Persistence of the Negative by Noys Benjamin.;

Author:Noys, Benjamin.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

FORMS OF VIOLENCE

What might it mean to re-think such concrete forms of terror, then, in the contemporary context? We need strategies of negation and ‘violence’ that can disrupt and break up the meta-rules that bind us through ideological enjoyment, including those injunctions to create and invent which flatter our powers at the expense of any real change. While capitalism offers us continual ‘cultural revolution’, in the form of constant ‘change’, to impose real change requires a negativity that can track points of rupture – the points of ideological and material domination. As a model for this disruptive negation of everyday ideological domination I want to propose another reference to Žižek’s re-invented Leninism: the non-Leninist, anti-mediatory, libertarian communist thought of the Situationist International (SI) (1957–72). What particularly dictates the choice of the work of the SI, which retains a certain notoriety, and is by no means unproblematic, is that they chose to develop strategies to work on real abstractions (condensed in Debord’s apt concept of the ‘spectacle’). Also, they cast these forms of strategy in a libertarian form that at once involved the imposition of internal discipline with a refusal of the delay of gratification until after the revolution. For example, the Watts uprising of 1965 was taken by the SI as exceeding both the mediations imposed by the capitalist spectacle as well as the reaction of the international left, which ‘deplored the irresponsibility, the disorder, the looting (especially the fact that arms and alcohol were the first targets for plunder)’.73

One of the most common criticisms of the work of Debord and the SI is that they remain within a highly abstract condemnation of the ‘spectacle’, which then commits them to an impossible position of revolutionary purity supposedly outside its domain. This is what T. J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith call ‘the burning-with-the-pure-flame-of-negativity thesis’.74 Jean-Luc Nancy provides the most refined philosophical version of this criticism. He argues that the SI’s attempt to designate a domain of non-appearance operates within a desire for presence that fails to learn the Nietzschean lesson – that the real world is a fable – and instead posits an ‘authentic reality’.75 Such a critique is impossible on its own terms, claims Nancy, and the SI’s attack on mediation or representation results in a sterile paradox as ‘the denunciation of mere appearance moves effortlessly within mere appearance’.76 The playground version of this runs as follows: ‘You critique the society of the spectacle, but do so you have recourse to language or images and so you simply add to the spectacle’.

This position on the SI repeats the strictures Latour imposes on critique and revolutionary violence. In the case of Debord and the SI their iconoclasm leaves them circulating in the paradox of trying to break the dominance of appearance through new modes of appearing – what they called ‘constructed situations’.77 These ‘momentary ambiances of life’ with a ‘superior passional quality’ are played off against the stifling regime of the spectacle. They find their origin in a vitalist metaphysics of desire and life as protean excess irreducible to representation.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.