RE: The Situationists
From: Bob Buckeye
Date: Sun, 17 May 2009 18:09:25 -0400
To: 75Grand
Jan:
Thanks for copying the Vaneigem interview for me. I'll get to it soon. If
I've been productive, I've also been very busy. Four reviews due by
June 1, including -- ha! -- Debord's correspondence and his wife's novel
(Michelle Bernstein).
In "Lipstick Traces," Greil Marcus convinced me of
Debord's importance. I've read everything available of Debord but can't
say I have a sense of him yet.
More later when the air clears.
Bob
________________________________________
From: 75Grand
Sent: Sunday, May 17, 2009 8:32 AM
To: Buckeye, Bob
Subject: The Situationists
Bob:
Thanks for your most recent Quarry Book,
which looks very good. Will read it soon - and add to website.
You are being VERY productive.
Jan
===============
FROM: e-flux
Hans Ulrich Obrist: What were your reasons for resigning from the group?
Raoul Vaneigem: Following the occupation movements of May 1968, we knew
that some recuperation was afoot. We were familiar with the mechanisms of
alienation that would falsify our ideas and fit them neatly into the
cultural puzzle. It became clear to us, during the last conference in
Venice, that we had failed to shatter those mechanisms, that in fact they
were shattering us from the inside. The group was crumbling, the Venice
conference was demonstrating its increasing uselessness, and the only
answers put forward were commensurate with the self-parody we had fallen
into. Dissension intensified to the point of paranoid denunciation: of
betrayals of radicality, of breaches of revolutionary spirit, of
dereliction of conscience. Those times of catharsis and anathema are now
long past, and it might be useful to examine how it is that we sowed the
seeds of failure for which the group ended up paying such a heavy price.
The shipwreck, however, did not indiscriminately sweep away to the shores
of oblivion all of us who participated in the adventure. The group vanished
in such a way as to allow the individuals to either consolidate their
radicality, disown it, or lapse into the imposture of radicalism. I have
attempted to analyze our experimental adventure in Entre le deuil du monde
et la joie de vivre [Between Mourning the World and Exuberant Life].
FULL ARTICLE: http://e-flux.com/journal/view/6