Communiqué #6: Détournement and Happiness.
•
by Johnobrow
I was disappointed to recently discover that despite my (I won't say best) efforts, eRepublik still exists. Since those who make revolution half way only dig their own graves, I shall once (maybe more than once if I'm honest) again endeavor to entice you to quit. Since I cannot murder your virtual selves (what would even give me such a right? I mean, let's face it, Tyler Durden in Fight Club was a bit of a dick), I call upon you all to voluntarily pop your spectacular proverbial clogs. Why? Well, I'll tell you why... through the medium of DÉTOURNMENT!
Yes, I will explain what the fuck that is. Détournement is the practise of subverting or revealing hidden meanings or truths in art and image-based media by changing or adding a single element within it, usually the text or dialogue. And so...
...a popular webcomic that expresses oppression and alienation through stick-men, exposes oppression and alienation through détournement!
P.S. You too can turn the spectacle's power of conditioning to promote the struggle against conditioning - you too can détourn!
Facebook
Twitter
Discord
Comments
Quick, comrade! The old world is behind you; jump!
Voted! 🙂
DESTROY THIS GAME
Nice cartoon. Not sure the punch line still holds though, even if I wanted it to.
The Situationist International was so uncompromising in its demands on its adherents that one by one all its members were expelled. In the end Debord even expelled himself -- rather forcefully -- taking his adoption of Schopenhauer's deep sense of pessimism to its logical conclusion.
Debord's chilliastic serenity had --and still has -- its legions of ironic imitators, from Gang of Four to Rage Against the Machine and Fugazi. That music is still refreshing in the way it refuses to adapt of tone of moral posturizing. Good on them. And the spirit of détournement seems to be alive and well where it naturally lives -- in the streets and on the internet -- from the dozens upon dozens of clever appropriations made by the Occupy movement, to the speed with which the "Party of Crooks and Thieves" meme recently zipped its way around the Russian Federation.
But on what basis could one really live like Debord and reject the whole of society today? What redemptive option, no matter how spurious, could save a culture that is not only completely dominated by state and market, but which could now hardly function at all without such crutches?
Who can honestly say these days that they feel the Paris Commune stirring under their feet? I think it would take more than quitting eRepublik to cease being a slave to the Spectacle. Unless we detached altogether from the grid, we're apt to find ourselves spinning around inside Facebook or Google+, with much the same effect.
Not trying to be situationist-rejectionist. To this day there is no better critique of the failures of the revolutionary project that culminated in Stalinism. Yeah, people would do well to read The Society of the Spectacle -- or some time pondering a Louise Bouregois sculpture -- instead of eRep-clicking for a few days. Can't disagree with that.
...
...
And there are signs of resistance percolating everywhere. From the dockworkers and students joining to together on the West Coast of the US and in Japan to shut down shipping for day; to the alternative bolo-bolo style economic structures emerging at the local level in Greece; to the rumbling, uncontrollable ferment that is continuing to shake the patriarchal power structures of the Arab World; to the delightfully anti-ironic-irony of the Indian movement against being decleared dead before you've actually died. Plenty to do after you're done reading Debord's rants or pondering Bourgeois' spiders.
But I find myself taken aback a bit when really pondering Debord's conclusion. I remember being shocked a number of years ago when I saw an edition of an SI journal I'd acquired, and had kept on the bookshelves next to other radical texts, under glass in a museum exhibition on the SI. When does -- or rather, when did -- "situationism" itself become part of the Spectacle? And what does that mean? Regarding the advice to "jump", I suppose I default to the old wisdom: look before you leap.
Of course it's possible to exist outside the spectacle. I do it from time to time, nowhere near as much as I'd like, but one tries. As a form of social relations, the spectacle is not permanent, nor is it solid. It only 'exists' (with want of a better word) when we consume or contribute to it. When we stop spectating there is no spectacle until we start spectating again. The point is to make these moments of reality, these "situations" last as long as possible and happen as frequently as possible. We can only concentrate on the here and now, our own everyday lives.
It's wrong to look at Situationism as an ideology or even a theory. The SI was just a group, it had its flaws like any other. What was important about it was the truth it expressed. All Situationism really is is life. This is why so many have refused to accept that Situationism exists, that it is a thing at all.
My view is it's a useful word to describe reality and life when 'reality' and 'life' have been recuperated.
Alternatively, these could all be the ramblings of a crazy anarchist who's off his head from painkillers and the fever his tonsillitis has caused him at 4 in the morning.
voted for raising very good answers to very good questions
Entiendo...
xD Dios mío, vienen a llevarsenos...