Constructed Situations by Stracey Frances

Author:Stracey, Frances
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press

Figure 5.1 [Riot police shooting] Paris, 1968, photographer unknown, from Enragés et Situationnistes dans le Mouvement des Occupations, p. 117 (reproduced courtesy of the Debord Estate/Alice Becher-Ho. Rights reserved).

Figure 5.2 [‘Sous les pavés, la plage’] Paris, May 1968. Photographer: Jo Schnapp, Enragés et Situationnistes dans le Mouvement des Occupations, Gallimard: Paris, 1998, p. 143 (reproduced courtesy of the Debord Estate/Alice Becher-Ho. Rights reserved).

Throughout Enragés et Situationnistes dans le Mouvement des Occupations, the rebel protesters are represented as being on the side of the repressed, while the CRS are ciphers for all that is repressive. Although not used in the Situationists’ book, the graffito ‘CRS = SS’ signalled the protesters’ perception of the fascistic character of the CRS’s actions during May ’68.27 There are, indeed, many similarities between the CRS and the SS soldiers of the 1930s and 1940s, especially when considered in the terms of Georges Bataille’s or Klaus Theweleit’s characterization of the latter as homogenized and masculinized subjects who rigidly armour themselves against all forms of otherness, both without and within.28 But the armoured subject at stake in the images under consideration here is clearly not that of 1930s–1940s fascism or Nazism, but 1960s capitalism. For the Situationists, this ‘society of the spectacle’ was characterized as a historical moment where all social and psychic processes of armouring were understood as a symptomatic response to the vampirism of the spectacle. Just as Marx saw capital as a form of ‘dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’,29 so too, for the Situationists, ‘the spectacle in its generality is a concrete inversion of life, and, as such, the autonomous movement of non-life’.30 All processes of armouring were therefore symptoms produced by the deadening spectacle. To be co-opted by it was to have one’s vital energies sucked out in such a way that man resembled the inert statues in the landscapes of a de Chirico painting: ‘his deserted squares and petrified backgrounds display man dehumanised by the things he has made – things which, frozen in an urban space crystallising the oppressive power of ideologies, rob him of his substance and suck his blood’.31

What better way to counter such petrifaction than by the explicit call for a fluid, promiscuous, palpable and illicit body, which refuses to be contained by socially prescribed and divisive boundaries? The slogan ‘Je jouis dans les pavés’ (which I translate as ‘I cum all over the paving stones’) suggests a transgression of boundaries (Figure 5.3). It responds to Vaneigem’s call for an erotics of communication and marks out the trace of a sensuous, somewhat obscene body, where, in a desublimating gesture, private masturbatory pleasures are relocated to the street. The painted words spell out the discharge of sexual fluids; an act of expulsion that breaks down the security of clearly defined bodily boundaries and liquidates proprietary social taboos that sexual pleasures should be secreted behind closed doors. To ejaculate and excrete internal fluids contaminates a coherent outline of the self, disturbing the borders between inside and out.

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