Instant Fragile.

Bruno Fortier, La Bibliothèque Royale, 1989 (via NDLR).

Quand je me suis levé, il était à peine six heures du matin. Il y avait des nuages, mais le soleil commençait à percer. Je savais déjà que nous aurions une de ces belles journées de septembre qui donnent envie d'abandonner son travail et de prolonger les vacances jusqu'à la fin du mois. Tu dormais encore, j'ai pris le vélo pour aller acheter du pain au village. La mer était calme, les bateaux étaient immobiles, accrochés à leur bouée comme des chiens sages. La boulangère m'a dit que nous étions parmi les derniers estivants. Le dimanche, son ne mari ne faisait plus qu'une trentaine de gâteaux.

- Autrement, ils nous restent sur les bras.

Je n'avais pas emporté mon maillot. Je m'en suis passé pour piquer une tête entre les rochers. On aurait pu nettoyer un de ces blockhaus que les vagues inondent les jours de tempête. On y aurait dormi certaines nuits pour oublier le bruit des voitures, comme dans ces cabanes que construisent les enfants et où ils se prennent pour des naufragés. Certaines nuits, celles où nous faisons l'amour. L'amour sauvage, l'amour comme une guerre, dont nous finissons par sortir vainqueurs tous les deux.

- Le naturisme est interdit sur l'île.

Une vieille femme qui me regarde fixement pendant que je me rhabille. Elle me crie des insultes en breton, avant de s'en aller sur ses jambes courtes dont l'une boite et lui donne de loin l'allure d'une grosse danseuse qui expérimenterait un nouveau pas.

- Réveille-toi, je viens de faire le café.

Tu continues à dormir, et quand je te secoue tu restes en position fœtale. J'ai peur que tu sois morte, on peut mourir dans son sommeil quand un vaisseau se fâche dans le cerveau. Mais, tu t'étires, tu bâilles, et en me regardant tu souris. Il me semble qu'on en se disputera pas aujourd'hui, qu'on se laissera glisser en pente douce jusqu'au soir. Depuis quinze ans, nous avons connu l'insouciance et la paix.

- Rarement, c'est vrai.

Nous ne sommes pas de ces goinfres que le bonheur finit par écœurer à force de s'en empiffrer. Nous l'apprécions comme un grand champagne qu'on ne boit pas plus d'une ou deux fois par an. Tu prends ton café en silence. J'éteins la radio. Je me tais.

- Il y a des instants si fragiles, que le moindre mot les déchire. 

Régis Jauffret, Microfictions, Éditions Gallimard, coll. Folio, 2007 (2008), p.357-358.

Merci à M.J.

Entrepreneur Pantouflard.

Bruno Latour, The whole is always smaller than the parts, 2011.

"Si tu veux imposer un changement, conseillait Milton Friedman à ses Chicago Boys, déclenche une crise." Le capital, loin de redouter les crises, s'essaie désormais à les produire expérimentalement. Comme on déclenche des avalanches pour se réserver le choix de l'heure et la maîtrise de leur ampleur. Comme on brûle des plaines pour s'assurer que l'incendie qui les menace viendra mourir là, faute de combustible. "Où et quand" est une question d'opportunité ou de nécessité tactique. Il est de notoriété publique qu'à peine nommé, en 2010, le directeur de l'Elsat, l'institut grec de statistiques, n'a eu de cesse de falsifier pour les aggraver les comptes de la dette du pays, afin de justifier l'intervention de la Troïka. C'est donc un fait que la "crises des dettes souveraines" a été lancée par un homme qui était alors encore un agent officiellement rémunéré du FMI, institution censée "aider" le pays à en sortir. Il s'agissait d'expérimenter grandeur nature, dans un pays européen, le projet néolibéral de refonte complète d'une société, les effets d'une bonne politique d'"ajustement structurel".

Avec sa connotation médicale, la crise a été durant toute la modernité cette chose naturelle qui survenait de manière inopinée ou cyclique en posant l'échéance d'une décision, d'une décision qui mettrait un terme à l'insécurité générale de la situation critique. La fin en était heureuse ou malheureuse, selon la justesse de la médication appliquée. Le moment critique était aussi le moment de la critique - le bref intervalle où était ouvert le débat au sujet des symptômes et de la médication. Il n'en est plus rien à présent. Le remède n'est plus là pour mettre fin à la crise. La crise est au contraire ouverte en vue d'introduire le remède. On parle dorénavant de "crise" à propos de ce que l'on entend restructurer, tout comme on désigne comme "terroristes" ceux que l'on s'apprête à frapper. La "crise des banlieues", en France, en 2005 aura ainsi annoncé la plus grande offensive urbanistique des trente dernières années contre lesdites "banlieues" orchestrée directement par le ministère de l'Intérieur.

Le discours de la crise est chez les néolibéraux un double discours - ils préfèrent parler, entre eux, de "double vérité". D'un côté, la crise est le moment vivifiant de la "destruction créatrice", créatrice d'opportunités, d'innovation, d'entrepreneurs dont seuls les meilleurs, les plus motivés, les plus compétitifs survivront. "C'est peut-être au fond le message du capitalisme: la "destruction créatrice", le rejet de technologies désuètes et des vieux modes de production au profit de nouveaux sont la seule façon d'élever le niveaux de vie (...) Le capitalisme crée un conflit en chacun d'entre nous. Nous sommes tour à tour l'entrepreneur agressif et le pantouflard qui, au plus profond de lui-même, préfère une économie moins compétitive et stressante, où tout le monde gagnerait la même chose", écrit Alan Greenspan, le directeur de la Réserve fédérale américaine de 1987 à 2006. De l'autre côté, le discours de la crise intervient comme méthode politique de gestion des populations. La restructuration permanente de tout, des organigrammes comme des aides sociales, des entreprises comme des quartiers, est la seule façon d'organiser, par un bouleversement constant des conditions d'existence, l'inexistence du parti adverse. La rhétorique du changement sert à démanteler toute habitude, à briser tous les liens, à désarçonner toute certitude, à dissuader toute solidarité, à entretenir une insécurité existentielle chronique. Elle correspond à une stratégie qui se formule en ces termes: "Prévenir par la crise permanente toute crise effective". Cela s'apparente, à l'échelle du quotidien, à la pratique contre-insurrectionnelle bien connue du "déstabiliser pour stabiliser", qui consiste pour les autorités à susciter volontairement le chaos afin de rendre l'ordre plus désirable que la révolution. Du micro management à la gestion de pays entiers, maintenir la population dans une sorte d'état de choc permanent entretient la sidération, la déréliction à partir de quoi on fait de chacun et de tous à peu près ce que l'on veut. La dépression de masse qui frappe présentement les Grecs est le produit voulu de la politique de la Troïka, et non son effet collatéral.

C'est de n'avoir pas compris que la "crise" n'était pas un fait économique, mais une technique politique de gouvernement que certains se sont ridiculisés en proclamant à la hâte, avec l'explosion de l'arnaque des subprimes, la "mort du néolibéralisme". Nous ne vivons pas une crise du capitalisme, mais au contraire le triomphe du capitalisme de crise. "La crise" signifie: le gouvernement croît. Elle est devenue l'ultima ratio de ce qui règne. La modernité mesurait tout à l'aune de l'arriération passée à laquelle elle prétendait nous arracher; toute chose se mesure dorénavant à l'aune de son proche effondrement. Lorsque l'on divise par deux le traitement des fonctionnaires grecs, c'est en arguant de ce que l'on pourrait aussi bien ne plus les payer du tout. Chaque fois que l'on allonge le temps de cotisation des salariés français, c'est au prétexte de "sauver le système des retraites". La crise présente, permanente et omnilatérale, n'est plus la crise classique, le moment décisif. Elle est au contraire fin sans fin, apocalypse durable, suspension indéfinie, différemment efficace de l'effondrement effectif, et pour cela état d'exception permanent. La crise actuelle ne promet plus rien; elle tend à libérer, au contraire, qui gouverne de toute contrainte quant aux moyens déployés.

Comité invisible, A nos Amis, La fabrique éditions, Paris, 2014, p.22-25.

Humane Scheme.

Jay Springett, Who owns the means of not dying?, 2013.

But instead of being confined to a resentment that destroys life in the act of hurling defiance, we can now act directly on the nature of the machine itself, and create another race of these creatures, more effectively adapted to the environment and to the uses of life. At this point, one must go beyond Sombart's so far excellent analysis. Sombart pointed out, in a long list of contrasting productions and inventions, that the clue to modern technology was the displacement of the organic and the living by the artificial and the mechanical. Within technology itself this process, in many departments, is being reversed: we are returning to the organic: at all events, we no longer regard the mechanical as all-embracing and all-sufficient.

Once the organic image takes the place of the mechanical one, one may confidently predict a slowing down of the tempo of research, the tempo of mechanical invention, and the tempo of social change, since a coherent and integrated advance must take place more slowly than a one-sided unrelated advance. Whereas the earlier mechanical world could be represented by the game of checkers, in which a similar series of moves is carried out by identical pieces, qualitatively similar, the new world must be represented by chess, a game in which each order of pieces has a different status, a different value, and a different function: a slower and more exacting game. By the same token, however, the results in technology and in society will be of a more solid nature than those upon which paleotechnic science congratulated itself: for the truth is that every aspect of the earlier order, from the slums in which it housed its workers and to the towers of abstraction in which it housed its intellectuals, was jerrybuilt - hastily clapped together for the sake of immediate profits, immediate practical success, with no regard to wider consequences and implications. The emphasis in the future must be, not upon speed and immediate practical conquest, but upon exhaustiveness, inter-relationship, and integration. The co-ordination of our technical efforts - such co-ordination and adjustment as is pictured for us in the physiology of the living organism - is more important than extravagant advances along special lines, and equally extravagant retardations along other lines, with a disastrous lack of balance and harmony between the various parts.

The fact is then that, partly thanks to the machine, we have now an insight into a larger world and a more comprehensive intellectual synthesis than that which was originally outlined in our mechanical ideology. We can now see plainly that power, work, regularity, are adequate principles of action only when they cooperate with a humane scheme of living: that any mechanical order we can project must fit into the larger order of life itself. Beyond the necessary intellectual reconstruction, which is already going on in both science and technics, we must build up more organic centers of faith and action in the arts of society and in the discipline of the personality: this implies a re-orientation that will take us far beyond the immediate province of technics itself.

Lewis Mumford, Towards an Organic Ideology in Rethinking Technology, A Reader in Architectural Theory, Routledge, 1934 (2013), p.57.

Courtier & General.

Joseph Koudelka, Le regard d'Ulysse, 1994.

What had changed most definitively for Debord was not the possibility, or the need, for revolution but the fact that the idea of a collective enterprise had collapsed. Other forms of organizing and promulgating subversive activity had therefore to be found. It seemed, in the first instance, that the best way to channel this impulse was through Champ Libre itself, to which Lebovici seemingly offered a free hand to Debord as 'literary director'.

Although he assumed this role, Debord also preferred to keep himself at some distance both from the day-to-day running of the group and the authors themselves. Debord had long since believed in the importance of invisibility and invisible agitation as a key Situationist technique and principle (the terrifying events in Italy, in the wake of the Piazza Fontana bombing, had convincingly borne this theory out) and he saw his position as a way of furthering what Alexander Trocchi, now long disappeared from view, has called 'the invisible insurrection'.

Amongst the books which Debord was reading in Florence and in Paris were Baltasar Gracian and Baldassare Castiglione as well as, inevitably, Machiavelli. The importance of these books was that they offered social, philosophical and political theories which not only sought to provide a model of cultivated behaviour but also, no less importantly, an ideal of action and interaction which formed the basis of the model Renaissance society. Debord found here parallels with his own previous experimental notion of the Situationist International as a micro-society; in these texts he discovered a way of preserving the notion of micro-society which was defined less by its collective decision-making process but rather by forms of individual behaviour. Friendship, honour, and the practical uses of the classical ideals of reason and self-knowledge were now becoming central to Debord's thought, behaviour and ultimately his writings.

In Castiglione, Debord found justification for his emphasis on activity and writing which engaged directly with its time, but also looked beyond, to future readers who had not been born yet but who might find in his texts a constitution of philosophical ideas closely linked to the comple demands of real life. Castiglione's most important work was his book Il libro del Cortigiano ('The Book of the Courtier') written in 1528. This was translated into French in 1850 by Gabriel Chappuis and republished by Champ Libre in 1987 (it was also translated into English by Sir Thomad Holby, and apparently read by Shakespeare, as The Courtier). This book was not only a treatise on how to be a perfect courtier ('known for all men as someone who is excellent,' writes Castiglione) but also a historically accurate and detailed account of life at the court of Urbino, the representation of a perfect city-state. The perfect courtier, according to Castiglione, is one who is able to bring together military and literary skills and use them with equal facility. Most importantly for Debord, Castiglione is concerned with the individual and his action, rather than with society as a collective whole. In this sense Debord's reading of Castiglione marks a decisive shift in his thinking away from social analysis and towards an individualistic theory of behaviour. It was also important for Debord that Castiglione argues against the false idealism of the Christian doctrine, stating that all moral judgements are both subjective and reversible ('Truth it is, many things seeme at the first sight good, which are ill: and many ill, that notwithstanding are good'). Most crucially, the book celebrates a perfect age based on a political philosophy which gives equal importance to the full measured enjoyment of the material aspects of life as well as theory or speculative thought.

Baltasar Gracian, writing a hundred years or so after Castiglione, offers a vision of the world which is slightly darker that that of his predecessor, probably the result of his education at the hands of Castilian Jesuit priests and his early career as a writer of chronicles in Zaragoza and Madrid. For this reason he is often quoted as an influence on Schopenhauer. For Debord, Gracian's most important work was El oraculo manual y arte de prudencia, which was translated into French by Amelot de Houssaie in 1684 (and reissued by Champ Libre in 1972) as L'Homme de Cour, or The Courtier. In this book Gracian presents 300 maxims which aim to instruct in the proper ways of conduct those who live alongside princes and men of power. Gracian emphasises above all the specifically Spanish qualities of desengano and agudeza. The first of these is to be translated as 'disillusion', but to be understood as a refusal to be fooled by the world and its appearance. The second, agudeza, is a term most often used in relation to the conceptista poetry of Gongora and Gracian himself. The term conceptista is generally understoof in Spanish as meaning 'witty, allusive or involved' and conceptista poetry is distinguished by an extreme for of concision, lack of similes and an essentially medieval approach in which the poet established an occult relationship with the universe.

What mattered most for Debord in the writings of Castiglione and Gracian was that they defined rules of moral and political action in a society which had not yet lost the sense of itself as a unified entity and in which the individual could therefore still influence great events. So, although the turn to an individualistic philosophy seemed a retreat, and to this extent was symptomatic of the introspective mood of the post-68 Left in the 1970s, it was also however, at least on Debord's own terms, a way of seeking to clarify present and future strategy in 'the society of the spectacly' in which the individual had been reduced to a mere spectator.

(...)

The architecture of the Auvergne reflects both the uncompromising landscape, of extinct volcanoes, inacessible ravines and grassy upland hills, and its political instability. It was not until the eighteenth century that the Auvergne lost its reputation as a land of brigands, insurrectionists, and anti-monarchist agitation. Many houses were constructed as a defense against roaming bands and private armies as well as the elements. The weather changed constantly and almost instantaneously from calm to wild and savage storms. The house of Champot seemed at times under siege from the elements, a factor which made the house feel like a fortress. This provided the perfect metaphor for the way in which Debord, the retired revolutionary general, was now beginning to conceive of himself and his relation to the outside world.

(...)

During the long winter days and nights in Le Minour, when there were no guests or they were exhausted from conversation and entertaining, Guy and Alice spent many hours drinking and playing war games. Games of strategy had always fascinated Debord; it was an interest which long preceded his discovery of Johan Huizinga and could indeed be traced back to childhood when, to escape Manou, his mother or his siblings, he would retreat to the back of the house in Cannes and obsessively plan campaigns with his lead soldiers. In 1975, in a second-hand shop in Paris, Debord had come across and old ware game which he had renovated. A brass plate, made by René Viénet, was attached to the side of the game. It read: 'Kriegspiel Clausewitz Debord'.

The rules of the 'game of war' were entirely based on the theories of Clausewitz and on the basis of eighteenth-century warfare, that is to say wars which were fought across territories not yet fully defined by nationhood or empire. Each territory in the game was divided into arsenals, fortresses, a mountain pass and nine mountains, which were untraversable, blocking fire and communications. The aim was the complete destruction of the military potential of the adversary, to be achieved by destroying all combat units or taking all the enemy's arsenals.

In this the game was also faithful to Huizinga's notion, for so long a central part of Situationist strategy, that the essence of war is also the essence of art. As in art, it is the lightning strike of the bold gesture, unpredicted and unpredictable, which is most likely to destroy an enemy's positions and clear the field for new manoeuvres. The war game was also most poignant, as Debord was assuming a new status as a thinker rather than a revolutionary participant in his age, a poetic suspension of the passage of time as in the poetry of Mallarmé or the paintings of Malevitch. 'In the unfolding of this Kriegspiel,' Debord wrote, 'all time is equal: the solstice of war where the climate never varies and night never falls before the invitable conclusion of the conflict'.

Andrew Hussey, The Game of War, Jonathan Cape, 2001 (various excerpts).

Anachronistic Distinctions.

Behind the scenes, Green ninja + hair dye commercial actress, 2014.

An article by Asger Jorn brilliantly attacked a society which accorded 'leisure' its highest social value and thereby, with the nodding complicity of managers, experts and sociologists, 'tried to sneak their way to a fully automated society' in which the individual, exhausted by work and dazed by pleasure, had lost any sense of himself as a unique subject.

(...)

This was because modern civilisation, argued all the Situationist writers, was based on a con-trick. Instead of living a life according to the principles of subjective desire, each individual was persuaded or conditioned (there was only a slight negligible difference between these two terms) into accepting the mediocre comforts of modern society. This was the process by which life was turned into an empty vessel, a 'spectacle', and it was the coercive power of this 'spectacle' which had to be opposed and fought in the most urgent terms. Glamour shots of bikini-clad sex kittens, images of commodified desire who were preening themselves or pouting à la Bardot, were placed alongside Situationist writings which were in equal measure imperious, sarcastic, aristocratic and contemptuous.

(...)

Back in Paris, Debord loudly claimed that he was not in the slightest bit interested in the activities of high-life international trash. Others detected an asperity in his tone which belied a certain jealousy of Rumney's easy access to high-life finance. More particularly, even at this stage, Debord was clearly interested in the possibility of having his life and work funded by a patron. This apparent dependence could be philosophically justified because, as Debord read it, it was a Renaissance model of artistic activity which placed art, politics and philosophy on a more intimate and human footing and therefore entirely separate from the twentieth-century model that dealt art as commodity. Secondly, it was a well-known commonplace that, as Machiavelli pointed out, contrary to appearance, such a relationship gave ultimate power to the artist, not the patron. The work of the Florentine artists of the early Italian Renaissance, who worked directly under the patronage of the Medicis but whose art was universal and spoke eternal truths, was clear proof of this fact. Debord was already reading at this stage not only Machiavelli's The Prince but also The Discourses, as well as Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier which, along with the Bible and The Prince, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V had famously kept by his bed. These books would accordingly become guiding works for Debord in later years.

(...)

Most notably in late May Debord had given a lecture to a research group convened by Henri Lefebvre under the auspices of the prestigious Centre nationale de la recherche scientifique. The title of the lecture, 'Perspectives on conscious modifications in daily life', was pompous and academic enough to please Lefebvre's research students. The content was however an undiluted call to arms in the name of a revolutionary transformation. 'Everything depends,' Debord argued, 'on the extent to which you dare to ask this question: how do you live? How are you satisfied? Not satisfied? This must be asked without for a minute letting yourself be intimidated by the various adverts which are aimed at persuading you that you are happy because of the existence of God, Colgate toothpaste or the CNRS'. 

(...)

The book was published in an elegant, plain white jacket, with a small photograph of Debord and the rubric: 'Guy Debord, born in Paris in 1931, is the director of the revue L'Internationale situationniste. He has also made several films which are out of circulation.'

The text itself was divided into 221 theses, rigorously numbered and orderedn each one developing or building upon the previous argument or assertion so that, in the true Hegelian fashion which Debord admired, the theory as a whole contained the sum of its parts. If the first influence was thinkers such as Karl Korsch, Gyorgy Lukacs and Anton Pannekoek, who were considered to be the inheritors of the 'young' or 'true' Marx, the revolutionary theorist of alienation whom Henri Lefebvre had set in contrast to the official Marxism of the French Communist Party. To this extent, it seemed, The Society of the Spectacle could be read as part of the general debate on the French left outside the French Communist Party, a debate which included Edgar Morin, Henri Lefebvre, the Socialisme ou Barbarie group, about the primacy of everyday life in revolutionary theory and practice.

(...)

Debord does not simply attack the obvious visual manifestations of modern society - advertising, television and the mass print media. He analyses in a rather more nuanced fashion the way in which the fragmented aspects of modern life are brought together in the images which the spectacular society makes to represent itself. This process is most clearly seen, he says, in the development of the modern cult of celebrity which serves to represent all the qualities - happiness, tragedy, freedom - which are missing in the anonymous lives of spectators.

(...)

In recent years, the term 'society of the spectacle' has itself become a cliché, entering the post-modern lexicon to describe any contemporary process, from the playful pursuit of designer consumerism, economic and cultural globalisation, the internet, celebrity worship or the way in which Western democratic political parties occupy interchangeable positions having abandoned the anachronistic distinctions of Left and Right. Having entered the language of contemporary life, the term 'society of the spectacle' is also somehow understood to imply a complicity with its illusory nature.

(...)

The Situationist International did not approve of bombs, but it did not approve of hysteria either, especially when emotions swung away from the promise of revolution. On the morning of the 18 December a pamphlet entitled 'Il Reichstag bruccia?' ('Is the Reichstag burning?') could be found scattered around the Piazza Fontana and factories throughout Milan. It was signed by 'Friends of the Internationale' and published in the names of Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian anarchists who were condemned to death in Massachussetts in 1921 for alleged armed robberies and whose innocence became a cause célèbre throughout the world. The text had in fact been composed by the Situationist International and it accused the Italian state of having a hand in the Rome and Milan bombs. Terrorism was denounced as most commonly a 'primitive and infantile demonstration of revolutionary violence' and the fruit of 'failed revolution'. These particular massacres, it was argued, were, however, a new, more spectacular form of violence, sanctioned by the state in order to frighten and coerce the populace. This form of terrorism was the brutal exposed reality of the society of the spectacle.

When the Situationists wrote this text, which caused an outcry on the Left as well as the Right, few even on the extreme Left dared to think that this was possible let alone already happening. It would be several years before the role and the activities of the Italian intelligence services known as 'Gladio' and their hand in the bombings would be fully known and revealed in the international press. It was the Situationists who had been the first to unveil the new tactics mounted by the spectacular society in its self-defence, the deliberate provocation and even murder of citizens which would ward off threats from the insurrectionist Left with the so-called 'strategy of tension'. 

(...)

The Real Split was not however a mere settling of scores. It also advanced and moved on many of the arguments of The Society of the Spectacle and, in particular, presented a withering analysis of modern conditions of production and consumption in which 'the executive is the epitome of the consumer-spectator'. This is because, unlike the genuine proletariat in the factories, the managerial or executive classes do not fully acknowledge their status as cogs in the machine of production, emphasizing their distance from the proletariat by consuming higher value consumer goods. This is, argued Debord, 'man as a thoroughly dependent creature who feels duty bound to lay claim to freedom itself, idealized in the semi-affluent nature of his activity as a consumer'. It was this man, 'the former student', Debord warned, who was also shaping the physical conditions of the modern world: 'The work and leisure requirements of the executive are what now dictate the transformations currently laying hold of our urban fabric, from office blocks down to the tasteless fare dished up in restaurants where his strident tones leave other diners in no doubt about how much training his voice has received from exposure to airport Tannoys.' The executive, the man who though he owned the world, was, said Debord, no more or less than 'le plouc', an old French slang word still in use, which denoted a gormless rural oaf, completely at odds with his environment. The same term, he went on, should be applied to women in modern society whose idea of liberation was to harbour the same needs and ambitions as the 'executive oaf'. The result of this process, in which 'executives always pretend to have wanted what they have got, and the distress occasioned by their secret dissatisfaction' was described by Debord as a new form of alienation, a 'gilded destitution'.

Andrew Hussey, The Game of War, Jonathan Cape, 2001 (various excerpts).