As the situationists see it, a universally dominant system, tending toward totalitarian self-regulation, is only apparently being combated by false forms of opposition — illusory forms which remain trapped on the system’s own terrain and thus only serve to reinforce it. Bureaucratic pseudosocialism is only the most grandiose of these disguises of the old world of hierarchy and alienated labor. The developing concentration of capitalism and the diversification of its global operation have given rise, on one hand, to the forced consumption of commodities produced in abundance, and on the other, to the control of the economy (and all of life) by bureaucrats who own the state; as well as to direct and indirect colonialism. But this system is far from having found a permanent solution to the incessant revolutionary crises of the historical epoch that began two centuries ago, for a new critical phase has opened: in Berkeley and Warsaw, in the Asturias and the Kivu, the system is refuted and combated.
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| — | The Class Struggles in Algeria (via diogeneanstirnerite) |
It has become ungovernable, this wasteland where new sufferings are disguised with the name of former pleasures and where people are so afraid. They turn in the night, consumed by fire. They wake up in alarm and gropingly search for life. And word is getting around that those who have been expropriating that life have ened up losing it themselves. This civilization is on fire; the whole thing is capsizing and sinking.
What splendid torpedoing!
We Spin Around the Night Consumed by the Fire (Guy Debord 1978)
Those who have not yet begun to live but who are saving themselves for a better time, and who therefore have such a horror of growing old, are waiting for nothing less than a permanent paradise. Some of them locate this paradise in a total revolution, others in a career promotion, some even in both at once. In either case they are waiting to access what they have gazed upon in the inverted imagery of the spectacle: A happy, eternally present unity.
But those who have chosen to strike with the time know that the time that is their weapon is also their master. And they can hardly complain about this, because it is an even harsher master to those who have no weapons. If you don’t fall in line with the deceptive clarity of this upside-down world, you are seen, at least by those who believe in that world, as a controversial legend, an invisible and malevolent ghost, a perverse Prince of Darkness. Which is in fact a fine title — more honorable than any the present system of floodlit enlightenment is capable of bestowing.
We Spin Around the Night Consumed by the Fire (Guy Debord 1978)
I began with a film devoid of images, the feature-length Howls for Sade, in 1952. The screen was white during speech, and black with a silence whose duration continued to grow: the final black sequence alone lasted twenty-four minutes. “The specific conditions of cinema allow the anecdote to be interrupted with masses of empty silence.” The cinema clubs rose up in horror, their cries drowning out what little dialogue there was that would have been capable of shocking.
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| — | Guy Debord, Attestations (1993) |
