File spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/avant-garde_1995/avant-garde_Aug.95, message 70


Date: Thu, 31 Aug 1995 16:23:30 +0300
From: nav0243-AT-comune.bologna.it (Luther Blissett)
Subject: Guy The Bore (part 3)


[continues from previous message]


4. EPILOGUE ?

=46urthermore, I don't consider unusual this station of nihilism where I'm
lingering as in a waiting room, half bored, half waiting for an alarm bell.
People then turn into passengers, and we're surprised at the waiter still
taking an order down. Given the disquieting mutation of our world, almost
everyone should know the atmosphere in which we start doubting about
reason. It may just be a spectral dream.
Ernst J=FC=1Fnger (what a sad skunk!), 1982.

Conclusions are already clear in the very development of our argument,
always suggested by the text and by its gaps. There is no epilogue which
can't be read in the titles: Guy Debord is really dead, nunc est bibendum!
On "Il Manifesto", Sunday 4th of December 1994, Enrico Ghezzi (a man of
some merit) wrote: "The news about Guy Debord's death seemed to me a
deceit, une leurre. A sublime fraud, like the one many suspected behind
Moana Pozzi's death. To be able to détourner  his very death. To make it
even more unreal than it already is, challenging it on its own mediatic
grave. [...] To give an end to his own length, not to his time. To give
himself an end..." I had a very different impression: The Bore did no
longer have choice, he had chosen more than three decades earlier, getting
carefully ready for the moment when his time would have finished, deboredom
would have come along, and he would be left with nothing but his own length
to give an end to, sooner or later.



NOTES
The notes marked by a *** didn't appear in the original text: they were
appended by the author during the foul-proof reading.

1. Guy The Bore is the double of Guy Debord, is Debord in such a
self-contemplative attitude that he became a sheer image. In our opinion a
feeling of deboredom (i.e. the boredom caused by Debord) has definitely
taken hold of the character after the movie In girum imus nocte et
consumimur igni (1979); here, self-contemplation still met a lyric
requirement, and wasn't tedious, (de)boring. As we'll explain later, since
then each of his writings is really full of resentment (a self-referring
kind of feeling which ended up in an emotional short-circuit) This feeling
of deboredom was already there at the time of the SI, though it was
mitigated because they recognized the collective revolutionary needs and
expectations.

2. Letizia Moratti is the chairman of the RAI board of directors. The RAI
[RAdiotelevisione Italiana] is the public broadcaster which competes with
the Fininvest, the Berlusconi's TV company. In March 1994 Berlusconi became
Prime Minister of a government which was a wonderful synthesis of
Poujadisme, Fascistic behaviours, Mafia alliances and neo-thatcherite
lingo. The first 'enemy' attacked and defeated by the Government was the
RAI, whose very existence seemed to be an intolerable interference in the
final Fininvestization of the country. Berlusconians and post-Fascists use
to describe the RAI as a lair of crypto-communists; actually there are lots
of soft-core leftists and former pro-situs, nevertheless the RAI belongs to
the ruling class as much as the Fininvest. Berlusconi instituted a new
board of right-wing directors whose chairman was Mrs. Letizia Moratti
['chairMAN' is quite proper, because some right-wing women refuse to use
the feminist gender; since in Italian the neuter gender does not exist,
they describe their offices or positions as though they were males]. She is
a member of a potent family of the Milan upper-class which, amongst other
things, owns the Inter football club. This raid has been the only
successful act of that Government, which was shaken and overthrown in
November by a general strike led by the reformist unions. Berlusconi was
too fetid and extremist to meet the requirements of the ruling class, which
exploited the workers' struggles to establish an 'apolitical' emergency
government whose premier is Lamberto Dini. However Letizia Moratti is still
where Berlusconi had placed her.***

3. Vittorio Sgarbi, former art critic, and Giuliano Ferrara, former
journalist, are two exponents of the Right who talk in a very vulgar and
insulting style. Sgarbi has a daily talk-show on Canale 5 (Fininvest),
=46errara is the ghost-writer of the Berlusconi's speeches and statements.***

4. Gian Carlo Pajetta and Enrico Berlinguer were two powerful and respected
bosses of the old communist party (PCI). Berlinguer was secretary general
since 1969 'til his death in 1985. He completed the destalinization of the
party and started its conversion into a social-democratic organization.***

5. It's no mistake today to use the term "situationism", because we owe the
existence of such an '-ism' to those who already used the term 30 years
ago. On the other hand, the SI strongly condemned the use of this word
because it defined a specific doctrine about savoir vivre which didn't
exist at all: everybody could be situationist even without knowing the SI,
therefore there doesn't exist such a thing as situationism. But, only in
1977, in Manoscritti antieconomici e antifilosofici del 1977 (anonimous
cyclostiled writing , Italy) we can read: "power swallows critique and
recycles it.  Marx became Marxism [...], in the same way the SI became
situationism." And power swallowed critique owing to those who turned
situations into situationism.

6. Carlo Freccero is a former pro-situ which became general manager of
Italia 1 (Fininvest) in the late Eighties. He managed to produce TV shows
which conjugated commercial potential and post-modernist experimentalism,
but he was too indipendent and Berlusconi fired him. After the death of Guy
The Bore, he wrote an obit piece on the communist newspaper "Il
Manifesto".***

7. Striscia la notizia is a daily satirical news edited by the former
pro-situ Antonio Ricci and broacasted by Canale 5 (Finivest).***

8. Angelo Guglielmi is an ex-member of the 1960's literary avantgarde group
Gruppo 63. For over ten years he's been general manager of RAI3, the most
post-modernist and leftist TV channel of the public television. Most RAI3
shows started as experimental and became smash hits, e.g. "Blob", an
outrageous daily strip edited by the pro-situ Enrico Ghezzi, which consists
in cut-ups and détournements of the shows and news broadcasted the day
before by all the national TV channels. Nevertheless, RAI3 broadcasts ugly
cop-styled shows like "Chi l'ha visto?", a show which searches for the
missing persons; in January 1995 its editorial staff has been victim of a
prank by Luther Blissett. ***

9. See the "Avertissement pour la troisi=E8me édition fran=E7aise", in: Guy
Debord, La societé du spectacle, Gallimard, Paris 1992. He writes: "This
edition has been left identical to that of 1967 [...] I am not the kind of
man who corrects himself [...] Such a critical theory doesn't need to be
trasnformed...". In this short piece, The Bore refuses to take the 1989
collapse (and all the following events) into account, and is content with a
reference to theses 58 and 111 of The Society of The Spectacle, as if this
were all had to be written on the subject, a sort of Nostradamus' centuriae
to which nothing can be added. Since in 1992 Croatians and Serbs were
already butchering each other, how should we name such a hack-prophet?***

10. Pro-situs  was the name given to superficial and lamely ideological
sympathizers of the SI who tried to emulate the style without sharing their
rigour. Still in the Commentaries to the  society of the spectacle, (1988),
Debord wrote: "On the ground of the post-1968 contestation, the inept
recuperators called 'pro-situs' have been the 'first disinformers', because
they dissimulated as much as possible the practical manifestations by which
the very critique they maintained to share had become popular; without
scrupling to weaken the proposition, they never cited anything or anybody,
in order to arouse the impression that they had found out something by
themselves"[By the way, isn't this an antiplagiarist statement? ***].


11. This phrase is incomprehensible in English; Glenn Miller was a trombone
player, right? Well, "trombone" is also the Italian metaphor to mean a
windbag, one that is puffed up etc.***

12. All the quotations since the beginning of the paragraph are from:
"Rapport sur la construction des situations et sur les conditions
d'organisation et action de la tendence situationniste internationale"
(1958), in: Mirella Bandini, L'estetico il politico - da Cobra
all'Internazionale situazionista, L'Officina, Torino 1977.

13. The case of the Englishman Ralph Rumney, who founded the first London
Psychogeographical Association, reminds of the Theatre of the Absurd. In
1958 he was sent out because, when his first son was born, he turned in his
psychogeographical survey of Venice a couple of days after the 'deadline'.
Nine years later, the whole British section was expelled in unbelievable
circumstances, allegedly described by Fred and Judy Vermorel in: The Sex
Pistols  (Tandem, London 1978).


14. See expecially  Open creation and its enemies, translated and prefaced
by Fabian Tompsett, Unpopular Books, London 1993.

15. Nash, "Who are the Situationists?", in "Times Literary Supplement",
London. Quoted in: Stewart Home, The Assault on Culture, AK Press,
Edimburgh 1991, p.39, and p.41.

16. Stewart Home, in the previously quoted work, uses the term
"spectosituationists" (from "spectacle") to distinguish the SI from the
Second SI.

17. "The current use of the term art treats it as a sub-category of these
disciplines; one which differentiates between parts of them on the basis of
perceived values. Thus, the music of Mozart is considered art,while that of
Slaughter and the Dogs is not. This use of the term art, which
distinguishes between different musics, literatures, &c, emerged in the
seventeenth-century at the same time as the concept of science. Before
this, the term artist was used to describe cooks, shoe-makers, students of
the liberal arts &c.
When the term art emerged with its modern usage, it was an attempt on the
part of the aristocracy to hold up the values of their class as objects of
'irrational reverence'. Thus art equated with truth, and this truth was the
world view of the aristocracy, a world view which would shortly be
overthrown by the rising bourgeois class [...when the bourgeoisie]
appropriated the concept of art it simultaneously transformed it. Thus
beauty more or less ceased to be equated with truth, and became associated
with individual taste. As  art developed, 'the insistence on form and
knowledge of form' and 'individualism' (basically romanticism) were added
to lend 'authority' to the concept as a 'particular, evolving, mental set
of the new ruling class'.
Thus, rather than having universal validity, art is a process that occurs
within bourgeois society and which leads to an 'irrational reverence for
activities which suit bourgeois needs'. This process posits 'the objective
superiority of those things singled out as art, and, thereby, the
superiority of the form of life which celebrates them, and the social group
which is implicated' [...] This is  a conclusion very different to that
reached by the specto-situationists [which wanted to realize art] If art,
from a materialist perspective, is a process which occurs in bourgeois
society, there can be no question of its realisation. Such an idea is
mystical since it implies not only that art has an essence, but that as a
category it is autonomous of social structures. To undertake its
realisation and suppression is an attempt to save this mental set at the
very moment the category is abolished. Art disappears from the museums only
to reappear everywhere! (Stewart Home, op. cit. The internal quotations are
from: Roger L. Taylor, Art: An Enemy of the People, Harvester Press,
Sussex, UK 1978.

18. Manoscritti Antieconomici e antifilosofici, quoted above.

19. Encyclopédie des Nuisances, Considerazioni storiche sull'Internationale
Situationniste,  edizioni 415, Torino 1994 (formerly: "Abrégé",
Encyclopédie des Nuisances # 15, Aprile 1992. For info: Encyclopédie des
Nuisances, 74 Rue de Ménilmontant, 75020 Paris, France.

20. La véritable scission..., op. cit.

21. Some references to the Kommune 1 can be found in: Richard Neville, Play
Power, Jonathan Cape, London 1970, republished by Paladin, London 1971. As
regards the anti-authoritarian consciousness of the German '68 movement,
see Hans-Jurgen Krahl, Konstitution und Klassenkampf, Verlag Neue Kritik
KG, Frankfurt a. M. 1971.


22. See Richard Neville, op. cit. and Fernanda Pivano, Beat Hippie Yippie -
Dall'underground alla controcultura, Rizzoli, Milano 1978.

23. Jon Savage, England's Dreaming, ?

24. For a good example of a debord-centred and servile historical account,
see Jean-Fran=E7ois Martos, Histoire de l'Internationale Situationniste, ed.
Gérard Lebovici, Paris 1989.


25. According to Tommaso Labranca, Trash culture is unsophisticated popular
culture. It obviously is coarse and inconsistent, thereby it has to be
buried under tons of "good taste". The middle class is as trashy as the
working class, but the latter is not ashamed of it, while the former wants
to hide the trash, poses as being thoroughbred and becomes kitsch. The
characteristics of 'proletarian' Trash culture are unintentional genre
cross-fertilisation, incongruity, aesthetical maximalism and emulative
syndrome.***

26. Encyclopédie des Nuisances, op. cit.

27. In southern Italy, especially in Naples, the New Year's Day culminates
with destruction of any old house furniture, which is thrown down from the
balcony. In addition to this, the midnight hour is saluted by a real
guerrilla of fireworks, petards and firecrackers. Some are found wounded or
dead. This clearly is a pagan cathartic feast which Christianity took good
care not to suppress.***

Emergence della Wo/Men Gemeinwesen

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Phone & fax +39-51-551740




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