“This essay is a significant contribution to the development of Social
Choreography.” – Jeffrey Gormly, editor, choreograph.net
Read the complete 5400-word text at choreograph.net.
“We have to change the world. That’s what we think. Change society. Change life. Do it for freedom. Get us out of this prison. We know one thing: this change is possible. All that remains is to figure out how to do it.”1
With these words written in 1957, Guy Debord founded the Situationist International, a radical group of creators searching for new forms of action in art and politics.
The practice of social choreography recently initiated by Steve Valk carries the promise of changer le monde once again to the threshold of the crossing from dream to reality. Two events organized by Valk lead to an appraisal of what has been achieved and what remains to be done in conceptualizing an effective contemporary project of concrete utopia. In “Smallclub: Goldcoast” (2001), Valk worked with artist-activists from Frankfurt’s TAT Theater to organize “wanderings” of groups of individuals for several hours through the Bockenheim section of the city. The idea for these walking adventures was adapted from the Situationist notion of le dérive or collectively “drifting” through urban spaces.
In the conference-event-happening “Framemakers: Choreography as an Aesthetics of Change” (2005), Valk collaborated with Jeffrey Gormly, Michael Klien and the Limerick-based Daghdha Dance Company to pay tribute to – yet also radicalize – William Forsythe’s “postmodern” choreography of the plasticity of the body. What the predominant “body movement paradigm” in our society relegates to the status of autistic or nonfunctional behavior attains a space of legitimacy on the stage in the incredible suppleness that Forsythe’s special inspirational remaking of the dancer’s body allows her to express. But the ambition of social choreography is to make the move from the dancer’s body to a new radical flexibility of the social body. Valk and his associates brought together dancers, cultural theorists and new media artists to discuss and enact the potentialities of choreography as a socially active force. But the presence at the conference of technology entrepreneur James Stevens hinted metaphorically at the decisive step that Steve Valk’s amazingly original enterprise must still take if it is truly going to change the world, which must take nothing less than that as its goal. To achieve real change, social choreography must intervene in the heart of capitalist society, not remain in the separate sphere of culture, which has long been designed as the safe place for authorized challenge, creativity, and pseudo-revolt. The technology corporation is today “where the action is” in the dynamics of the present, and social choreography must be brought under the umbrella of a radical technology corporation that will “change all the rules” in every aspect of its operations.
The Wandering Spectacle
If I wager on red or black in roulette, pair or impair, manque or passe, I have a nearly even chance of victory or defeat, of gaining an amount equal to my stake, or of sacrificing the money that I have set down, leaving aside the house advantage that the 37th number, the zero, affords to the gaming establishment. The only nonpositive number on the wheel of chance is neither red nor black, neither pair nor impair, neither manque nor passe. When this lowest degree comes up, my squandered chips are positioned by an employee onto a narrow line between further acquisition and forfeiture, and the issue is deferred. But the two essential outcomes, being up or down, getting ahead or falling back, kicking ass or getting kicked, winning a bundle or crapping out, steamrolling or biting the dust, would clearly seem to be two separate and distinct modalities, entirely unrelated stations of existence into which I discretely cross over following the croupier’s throw and my subsequent instantaneous visual recognition of which compartment the ball has come to rest in.
I have placed my bet on red, the dishlike device is spinning, my palms are sweating, my pulse is racing, the small metallic orb goes ’round and ’round, is deflected, and collides into several ridges. If the silver ball tumbles down into the slot of a red number, I will taste the rush of triumph and of easy street, otherwise the bitterness of destruction and of hard knocks. The tiny sphere bounces back up from the first pocket with which it flirts and lands disadvantageously. A small piece of my hide is ripped away from me. The two results, winning and losing, and the differing circumstances which they respectively bring about, are seemingly divided and dissociated one from another. But this is only an appearance. There is a certain system, a level of shared reality, to which both winning and losing belong. It is a dimension which illuminates what they have in common and which precedes either of them and makes them both possible. It is a system of participation, call it obsessional neurosis or addiction, or call it the game or seductive play, to which I assent. I consent to having my mood, my emotional or psychological state, suddenly effected by an arbitrary change in fortune or in exterior events. There are other intimate couplings analogous to the pairing between gain and loss: pleasure and pain, love and hate, sado and maso, yin and yang. A gambler who begins to comprehend the intricate intermingling between winning and losing might strive to achieve sovereign indifference towards the value of money, to espy the secret flow of the game itself, or risk being swallowed up by the consequences of his fluctuations and losses.
Like winning and losing at a subtle divertissement, the two key ideas of the Situationists, an avant-garde artistic and radical leftist political movement which thrived in Paris, London, and northern California in the mid-20th century, are like a perpetual Möbius strip which appears at all points to have two sides but really has one. The two crucial Situationist ideas – wandering and the spectacle – have often been regarded as contradictory and at odds with each other. Wandering or le dérive, which literally means “the drift,” is connected with the early Parisian Situationists of the 1950s, who were influenced by Dada, Surrealism, and Lettrism, with the collage art of the Dutch painter Asger Jorn, and with the utopian theories of city planners Constant Nieuwenhuys and the Algerian Abdelhafid Khatib.2 The dérive, a group technique of transient passage through varied ambiences, evokes activity, creativity, and cultural optimism; new encounters and the exploration of territory; and psycho-geographical defamiliarization. It conjures up free association and the rediscovery of fascination; the construction of stimulating “situations;” and an adventurous playing with architecture and urban space.
The notion of “the society of the spectacle” was first elaborated in Guy Debord’s 1967 text La Société du spectacle, and it attained prominence during the French student uprisings and workers’ factory and office occupations of May 1968.3 The spectacle denotes a certain critique of consumerism, the mass media, simulations, and “commodity fetishism.”4
It implies a degree of resignation and cultural pessimism faced with the widespread domination of images over reality, and in the wake of prevailing contemporary social phenomena such as television, advertising, cybernetics, and organized leisure time. “Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation,” wrote Debord. The generalized reduction of the citizen to spectator status and the alienation of the worker from the product of his labor are developments which the Situationist International saw as common to the advanced capitalist countries of the West and the state socialism of the East. The spectacle is the dominion of the mode of mere survival of economics as separating category, ruling over life itself and the festival of culture. It is “the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity.”5 But in the active critique and transformation of everyday life, as in the system of red and black in roulette, the concepts of wandering (or the dérive) and the spectacle are revealed as being deeply inter-connected and non-separated from each other.
SCHMALCLUB Goldküste 25.05.2001. Drifting and rambling along the Gold Coast of Bockenheim, Frankfurt. Pflasterstrand. Sous le pavé, la plage. The search for the beach under the cobblestones. Locomotion without a goal. The hunters of marvels. A sixth-story dentist’s office overlooking city rooftops. Traffic signs of vehicular circulation superimposed onto a park’s greenery. Claustrophobic towers. Touring map distributed in a travel agency with its entry point at the site of the travel office itself. A ride on a yellow Post Office bicycle, on a movable garage ladder, or through the Palmengarten on a mini-train. Dance studio. Quickie stay in an inviting hotel room. Wait tables or wash up in a restaurant’s kitchen. Meet an astrologer or other assorted celebrity. Get a touch-up at a hair salon or a passport photo. Stop in at the Institute for the Scientific Study of Dreams. Carrying the handy companionship or wandering spectacle of constant cell phone communications directly in one’s vocal folds and ear. Arrive or “be received” at the stationary destination of Telekom’s seamless cylindricality, looking outwards or homewards with views towards everywhere, as in an inverted panopticon.
Our habitual relationships to physical space and our reasons for movement and action within the urban environment are largely determined by the functional and utilitarian patterns of work, daily errands and commissions, and leisure activities. In the dérive or meandering, one instead lets oneself be spontaneously seduced by the attractions of the terrain, and essays to make an interpretive stand-up reading of the city. Wandering must be wrested back from its consumerist meaning (as in the German word wandern) of hiking or walking on foot. On the Gold Coast, you rove and experiment, study your surroundings, you follow your instincts, and delve concretely into where you are and exactly how you are living. To dérive is to “notice the way in which certain areas, streets, or buildings resonate with states of mind, inclinations, and desires.”6
As you accelerate your wandering, you start to proactively turn upside down the designated purpose of given locations and to make more conscious and free use of ambiences. You begin to discern the “psycho-geographical contours, currents, fixed points, and vortexes” which influence, encourage, or discourage entries, exits, and flows into and out of specific prescribed zones of the city.7
The permanent circulation of automobile traffic, semiotic messages, commodities commerce, and shopping everywhere is the ceaseless organization of universal isolation, the unremitting production of “lonely crowds,” and the antinomy of encounter. “Spectacles compensate for the participation that is no longer possible.” For Guy Debord, the spectacle is the incessant auto-justifying and self-legitimating speech of the established society. “The spectacle is the dominant order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue.”8 As designer lifestyles get manufactured as palettes of niche products, the spectacle also becomes a system of separation from one’s own life, an integrated complex of specialization and fragmentation into widely separated instances of social existence. But the spectacle is instantiated, brought into renewed being at each moment by its actors. We partake in the spectacle, and we can change it. There is nothing outside of the spectacle and that is good. Digital technologies, online interactive networks, and “reality TV” have not in themselves dismantled or altered the spectacle. Technophoric claims along such lines tend to miss the point. It is not about taking the side of wandering or of the spectacle. They are not in opposition. They have always been, and will always be, intertwined elements in a continuum, like winning and losing. We are always in process in the wandering spectacle, and the urgent question is precisely how do we choose to live our relationship to that, as fluid consumers or as creators.
NOTES
1 – Guy Debord, Rapport sur la construction des situations… suivi de Les Situationnistes et les nouvelles formes d’action dans la politique ou l’art (originally published in 1957) (Éditions mille et une nuits, 2006).
2 – Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998).
3 – Guy Debord, La Société du spectacle (Paris: Éditions Buchet-Chastel, 1967).
4 – See Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (London: Routledge, 1992). See also Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord (translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith, with a Foreword by T.J. Clark and a New Afterword by the Author) (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993).
5 – Debord, La Société du spectacle.
6 – Guy Debord, “La théorie du dérive” in Internationale situationniste #2, December 1958.
7 – Guy-Ernest Debord, “Exercice de la psychogéographie,” Potlatch, no.2 (Paris, June 1954).
8 – Debord, La Société du spectacle.
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