets.org

Bureau of Public Secrets, PO Box 1044, Berkeley CA 94701, USA
www.bopsecrets.org knabb@bopsecrets.org