Laszlo Krasznahorkai: The Melancholy of Resistance

Like the novels of W.G. Sebald, Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s masterpiece The Melancholy of Resistance is vitally untimely; Krasznahorkai’s total commitment to a compellingly dysphoric vision and a demanding, relentless style reveals the narrowness of the contemporary field of literature, which, even at its best, rarely offers more than a refined, topical take on realism or nuanced (that is, hipsterized), metafictional endgames. The story of The Melancholy of Resistance will be familiar to fans of Bela Tarr’s The Werckmeister Harmonies, which loosely adapts the central section of Krasznahorkai’s novel. The novel opens by describing a nightmarish train ride home to a midsized town in Hungary that is caught up in an inexplicable, entropic movement toward decay, anarchy, and chaos. During a brutally cold but snow-free winter, garbage accumulates on the streets, stray cats multiply and become bold, and mysterious events keep occurring. The opening page of the novel describes a general “sense of ever-spreading all-consuming chaos which rendered the future unpredictable, the past unrecallable and ordinary life so haphazard that people simply assumed that whatever could be imagined might come to pass.” The people of the town continuously gossip about “the collapse into anarchy,” “the unstoppable stampede into chaos,” “the approaching catastrophe.” Page after page, Krasznahorkai piles on dense descriptions of this state of universal decay, of a rotting ontology and corrupted nature, creating a suffocating, paranoid atmosphere, which is only occasionally punctured by striking and darkly humorous vignettes. To make matters worse, one night a circus advertising “The Biggest Whale in the World, and other sensational secrets of nature” arrives in the heart of the town. The circus attracts a mysterious and unruly mob of strangers, who seem to be followers of “The Prince,” a monstrous being who speaks about destruction in a chirping language that has to be translated by a factotum. One of Krasznahorkai’s themes here is the Hobbesian opposition of the state and anarchy. The crowd that gathers around the whale, the fallen Leviathan, is described as a “multitude,” and this mob eventually riots over one long, destructive night, only to be subdued by a repressive and hypocritical sovereignty. This political conflict, however, cannot be separated from the novel’s metaphysical inquiry into the struggle between order and chaos. Not just the body politic, but all bodies, organic and inorganic, are swept up in an eternal fight between what resists and what attempts to overcome that resistance. Krasznahorkai assigns his characters contrasting positions on these issues. Mrs. Eszter, “president of the women’s committee” and fond friend of the police, cynically accepts reality as the war of all against all; she sees the general disorder as a sign for the need of a new beginning, and uses the circus to gain power and force her program for “A TIDY YARD, AN ORDERLY HOUSE” onto the community. Valuska, an innocent idiot savant, makes his regular rounds of the town while lost in cosmological visions of “the lowly place of man in the great order of the universe.” Valuska is therefore particularly devastated by The Prince’s proclamation that “there is no whole. . . . the whole does not exist.” Taking a more “rational” approach, Mrs. Eszter’s estranged husband, Gyorgy, has removed himself from society in order to seek out a higher form of order. He once faithfully believed that “music, which consisted of the omnipotent magic of harmony and echo, provided humanity’s only sure stay against the filth and squalor of the surrounding world, music being as close an approximation to perfection as could be imagined.” But he discovered that Werckmeister ignored pure tonalities in the construction of his “well-tempered” tuning system. Shocked by the illusory image of order that is the foundation of Western classical music, Eszter tries to adjust his piano to a more “natural” tuning, but when he performs Bach on the instrument the result is “an unbearably grating din,” which he forces himself to tolerate out of ideological zeal. Even the multitude is allowed to explain the motives for its destructive rampage when Valuska discovers a discarded notebook that describes the night’s events. He reads, “there was nothing left to lose, everything having become intolerable, unbearable, beyond the pale; each house, each fence, each advertising pillar, telegraph post, shop or the post office, even the lightly drifting odours of the bakery, had become intolerable; intolerable too every precept of law and order, every petty demanding obligation, the continuous and hopeless expenditure of energy in the attempt to suggest that there might be some point to all this rather than be faced by the unyielding, indifferent, universal incomprehensibility of things.” Krasznahorkai never harmonizes the clamor created by these different voices, yet, aesthetically, his dense style and labyrinth-like sentences seem to already be on the side of chaos, which, in the final pages, explicitly devours everything, including the book itself.

Gilles Deleuze & Michel Foucault: Photogenic Painting

Photogenic Painting packages together a lengthy introduction and two essays by Deleuze and Foucault on Gerard Fromanger, a French hyperrealist painter whom one of the editors calls “the political artist of 1968 and its aftermath.” The volume also offers a generous collection of images of Fromanger’s paintings, which are relatively unknown outside France. Fromanger was friends with the two philosophers and painted magnificent portraits of them, as well as of other French intellectuals, including Guattari and Sartre. Deleuze and Foucault return the favor in their critical “portraits” of Fromanger, sharpening their respective theoretical frameworks into supportive introductions to his work. Deleuze’s essay, “Cold and Heat,” is perhaps a bit too abstract. Deleuze argues that “Fromanger’s model is the commodity.” In the world Fromanger paints, everything has been “rendered in the terms of the single model, the Commodity, which circulates with the painter.”
Rather than reject the model of the commodity, or attempt to criticize it from supposed point of externality, Fromanger works wholly within the “system of indifferences in which exchange-value circulates.” In his paintings, he manipulates the relational potential of the hotness and coldness of different colors, creating “connections,” ”disjunctions,” and “conjunctions” between different elements of the paintings. Deleuze praises this “mobilisation of indifferents” for its “radical absence of bitterness, of the tragic, of anxiety, of all this drivel you get in the fake great painters who are called witnesses to their age.” He concludes, “From what is ugly, repugnant, hateful and hateable he knows how to bring out the colds and hots which produce a life for tomorrow. We can imagine the cold revolution as having to heat the over-heated world of today.”
Foucault’s essay, “Photogenic Painting,” is the better contribution, a remarkably clear and insightful text that makes one wish that Foucault would have written more in the way of art criticism. Foucault’s argument is especially relevant today, as images are increasingly remediated as they circulate throughout digital networks. Foucault takes issue with the modernist attempt to purify painting of everything but its own essence. Instead, he finds inspiration in the early decades of photography, a period when photographers playfully indulged in a wide variety of “operations” on their images, many of which, such as painting directly on the photographs, undermined the border between photography and painting. Confronted today with political and commercial control over images, we need to learn once again how to “put images into circulation, to convey them, disguise them, deform them, heat them red hot, freeze them, multiply them.” According to Foucault, “Pop Art and hyperrealism have re-taught us the love of images. Not by a return to figuration, not by a rediscovery of the object and its real density, but by plugging us in to the endless circulation of images.” “Pop artists and hyperrealists paint images,” but not images that are meant to accurately represent reality. These images are “relays” that transmit photographic images, further circulating them in a form that retains the traces of this act of translation and circulation between media. Foucault considers Fromanger an exemplary hyperrealist who is ahead of the game. Fromanger creates a painting by taking a photo, projecting this photo on the canvas, and then directly painting over the projected image. His photos are not deliberately composed, but rather record a “photo-event.” According to Foucault, Fromanger attempts “To create a painting-event on the photo-event. To generate an event that transmits and magnifies the other, which combines with it and gives rise, for all those who come to look at it, and for every particular gaze that comes to rest on it, to an infinite series of new passages.” When the photographic projection is turned off, the painting must “sustain” the image; its function is not to fix the image once and for all, but to help it to continue to circulate, beyond the original photograph. “The function of the photo-slide projection-painting sequence present in every painting is to ensure the transit of an image. Each painting is a thoroughfare; a ‘snap’ which rather than fixing the movement of things in a photograph, animates, concentrates and magnifies the movement of the image through its successive supporting media.” Fromanger can therefore take a single photograph, a single photographic event, and relay its image in different ways through a series of paintings. Foucault concludes, “We are now coming out of the long period during which painting always minimized itself as painting in order to ‘purify’ itself, to sharpen and intensify itself as art. Perhaps with the new ‘photogenic’ painting it is at last coming to laugh at that part of itself which sought the intransitive gesture, the pure sign, the ‘trace’. Here it agrees to become a thoroughfare, an infinite transition, a busy and crowded painting. And in opening itself up to so many events that it relaunches, it incorporates all the techniques of the image: it re-establishes its relationship with them, to connect to them, to amplify them, to multiply them, to disturb them or deflect them.”

William Gibson: Zero History (2010)

William Gibson continues his archaeology of the present in Zero History, which forms something of a trilogy with Pattern Recognition and Spook Country. Gone are the jacked-in adventures through cyberspace and virtual reality. Gibson’s new realism (mostly) limits itself to a contemporary world already over-populated with iPhones and GPS systems, a “mixed reality” that doesn’t require the conceits of science fiction to appear as unreal and sometimes dystopian. The very fabric of everyday life has changed as a result of information technologies, as one character ambivalently notes, “Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places, that once belonged to cigarettes, now belonged to phones. Human figures, a block down the street, in postures utterly familiar, were no longer smoking.” However, the information revolution is primarily approached here not through speculation about new technologies but rather through an imaginative foray into the fashion system and its relentless, repetitive quest for the ever-changing new. The plot focuses on Hollis Henry, former member of the band The Curfew, who is again dragged into a business adventure by Hubertus Bigend, head of the elusive advertising agency Blue Ant. The recession is behind Hollis’ reluctant return to “freelance” work for Bigend: she has lost “nearly fifty percent of her net worth” because of “devalued money market shares.” Bigend hires her to seek out the maker of a clothing line known as Gabriel Hounds, a “secret brand” whose “branding would be that it was a secret. No advertising. None. No Press. No shows.” Sold only for brief moments at shifting, hidden locations, the brand is about the “reinvention of exclusivity. Far ahead, say of the Burberry label you can only buy in one special outlet in Tokyo, but not here, and not on the web. That’s old-school geographical exclusivity. Gabriel Hounds is something else. There’s something spectral about it.” Bigend is interested in Gabriel Hounds because he fears someone has discovered a “new way to transmit brand vision.” His firm Blue Ant has always been more than an “advertising agency,” specializing in “brand transmission, trend forecasting, vendor management, youth market recon, strategic planning in general.” But Gabriel Hounds seems to exist beyond even his firm’s horizon: “It’s about atemporality. About opting out of the industrialization of novelty. It’s about deeper code.” Bigend’s interest in Gabriel Hounds is also motivated by his risky new venture into making “designer combat pants” for the military. As one character notes, “Military contracting [is] essentially recession-proof,” a massive but rather insular market. It is difficult to move into military clothing, however, not just because of the existing contractors but also because of the history of fashion. As one of Bigend’s employees explains, “The military, if you think about it, largely invented branding. The whole idea of being ‘in uniform.’” “The bulk of the underlying design code of the twenty-first-century male street was the code of the previous mid-century’s military wear.” However, this unintentional success has become an obstacle: “Having invented so much of contemporary masculine cool in the midcenutry, [the military and its designers] found themselves competing with their own historical product, reiterated as streetwear.” Since this is a Gibson novel, Hollis’ search for the maker of Gabriel Hounds eventually settles into some well-trodden generic conventions, resulting in a final confrontation with some angry military contractors, who are thwarted through an operation reliant on remote control drones and a Festo air penguin. The title of the book refers to the blank credit history of someone who hasn’t “had a credit card for ten years” and whose past credit data has been erased. One of the book’s major themes is the desire to acquire freedom by removing oneself from the databanks that are now accessible almost anywhere and anytime. Gibson’s characters regularly search online for information (“Google” is a prominent verb in the novel), sometimes about each other. Cell phones make such searches possible, but are also used to continuously track the movements of individuals. And London’s omnipresent surveillance cameras guarantee that any appearance in public will be recorded and stored away. Gabriel Hounds is an innovative brand precisely because its strategy is to subtract itself from these ubiquitous webs of information. The novel’s conclusion also hinges on an unattractive T-shirt that causes surveillance cameras to delete the wearer from images that are retrieved later. Rather than zero history, Bigend fantasizes about the power that might be obtained from a total view of all available information. One character explains Bigend’s interest in the “order flow,” which is “the aggregate of all the orders in the market. Everything anyone is about to buy or sell, all of it. Stocks, bonds, gold, anything. If I understood him, that information exists, at any given moment, but there’s no aggregator. It exists, constantly, but is unknowable. If someone were able to aggregate that, the market would cease to be real.” Picking up this idea in its last moments, the novel’s narrative itself “cease[s] to be real,” swerving back towards Gibson’s science fiction roots.

John Arquilla & David Ronfeldt: Networks and Netwars

RAND researchers may have prepared this collection of articles on netwar for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, but its claims are important for anyone invested in the potential of networked action, and particularly for those interested in media studies. Arquilla and Ronfeldt define netwar as “an emerging mode of conflict . . . in which protagonists use network forms of organization and related doctrines, strategies, and technologies attuned to the information age.” The primary tool of netwar is “swarming,” “a seemingly amorphous, but deliberately structured, coordinated, strategic way to strike from all directions at a particular point or points, by means of a sustainable pulsing of force and/or fire, close-in as well as from stand-off positions.” “Swarming occurs when the dispersed units of a network of small (and perhaps some large) forces converge on a target from multiple directions. The overall aim is sustainable pulsing—swarm networks must be able to coalesce rapidly and stealthily on a target, then dissever and redisperse, immediately ready to recombine for a new pulse.” Because it allows small and/or dispersed groups to create substantial results, netwar has made nonstate actors into major players in the contemporary world (“power is migrating to nonstate actors”). Netwar may be waged not only by terrorists and criminal organizations, but also by leftist radicals. Anarchist and autonomous Marxist organizations (such as the Black Blocks that appeared at the Battle of Seattle or the Zapatistas in Mexico) have used netwar against state forces. States have traditionally relied on hierarchical forms of organization, but these tend not to be successful in combating the networks involved in netwar, which tend to be “robust” because of their fluid, decentralized, and ambiguous organization. As a result, “It will become crucial for governments and their military and law enforcement establishments to begin networking themselves. Perhaps this will become the greatest challenge posted by the rise of netwar.” On a more positive note, the authors admit that netwar allows organizations such as NGOs to more successfully exert a kind of “soft power” that may be of great use for democracies as well as lessen the need for more troublesome forms of violent state “hard power.” New information technologies such as the Internet have been vital for the spread of netwar, but the authors don’t want to limit netwar to online actions such as hacktivism of cyberterrorism. They claim, “netwar may be waged in high-, low-, or no-tech fashion.” What is important is the use of network forms of organization, which can be created in many different ways. These networks may depend on technologies, but “social, narrative, organizational, and doctrinal” factors are also important for their effective functioning. Arquilla and Ronfeldt offer some theses on the challenges of netwar: “Hierarchies have a difficult time fighting networks.” “It takes networks to fight networks.” “Whoever masters the network form first and best will gain major advantages.”

Catherine Lupton: Chris Marker

Catherine Lupton’s Chris Marker: Memories of the Future is billed as “the first comprehensive study in English of Chris Marker’s work.” Marker the person is notoriously elusive, rarely giving interviews, making public appearances, or even letting himself be photographed (and in the last case, he prefers to be hidden behind his camera in the photo). But focusing on Marker’s published writings and film and video texts, Lupton has created an informative introduction to a director whose work remains indispensable yet largely unviewed (La Jetée and Sunless being the two notable exceptions). Marker does not fit into any readymade conception of a director, not the least because he has worked in so many different media. To identify what it is that Marker does, Lupton cites André Bazin, who argued “that the primary matter of Marker’s work was intelligence, and that his operative mode was the personal essay, which combines stylistic flair with a process of reflective enquiry into its subject. Intelligence is a quality of mind that may choose to express itself through whatever medium is at hand, whether it be a typewriter, a Rolleiflex, a 16mm-film camera, a Sony Handycam or an Apple Mac loaded with image processing software.” Lupton adds that, in contrast to a typical director barking commands on a set, “Marker is more an image-scavenger, one adept at editing, reprocessing and commenting on representations that already exist. He typically seems to stand at one remove from his own projects, like someone who is faced with an enthralling tangle of pre-existing texts and images . . . and whose role is to sort through it all, pondering aloud all the while about what this process of sorting out entails.” Marker first appeared on the Parisian cultural scene in the late 1940s as a writer, publishing a novel as well as “poetry, a short story, political and cultural essays, book and film reviews.” Throughout the book, Lupton underscores Marker’s lifelong interest in “transposing conventions and techniques across media.” She argues, “Surveyed as a whole, Marker’s early writings are striking not only for their diversity, but for their permeability to the influence of other media; their desire to reach beyond writing and embrace other potential forms of reflection and enquiry.” Marker wrote about film for Cahiers du Cinema and other periodicals. According to Lupton, this criticism reveals Marker’s fascination with cinema for “its capacity for revelation: the power to unveil deeper realities that expand and enrich the significance of the everyday world, but remain firmly grounded in its objects and appearances.” She argues that this early film criticism outlines the approach Marker would later take when he started to make his own films. “This developed sense of the physical world in film as the bearer of an inner imaginative reality sheds light on the way that Marker’s own films have used documentary footage of the actual world to map a subjective consciousness, via incisive dialogues between the spoken commentary and the assembled images. Even Marker’s engagements with political and historical subject matter would uphold this principle of revelation, by scrutinizing archival images for evidence of hidden historical realities.” Marker’s first film was Olympia 52, a rather straightforward documentary on the Olympic games. Around the same period, he co-directed with Alain Resnais Les Statues meurent aussi, a short film about African art that had strong anti-colonial undercurrents. The first period of Marker’s film career is defined by the subjective travelogue films he made, such as Sunday in Peking, Letter from Siberia, and Description of a Struggle. “[The] desire to see and show the world from unexpected angles would become the defining impulse of Chris Marker’s activities through the 1950s and the first years of the 1960s, as he began to establish a reputation as an inveterate globetrotter with a sequence of works based on journeys to countries and regions in transition.” Lupton summarizes the approach of the films from this period: “Marker’s early travelogues typically fuse an engagingly personal response to the places visited with astute insights into the political forces and attitudes that have shaped their identity, and might also determine their destiny in the world. Disdaining the fanfare of clichés and national stereotypes, Marker seeks out the fugitive signs, embedded in the texture and habits of everyday life, that reveal how nations and cultures organize and express themselves, how they engage with the memory of their past and imagine their contributions to the future.” During this period, Marker was also, fittingly, a series editor for the Petite Planete country guides, and Lupton compares these guidebooks to Marker’s films. In addition to forming deep ties with Resnais and Varda (who, with Marker, were deemed by one contemporary critic the “Left Bank Group”), Marker also wrote commentaries for the films of many other directors, including William Klein and Joris Ivens. La Jetée and Le Joli mai, which were produced at the same time, mark a turning point in Marker’s film career, and Marker himself has since refused to condone screenings of the films he made before these two. The cinéma vérité movement, particularly Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronicle of a Summer (1960), anticipated a great deal of Marker’s Le Joli mai, which interviewed individuals about their lives as the Algerian War came to an end. Lupton emphasizes that Marker was more critical and partisan than Rouch and Morin, and definitely less concerned with sociological objectivity. “Faced with Rouch’s label cinema vérité, with its troublesome connotation of some general truth discovered through cinema, Marker is credited with promptly rephrasing it as ‘ciné, ma vérité’ (‘cinema, my truth’).” Marker worked on La Jetée on the days the film crew was off from Le Joli mai (Lupton clarifies that the former film’s images were made from photographs taken on a Pentax camera, not single frames of film). Although the films might appear to be completely different, Lupton argues they are quite complementary. “[Le Jetée] imagines the Paris of 1962 as fragments of distant memory collected . . . from the perspective of a post-apocalyptic future-present, in a narrative that explicitly figures traumatic and repressed aspects of contemporary history by taking them to a terrifying but plausible fictional conclusion. In this sense La Jetée forms the political unconscious of Le Joli mai, using the archetypal structure of narrative fiction to bring to the surface disturbing knowledge and pervasive anxieties that could not be fully aired and resolved in public discourse.” Marker was involved in explicitly political filmmaking from 1967 to 1977 (that is to say, starting with Far From Vietnam and ending with Fond de l’air est rouge). Marker’s signature, subjective-essayist, style may have been muted during this period, but Lupton asserts that there was no radical break in his films during this period (which, in my opinion, are perhaps his greatest works). The militant turn in Marker’s work was influenced not only by the political events of 1967 (which Marker holds to be more important than those of 1968) but also by the formation in 1967 of the “collective Societe pour la Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles (‘Society for Launching New Works’), usually known by the acronym SLON, to produce Far from Vietnam,” a collective film involving over 150 individuals, including Godard, Resnais, Ivens, and Lelouch. In what is perhaps the most valuable section of the book, Lupton offers a detailed and helpful survey of the work produced by SLON. “SLON regarded itself as a tool, to help in the production of films made from a Left political perspective that would not otherwise exist. The collective offered technical assistance and training to militant groups who wished to make their own films (the Medvedkin Groups being a case in point), and helped out with post-production facilities and financing. It then took charge of distributing the finished films, largely through the burgeoning ‘parallel’ circuit of trade unions, cultural centres, Left political organizations, schools and film societies, but also willingly organizing commercial cinema releases and sales to television.” In his SLON-related work, Marker committed himself to experimenting with more democratic forms of film production. “From 1967 this principle would take Marker beyond the privileged status of the auteur-director into the humbler and less visible functions of producer, fund raiser, editor, facilitator and general fixer, ensuring the exposure through SLON of other people’s work while continuing to make his own (unsigned) films.” Marker visited the striking Rhodiaceta workers in 1967, and these contacts eventually lead to his film A Bientot, j’espere (1968) as well as the formation of the Medvedkin Group, whose name was suggested by Marker. During May ’68, Marker came up with the idea for the Cinétracts, the silent film pamphlets about the ongoing revolutionary events. In the early 1970s, Marker was involved in a number of other SLON projects, such as the On vous parle series, and also made L’Ambassade and La Solitude du chanteur de fond. This militant period culminated in his 1977 masterpiece, Le Fond de l’air est rouge. Lupton claims the film originated in a suggestion from a friend to make a film from SLON and another organization’s unused film materials. “The idea of Le Fond as a film composed of rejected, unused materials, offcuts and outtakes would become central to Marker’s conception of its historical purpose. Introducing the published script, Marker wrote that he had become curious about all the material that had been left out of militant films in order to obtain an ideologically ‘correct’ image, and now wondered if these abandoned fragments might not yield up the essential matter of history better than the completed films.” In addition to offering this critical-historical supplement, Marker subjected the images he reused from other films “to a continual process of re-contextualization and reinterpretation through montage and commentary, so that their meaning for one historical moment is shifted and interrogated in another.” Lupton highly praises the end product, writing, “As a groundbreaking work of visual historiography, Le Fond attempts nothing less than to give cinematic form to the chaotic and contradictory movement of world history during the tumultuous decade that it covers.” The film “attempts to trace the decline of the Left back to its sources, by juxtaposing an array of competing perspectives and events in a mosaic structure of film and television images, location sound, music and multi-vocal commentary, which benefits from the kind of hindsight that is able to see the complex interplay of different forces more clearly, but not the sort that assumes from the outset that defeat was inevitable or desirable.” Moving into the 1980s, Marker became increasingly involved with computers and new media platforms, including video. As usual, Lupton claims that this openness to new media was characteristic of Marker. “He embraced new media enthusiastically and wholeheartedly from the outset, without any of the hand wringing or pronouncements of doom with which others attached to filmmaking frequently greeted the burgeoning electronic media and communications revolution. As early as 1984 Marker was conducting his rare interviews via computer, and pronouncing: ‘Film and video are equally obsolete when you consider the incoming reign of digital images.’ Although he continued to release his work on film throughout the 1980s, every one of these project contains images of and allusions to Marker’s affirmative vision of new technology.” She offers a thorough and helpful interpretation of the film Sunless, Marker’s most respected work from this period. Analyzing the film’s competing models of memory, Lupton highlights the intersecting of memory and media that would come to characterize Marker’s recent new media project. She writes, “The ways in which memory perpetually reshapes past events and experiences are figured in Sunless through the periodic visual and aural distortion of both film images and sound sources, by processing them through synthesizers. The reflections that the film offers on these synthetic images . . . crystallize the pioneering enthusiasm for new media technologies that Marker had first exhibited with Quand le siecle a pris formes, and establish a precedent for exploring questions of deep cultural memory through new media that would extend across much of his subsequent work.” More recently, Marker has made television works, gallery installations, and even a CD-ROM, Immemory. For better or worse, Marker claims that Level Five, which is about the fate of historical memory in an era of computer databanks, is “his last theatrical feature film . . . and that in the future he intends to work only with the computer.”

Guy Debord: A Sick Planet

A Sick Planet collects three pamphlets by Debord (two of which are also included in the Situationist International Anthology), repackaging the separate texts as one well-designed commodity. The first pamphlet, “The Decline and Fall of the ‘Spectacular’ Commodity-Economy,” takes as its subject the Watts riots of 1965, offering what has since become the standard romantic-anarchist account of ghetto revolt. Debord attempts to defend what was characterized on almost all sides as senseless, aimless theft and destruction by offering Situationist theory as “the truth sought implicitly by [the rioters’] practical action.” “Our theory of survival and of the spectacle is illuminated by these actions, as unintelligible as they may be to America’s false consciousness. One day these actions will in turn be illuminated by this theory.” Debord explains, “The Los Angeles revolt was a revolt against the commodity, against a world of commodities and of worker-consumers hierarchically subordinated to the measuring-rod of the commodity.” Deprived of any hope for future integration into society and conscious of the degraded nature of the minority spectacle aimed at them, blacks in Los Angeles rejected the idea of entering into the capitalist exchange relation and simply seized upon the world of abundance promised by modern marketing. “The blacks of Los Angeles . . . take modern capitalist propaganda, with its touting of affluence, at its word. They want all the objects displayed, and available in the abstract, right now—because they want to use them.” Circumventing “the rat-race of alienated labour and increasing, ever-deferred social needs,” they also freed themselves from subordination to and fetishization of the commodity, and were therefore free to play with and even destroy commodities. The role the police played in fighting looting, which Debord considers “the natural response to the affluent society,” reveals that the policeman “is the active servant of commodities . . . whose job is to ensure that a given product of human labour remains a commodity with the magical property of having to be paid for instead of becoming a mere fridge or rifle—a mute, passive, insensible thing, captive to the first comer to make use of it.” Debord concludes by defending the “excesses” of the Watts rioters, claiming, “Any rebellion against the spectacle occurs at the level of the totality, because—even if it is confined to a single neighborhood, such as Watts—it is a human protest against an inhuman life; because it begins at the level of the real single individual, and because community, from which the individual in revolt is separated, is the true social nature of man, true human nature: the positive transcendence of the spectacle.” The second pamphlet collected here, “The Explosion Point of Ideology in China,” examines the causes and development of the Cultural Revolution in China. Exhibiting a strong debt to Cornelius Castoriadis (see the three volumes of his Political and Social Writings: I, II, III), Debord attacks Maoism and shows how “accelerating disintegration of bureaucratic ideology” across the globe has eliminated any remaining illusions about the supposed revolutionary nature of the communist parties. Rather than a genuine attack on the party bureaucracy, the conflicts in China are the consequence of a ruling class divided in two, a dispute at the top of the political hierarchy. Despite being masters of ideology, the Maoists pulled back and entered into a truce when the Cultural Revolution threatened the Party itself, revealing their separation from the peasants-workers. Debord concludes, “Wherever China may be headed, the image of the last revolutionary-bureaucratic regime is now shattered.” The third pamphlet in the collection, ”A Sick Planet,” is a new translation of a text from 1971. The pamphlet is of interest primarily because Debord integrates ecological issues into revolutionary theory. According to Debord, the discussion of pollution in the spectacle registers but distorts a serious materialist problem, the fact that we have reached “the moment when it becomes impossible for capitalism to carry on working.” Modern capitalist production has advanced to the point where its science and technology can even predict “the rapid degradation of the very conditions of survival.” Debord explains, “A society that is ever more sick, but ever more powerful, has recreated the world—everywhere and in concrete form—as the environment and backdrop of its sickness: it has created a sick planet. A society that has not yet achieved homogeneity, and that is not yet self-determined, but instead ever more determined by a part of itself positioned above itself, external to itself, has set in train a process of domination of Nature that has not yet established domination over itself. Capitalism has at last demonstrated, by virtue of its own dynamics, that it can no longer develop the forces of production.” The serious threat posed by pollution, which even the “masters of society” must acknowledge, might act as a revolutionary catalyst. “[T]he plain fact that such harmful and dangerous trends exist constitutes an immense motive for revolt, a material requirement of the exploited just as vital as the struggle of nineteenth-century proletarians for the right to eat.” But the spectacle focuses only on a new kind of reformism. Modern industries hope to profit from fighting pollution (think of today’s “green” technologies). Constrained by the imperative to create new jobs (“that is to say for the sake of using human labour as alienated labour, as wage-labour”), governments choose conservative responses that do not question the system. However, the problem of pollution (as well as of hierarchy, spectacle, and capitalism) can be solved “only by submitting everything—except ourselves—to the sole power of workers’ councils, possessing and continually reconstructing the totality of the world—by submitting everything, in other words, to an authentic rationality, a new legitimacy.” Debord beautifully concludes, “Alienated industrial production makes the rain. Revolution makes the sunshine.”