Page 126 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

JOBNAME: McGraw−TaylorHarris PAGE: 5 SESS: 11 OUTPUT: Mon Oct 8 09:06:49 2007 SUM: 54ED47A8
/production/mcgraw−hill/booksxml/tayharris/chap05

Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle 111
artificial division between art and life. Like Dada they celebrated
negation, the utter rejection of the false and contemptible values of
the culture surrounding them (‘negation, historically associated with
dadaism, must end up in every subsequent constructive position as
long as those positions manage to resist being swept up by the force
of social conditions’ [Debord in McDonough 2004: 32]) and, like
the Surrealists, they did this in the name of a revolutionary politics.
The Situationists proposed a move ‘beyond art’. No longer would
their revolutionary aspirations be channelled through the artwork or
its negation, rather the life of the spectacle itself was to be their
material. Allied to this was their commitment to the power of play or
the ludic. Liberated life was to be a game, an aesthetic pleasure
palace, underwritten by the advances in industrial technology born
of capitalism. In this sense the Situationists did not seek the
restoration of alienated life that had been consumed by the com-
modity but, rather, to liberate the positivity inherent in the commod-
ity. To this extent they were practising Kracauer’s disdain for
outmoded cultural values and his belief that the path out of Ratio’s
alienation was to be found by pushing through it rather than
withdrawing from it. In contrast to the nihilistic conception of
negation found in the Dadaists concept of anti-art, the Situationists
saw negation in Hegelian terms, that is, as a aufhebgen or sublation –
in which something is negated to the extent that one moves beyond
it, but in a process of creative transformation in which elements of
the old are contained in a radically new version, rather than the
simple destruction of what went before. In this manner Debord saw
all of the Situationist International’s various activities in terms of a
coherent strategy perfectly attuned to its historical situation; the
Situationist movement must necessarily manifest ‘itself simultane-
ously as an artistic avant-garde, an experimental investigation of the
free construction of daily life, and finally as a contribution to the
theoretical articulation of a new revolutionary contestation’ (Debord,
in McDonough 2004: 159).
One of the first expressions of this commitment to the dialectical
development of revolutionary theory and aesthetic and experiential
praxis was psychogeography. Psychogeography worked over the legacy
of the avant-garde’s attempt to apprehend and express the shock
and cacophony of the metropolis (as touched upon in Chapters 1
and 2’s discussion of the ‘shock’ and ‘distraction’ fostered by the
advent of the mediascape) within the context of the urban renewal
that took place in post-war Europe. The Situationist International
defined psychogeography as the ‘study of the exact laws and precise
effects of the geographical environment’. In language reminiscent of
Benjamin and Kracauer’s previously cited descriptions of the
disorientating effects of the metropolis, they argued that it arose

Kerrypress Ltd – Typeset in XML A Division: chap05 F Sequential 5

www.kerrypress.co.uk - 01582 451331 - www.xpp-web-services.co.uk
McGraw Hill - 152mm x 229mm - Fonts: New Baskerville