Debord dates the modern spectacle from the 1920s: “the society of the spectacle continues to advance. It moves quickly, for in 1967 it had barely 40 years behind it; though it had used them to the full.”8 This periodization is no mystery. The key incidents are the Bolsheviks’ suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion against the Soviet state (1921) and German Social Democrats’ acquiescence to the suppression of the German revolution by the far right (1919). Debord: “The same historical moment, when Bolshevism triumphed for itself in Russia and social democracy fought victoriously for the old world, also marks the definitive inauguration of an order of things that lies at the core of the modern spectacle’s rule: this was the moment when an image of the working class arose in radical opposition to the working class itself.”9
What Debord calls the concentrated spectacle has its roots in David and Delacroix; the diffuse spectacle arises out of the contradictory materials Manet and Pissarro explore. The concentrated spectacle merged elements of both. But what separates the spectacle proper from its nascent state is the incorporation, not of an amorphous people, but of the working class, and not as individuals but via the representation of class power. The disintegrating spectacle resembles the nascent state. Organized labor gradually ceases even to be its own image.
Clark’s excavation of the nascent spectacle may well provide resources for thinking about its disintegrating remnants, and what he describes as “a terrible, interminable contest over how best to debauch and eviscerate the last memory—the last trace—of political aspiration.”10 For Clark, as for Debord, there’s not much to mourn about the collapse of the Soviet Union and its client states, of what Debord called the concentrated spectacle. Debord rather presciently anticipates that its eclipse casts its western counterpart adrift, that it would be lost without its nemesis. The presence of even a false alternative obliged the masters of the diffuse spectacle to think historically. With its victory, the diffuse spectacle integrated into itself the practices of state secrecy of its rival, to the point where it deceived even itself.
Clark opposes a deep attention to the image as a foil to both the absence of historical thought, and—paradoxically—as a challenge to the apparently image-drenched world of the disintegrating spectacle. “Sure, I count myself an enemy of the present regime of the image: not out of some nostalgic logocentricity, but because I see our image machine as flooding the world with words—with words (blurbs, jingles, catchphrases, ten thousand quick tickets to meaning) given just enough visual cladding.”11 Clark himself contributes to the critique of the disintegrating spectacle as one of the members of the group Retort, whose text Afflicted Powers, while by no means Situationist, nevertheless can be read as drawing in part upon Clark’s earlier work.
Retort’s signal date is 2003, when some eight hundred cities hosted anti-war demonstrations. “It was a world-historical moment. Never before had such masses of people assembled, against the wishes of parties and states, to attempt to stop a war before it began.” What appeared is “a digital multitude, an image of refusal,” but set to become just one more image, “another image-moment in a world of mirages.”12 In 2003 the anti-militarist strain of popular revolt reappeared—and again failed to stop the wars.
Where Clark values Pissarro’s anarchist vision as a small token of a worker’s movement that eschewed a vanguard, Retort extends this critique to the vanguard form of the anti-western jihadists. While it might tempt some on the left to welcome attacks on the empire, Retort is quick to show that the limits and dangers of this kind of vanguard are the same as the Jacobin one and its Leninist inheritors. The fatal flaw hinges on usurping the political and setting oneself up as its armed image.
As for the 9/11 bombers: “They were exponents of the idea (brilliant exponents, but this only reveals the idea’s fundamental heartlessness) that control over the image is now the key to social power.” Spectacular power is vulnerable to a raising of the stakes, to being beaten at its own game. Or so it appears: “But the present madness is singular: the dimension of spectacle has never before interfered so palpably, so insistently, with the business of keeping one’s satrapies in order.”13
The colonization of everyday life proceeds apace, an “invasion and sterilizing of so many unoccupied areas of human species-being.” What is somewhat blandly referred to as globalization turns in on itself, “mapping and enclosing the hinterland of the social.”14 What the disintegrating spectacle leaves in its swirling wake is a world of loosely attached consumer subjects, and a weak form of citizenship which the ramping up of nationalist rhetoric does its best to mask. Weakly attached citizens-consumers still need to heed the call up, from time to time, to make sacrifices to preserve the state. Neither the popular forces nor even the state itself seems to manage any form of historical thought. The state comes to believe its own disinformation.
The Situationist project is often dismissed as if it were a claim to penetrate the veils of false consciousness and reveal the essential truth it masks. What Clark’s dilation on the history of revolution and representation affords is a more subtle view, in no way reducible to such ideology critique. As Clark writes: “supposing we take Debord’s writing as directed not to anathemizing representation in general (as everyone has it) but to proposing certain tests for truth and falsity in representation and, above all, for truth and falsity in representational regimes.”15
A first test would hinge, as in his examples from David and Delacroix to Courbet, Manet and Pissarro, on the materiality of the encounter. A second test might turn on the social form of the relation within which an image is produced. The dilemma of modernity is the split in the results it achieves in these two tests. The avant-gardes of modern art end up channeled into a preoccupation with the materiality of the encounter, even while modern experience is rife with popular social movements that express desires that escape from the regime of representation and produce other kinds of relation. The spectacle emerges not least as the means of absorbing the expression of both desires back into the representation of the commodity. And yet the very persistence of the spectacle indicates that desire still exceeds it, and on at least these two fronts.
What matters is the remaking of counter-strategies that do not necessarily reveal the real behind the symbolic curtain, but rather attempt to produce a different kind of social practice for expressing the encounter of desire and necessity, outside of power as representation and desire as the commodity form. Clark: “Why should a regime of representation not be built on the principle that images are, or ought to be, transformable (as opposed to exchangeable)—meaning disposable through and through, and yet utterly material and contingent; sharable, imaginable, coming up constantly in their negativity, their non-identity, and for that reason promoted and dismantled at will?”16 In short, why should détournement not be the practice by which the encounter with the world is discovered and produced?
For Debord, the spectacle emerges out of a key moment, when the Second and Third Internationals come to stand in the place of proletarian power, when the proletariat has to be killed in order to be represented, and represented in order to be killed. Clark extends the historical frame back to the nineteenth century, to show that the spectacle emerges out of not this one but a whole series of encounters between the expression of popular power and the power of representation. From there, perhaps it’s a question of extending forward as well. It is not as if the social democratic and Stalinist forms of usurpation of popular power are the last.
One of the most salient points of departure for critical thought and action in the early twenty-first century may well be the account rendered by former Situationists of the failure of the popular movements of their time. This might at least forestall the curious nostalgia that animates contemporary leftism, which is so often so indiscriminately fascinated by the red decade in France from 1966 to 1976, by the various forms of neo-Maoist philosophy that linger in its wake, and by the Italian Autonomist movement, which arose with a vengeance around 1977 to take up the banner of waning militancy in France.
Situationists and Post-Situationists were consistently hostile to such currents, which might provide a certain useful counterweight to