Sam Cooper interviews Mckenzie Wark
The Unreturnable Gift: Berfrois Interviews McKenzie Wark
McKenzie Wark is an Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at The New School. His most recent book, The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International , offers a reconsideration of the movement in terms of its lesser-known participants, its fringe activities, and its relevance for today. He is also the author of A Hacker Manifesto (2004) and Gamer Theory (2007).
Sam Cooper is a PhD Candidate at the University of Sussex. His thesis is titled âA Lot to Answer Forâ: The British Legacy of the Situationist International.
There are now a lot of books about the Situationist International, which suggests that there are a lot of different ways to approach the group. How would you characterise your approach?
The Situationist International is the gift that keeps on giving, in the ambiguous sense that gifts are a good thing but also a problem: We donât always know how to make them go away. Part of it is that culture works that way. Sometimes things disappear after fifteen minutes, sometimes they disappear after a hundred years. Part of it is that the Situationist International is rich enough for its story to be retold all over again in order to extract a somewhat different array of concepts that speak to our present. I wanted to find the version that would speak to the early twenty-first century. Part of it involved decentering the story. It struck me as unusual that no-one had done this already: No-one had said, âletâs decenter this story away from Paris, letâs write women back into this story, letâs acknowledge the North African presence in the Situationist Internationalâ. I didnât get as far there as I wouldâve liked, because the less central figures tend to be less well documented, but letâs acknowledge that this was a transnational network of men and women, speaking several languages, and tell that story instead.
You just mentioned what you also state in the first chapter, that youâre attempting to retrieve âa past specific to the demands of the presentâ. In what ways does the version of the Situationist International that you retrieve speak to the present?
One received version of the story is that the Situationist International is the group that most clearly anticipates May 1968. I think that version is still substantially true, but I also think that May â68âone of the greatest general strikes in historyâisnât such a great guide to what cultural and political life in the twenty-first century is really like. So what else were the Situationists about? It strikes me that there are several important keys in their body of work. One is the transnational network. How do you create networks across languages, across cultures? Iâve tried to do that myself, so I was interested in their attempts, and where those attempts fell apart.
Another key is that while there is a certain effectiveness in the taking-to-the-streets model of action, it also has severe limits. I found someone like Constant really interesting because he wanted to address a much bigger scaleâquestions of design at the level of infrastructureâand those things can get left out. At the moment, there is a real fetishising of âthe Politicalâ, and I think that in an era when politics is so miserably failing, why are our philosophers fetishising âthe Politicalâ? Isnât that the last place youâd want to go? So Constant asks, why donât we think of the infrastructural organisation of life, and how that could be done differently?
New Babylon, Constant, 1959-74
The category of everyday life is now an established one, discussed as an object of study, but how is it to be practiced? What are practices of everyday life? The best known story to come out of the Situationist International about that is the dĂ©rive, which involves wandering the streets, discovering new ambiances, constructing new psychogeographies that could contain intimations of what future landscapes would look like if we were free from private property and wage-labour, and so on. Thatâs great, but itâs a bit of a young manâs gameâto roam the streets in a pack, after a few drinksânot everyone can do that, or at least itâs not advisable in an age when thereâs a CCTV camera on every street corner. MichĂšle Bernstein, whom I write about, has a really fabulous and less masculinist version of what the experience of the everyday could be like. Sheâs also interested in love, sex and romance, as games played out in the space of the city, in ways that arenât about treating other people as your property. I donât know if itâs also called âhook-up cultureâ in the UK, but in the US thereâs been a transformation in how young people think about love and sex and everyday life, and Bernsteinâs two novels anticipate that in really interesting ways.
You mention in the book that you want to defend âlow theoryâ, which is a concept that seems to relate to these practices of everyday life. What do you mean by âlow theoryâ, and how is it connected to the Situationist International?
Well, the American university is where so-called âFrench theoryâ was actually invented, and not in philosophy departments but via comparative literature, other literature departments, sometimes media studies, and various other places. So you couldnât quite call it philosophyâit got called âtheoryâ and sometimes âhigh theoryâ. You end up with this construct, based essentially around the reception of Derrida into the Anglophone world through these centres of intellectual power in the US. And this is interesting, but it occupies a certain kind of terrain, a certain space. It requires a certain training.
Iâve always been much more interested in something else: The self-conscious attempt to construct conceptual practices outside of formal settings. That is what Marx did, itâs what Freud did, itâs what Benjamin did; Iâd even say itâs what Nietzsche did, because of course heâs on âpermanent leaveâ when heâs writing all these amazing books, when heâs already losing it. Somehow, these guys are all now âhigh theoryâ, but thatâs not where they came from whatsoever. Marx is not a philosopher, Freud is not a philosopher, Benjamin is not a philosopher; Iâd even say Nietzsche is not a philosopher. Theyâre all doing âlow theoryâ, and Iâm trying to tell stories that fit into that tradition, maybe not at that level, but as a whole other way of thinking about the practice of knowledge in everyday life. This puts on the table the question of the politics of knowledge in a way that canât be directly asked, or answered, in the space of the university.
Asger Jorn, photograph by BĂžrge Venge
The jury will be out for a hundred years as to whether anything by the Situationist International is of the same quality [as Marx, Freud, Benjamin, etc.], but one makes the case. In the work ofAsger Jorn there is some astonishing stuff. He was trying to ask, what is the practice of the class to which an artist belongs? This is a pretty astonishing question to be asking in the Fifties, when artists either imagined themselves to be petit-bourgeois peddlars of their own souls, or they tried to align themselves with the working class through being communists, as even Picasso tried to do. Jorn asks, is there another way to think about creative practice?
The language and the style of your book seem to conjure something of the Situationist project, which seems to have been a tactical decision on your part, consistent with this idea of âlow theoryâ. How does the bookâs style relate to its content?
I am, first and last, a writer. Like any writer, Iâm interested in good examples of the craft. The danger is that you read really good stuff and you end up imitating it. Iâve certainly done that. I have whole notebooks of stuff that reads like Debord in translation. Heâs an astonishingly interesting writer in French, and a lot of it survives in English translation. I didnât want to write a book that imitated him, but I did want a certain prickliness in some of the prose, a certain spiky quality. So it was an exercise in style, in finding a style appropriate but not imitative.
This book came after two books that are straight-up dĂ©tournements of Situationist texts: AHacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory were rewritings of the two canonical Situationist texts, Guy Debordâs Society of the Spectacle (1967) and Raoul Vaneigemâs book, known in English as The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967). So itâs taken me three books so far, and I havenât even arrived at Debordâs late prose which I think is particularly valuable. While Iâve tried to decenter the story away from Debord, he is still the Situationist Internationalâs best writer. I love Jorn, but his writing is really torturous: Heâs a good bad writer!
The Situationist International maintained that it never offered itself up to academic study, or to translation into other types of discourse. They were very wary of being appropriated for ends other than their own. How have you dealt with that dilemma?
I donât think this is so unique to Situationist texts. Any work worth paying attention to usually tries to armour itself against certain kinds of appropriation, which itself reveals a nervousness, a sense of inevitability, about appropriation. Iâm sure the Situationists felt this way. After all, they came up with the theory of dĂ©tournementâthat the whole of culture works by plagiarising itself because none of it is private property and all of it belongs to everybody. The Situationists even say that the best example of dĂ©tournement is advertising, which plagiarises anything of any interest and attaches commodity desire to it. So, if that was your theory, you would get incredibly nervous about the fact that itâs inevitable that youâre going to be appropriated!
I did a little book, as a trial for this one, called 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International. I showed this to an artist friend, and he had a fantastic response, â50 years of recuperation of the Situationist International? May there be 50 more!â And I thought, thank you! That is exactly right! The work that is valuable in culture in the long term is the unreturnable gift, the thing we just donât know how to get rid of. Iâm sorry to say, love her or not, Amy Winehouse: Thereâs an art that, in a couple of years, we could be done with. Itâs a gift we can return, itâs probably not up there (though I could be proven wrong). We can repay that one and itâll go away. But this one, the Situationist International, it just wonât go away.
Situationist leaflet, Denmark. Photograph of Christine Keeler by Lewis Morley, 1963
Were there aspects of the Situationist project that you found, now, to be redundant or to have been outflanked by politics or by history?
Iâm reluctant to trade in that wisdom of hindsight, but in this sense of the unreturnable gift, all of the Situationistsâ work is simultaneously redundant and not. As I was saying, the dĂ©rive is now hard to do: in the age of the CCTV camera, there is no available invisibility in that sense. The concept of spectacle has certainly evolved way past what Debord describedâit didnât get any better, it got worse.
But then Constantâs utopian schemes, for example, are to me very poignant. He imagines the ability to change global climates: he didnât realise that actually weâve already done that, inadvertently. There is a pathos there that is both dated and not. So, my answer is that these stories about the Situationist International are rooted in very particular histories. The historical nature of conceptual thought is something worth stressing at the moment: there is no eternal, Platonist, political universe that you can extract, as is now common to think. The moment that a good concept speaks to is, at one and the same time, the day on which it was published and the century in which it happens.
How did you, personally, come to the Situationist International? How have your own activities informed your understanding of the Situationists?
Having been a militant in my youth, and then living through a peripheral but nonetheless interesting bohemia, I was interested in those two spaces. Eventually I became an academic, but Iâm still more interested in those other spaces; they are where I get ideas from. In the Eighties and Nineties I was involved in avant-garde movements of probably no great historical significance, but we gave it a shot. We were interested in media, the internet. We werenât techno-utopians, we were quite tactical. I wanted to write about that, and failed, but I asked myself, what was the book most of us read? It was Society of the Spectacle. So I re-read that, which lead toHacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory. The Beach Beneath the Street is, in a sense, a prequel to those two. It excavates a bit more thoroughly what I thought I was doing in those texts.
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