Quote Dump
I am going to use this page of my blog to dump some quotes from the readings I am doing over the reading week which feel particularly relevant to my work. There is going to be no correct referencing, no context for the quotes, and no explanation as to why I feel they are relevant, it’s just a place to put them all.
‘On The Concept of History’, Walter Benjamin (1940)
The chronicler, who recounts events without distinguishing between the great and small, thereby accounts for the truth, that nothing which has ever happened is to be given as lost to history. Indeed, the past would fully befall only a resurrected humanity. Said another way: only for a resurrected humanity would its past, in each of its moments, be citable. Each of its lived moments becomes a citation a l’ordre du jour [order of the day] – whose day is precisely that of the Last Judgment.
The true picture of the past whizzes by. Only as a picture, which flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognizability, is the past to be held fast. “The truth will not run away from us” – this remark by Gottfried Keller denotes the exact place where historical materialism breaks through historicism’s picture of history. For it is an irretrievable picture of the past, which threatens to disappear with every present, which does not recognize itself as meant in it.
To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger. For historical materialism it is a question of holding fast to a picture of the past, just as if it had unexpectedly thrust itself, in a moment of danger, on the historical subject.
There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair [verweilen: a reference to Goethe’s Faust], to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.
‘Theory of the Derive’, Guy Debord (1956)
… In order to illustrate “the narrowness of the real Paris in which each individual lives … within a geographical area whose radius is extremely small,” he diagrams all the movements made in the space of one year by a student living in the 16th Arrondissement. Her itinerary forms a small triangle with no significant deviations, the three apexes of which are the School of Political Sciences, her residence and that of her piano teacher.
It should go without saying that we are not at all interested in any mere exoticism that may arise from the fact that one is exploring a neighbourhood for the first time. Besides its unimportance, this aspect of the problem is completely subjective and soon fades away.
‘From Street to Screen’, David Archibald and Carl Lavery (2018)
A different method of analysis is needed – one in which the focus of attention is not based on contextualizing what the films say or in historicizing what they show, as most commentators on his films have done to date (Coppola 2003; Danesi 2011), but rather on how their rhythmic structures seek to liberate the audience from the dominant refrains of neoliberal capitalism.
There is a temporal irony involved in Debord’s cinema, for while, as we outline below, it is always melancholically focused on the past, its significance is projected into the future. In this respect, Debord’s films are marked by what art critic Boris Groys calls ‘contemporaneity’ – an uncanny mode of temporality in which to be historically attuned is always to be out of date, never in step with one’s time: “the contemporary is actually constituted by doubt, hesitation, uncertainty, indecision – by the need for prolonged reflection, for a delay. We want to postpone our decisions and actions in order to have more time for analysis, reflection, and consideration. And that is precisely what the contemporary is – a prolonged, even potentially infinite period of delay”.
This necessary ambivalence is nowhere more evident than in the changed status of the drift or dérive in Debord’s work. In its original foundation, the drift, (…) was a critically informed walking practice, an attempt (…) to map urban atmospheres and to contest the society of the spectacle’s attempt to produce new spaces and times where nothing of note happened, and where everything remained the same. Today, though, the drift retains its relevance not simply for how it calls out for new cities and emancipatory architectures, but rather for how it interrupts ‘24/7 capitalism[’s]’ desire to capture attention through an expanded notion of the cinematic (Crary 2015) – a redistributed technology of screens, networked communications, and informational labour. In our present, the drift is both a temporal and ontological condition, something that contests what François Hartog critiques as ‘presentism’ (2015: xiii–xv), the sense in which capital seeks to erase alternative ways of living in time by tethering us to a now that wants to last forever.
Today, we are jolted and shocked on a daily basis, subjected to information overload, tyrannized by deadlines and signs, compelled to engage in the ‘labour of looking’ (Beller 2006:2). Faced with such a disjunctive, panicked reality, the point is not so much to carve out a space for thought, but to set in motion a different refrain, to offer new rhythmic possibilities on a performative level.
In its original formulation, the dérive, of course, was not figured as a cinematic technique at all, even though Debord’s driftmaps with Asger Jorn make specific references to the film noir Naked City (Dassin, 1948). Nevertheless, it is telling that all of the films after Hurlements either reflect on the drift directly and/or use it as a compositional device. Where On the Passage and Critique of Separation represent the drift explicitly through images of people and places and by ruminating, melancholically, on the defeat of the dérive – in On the Passage, for instance, one of the three off-screen voices who feature in the film says ‘We haven’t changed anything’ (Debord 2003 [1959]: 22) – in Debord’s subsequent cinematic work the dérive is located primarily in the rhythms of the films themselves. In the same way that drifting through the city on foot, as Thierry Davila explains, allows images to impact on consciousness in a cinematic fashion, creating a kind of ‘internalized montage’ (2002:31, our translation), Debord’s films reverse – or better still – transpose this process, subjecting the viewer to a constant barrage of apparently disconnected faces, spaces and histories. In Society of the Spectacle and In girum, for instance, there is a perpetual cutting back and forth between different visual modes – stills from anonymous, soft porn movies and magazines, photographs of historical figures, comic strips, advertisements for commodities – and there are long sections that stitch together whole sequences from well-known Hollywood and Soviet-era films, including Johnny Guitar (Ray, 1954), Rio Grande (Ford, 1951), For Whom the Bell Tolls (Wood, 1943) and Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein, 1925). In the same way that drifters sought to actively lose themselves in the rhythms of the city, so Debord attempts to disorientate spectators in their cinema seats, to create what he called a ‘static derive’ (Debord 1981 [1958]: 52) – a drift in which viewers are released from the static refrains of spectacular time, and so have the opportunity, as we argue, in the final section of this essay, to reinvent the future by reconnecting with the past.
In order to prevent any possible confusion in our argument, it seems important to make clear that we have little interest in the aesthetics of slow cinema, whose advocates, such as Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott (2011) and Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barrades Jorge (2015), assume that speed itself is the privileged site of contestation. Rather our focus is on the possibilities afforded by disruption and interruption, in tracking the anachronistic tempos and variegated temporalities produced by a ‘drifting montage’, which is the major factor in constructing what we call the ‘arrhythmic form’ of the films.
In an important but largely theoretical essay on Debord’s use of détournement in film, Agamben points out how it is structured around two competing but ultimately complementary movements: ‘repetition and stoppage’ (2002:315). Where repetition, for Agamben, ‘restores the possibility of what was … by transforming the real into the possible and the possible into the real’ (316), stoppage, by contrast, interrupts the flow of the present, and ‘“exhibits” words and pictures’ (317): ‘The image worked by repetition and stoppage is a means, a medium that does not disappear in what it makes visible. It is what I call a “pure means”, one that shows itself as such’ (318). Through this insistence on the showing of appearance, Debordian montage, creates not only ‘a chronological pause’ in the telling of a story that would give us time to think. More radically still, it disrupts the rhythmic flow of narrative itself, the normative sequencing of time into past, present and future, and, as such, is better approached as temporal force, an invisible intensity.
In Debordian montage, there is often a gap between what the eye sees and what the ear hears, creating a disjunction between the act of viewing and listening. The images come too thick and fast, without warning of their provenance or context for their placement, and the voice-over is invariably too dense and philosophical to grasp in one hearing. What we are presented with is what Thomas Y. Levin terms the ‘mimesis of incoherence’ (2002:360), a resonant phrase for describing Debord’s refusal to communicate. In an early sequence in the film The Society of the Spectacle, a series of shots are edited together in quick formation – missiles being fired from warships, men in space, the stock exchange, riot police marching in formation, a mounted policeman attacking a man sitting on a park bench, two semi-naked women performing an erotic dance on a stage, a still image of a young couple watching an image of a yacht on a television screen, the construction of skyscrapers. These images accompany Debord’s narration as he outlines his thesis on separation and spectacle. This is followed by a somewhat arbitrary cut to a shot of a rising sun, and then black screen and white intertitles: ‘Some cinematic value might be acknowledged in this film if the present rhythm were to continue; but it will not be continued’ (…) The effect is to create a distance – what Agamben sees as ‘a stoppage’ – between the on-screen images and the narrator’s voice. In this interruption of sound and sense, time takes on a durational quality, a type of thickness. It is no longer simply something we follow from moment to moment, but something we are part of – a stuttering, syncopated now that simultaneously passes and does not pass.
There is always a syncopated beat to Debordian montage – a form of editing that stumbles and staggers along, and, in the process, calls attention to itself in an act of self-conscious theatricality, which, differently from the editing techniques of French New Wave directors, is never tied to a narrative or focused on a star performer. In Debord’s deregulated rhythms, there is no way of reconciling political sounds and sense. We are constantly rebuffed.
However, such an intellectual linkage is somewhat opaque, and the film’s uneven rhythm denies it in the sheer immediacy and variety of images that hit the retina. In contradistinction, say, to Sergei Eisenstein’s notion of rhythm in montage in which the collision of different images and/ or sounds is organized in a dialectical manner to create a specific synthesis at the point of reception (Eisenstein 1977:45–63), Debord’s editing is more lateral and open-ended. The point is not to impose meaning, but to release us from its burden, to allow our attention to drift arrhythmically, and in that drifting to liberate perception from Hartog’s tyranny of ‘presentism’, the fetishization of immediacy. Where Eisenstein wants, always, to immerse us sensorially into the drama unfolding in front of our eyes – to bring us closer to the action through the construction of ‘conflict’ (53–8) – Debord, on the contrary, creates a gap, a temporal abyss between the screen and the spectator. In the syncopated rhythms of his montage, Debord produces a different kind of affect: one in which the spectator is moved this way and that, and caught between stoppage and flow, gathering together fragments of meaning and never being allowed to gaze unencumbered at the screen, as one does, say, in slow cinema.
As Clément’s description intimates, it is important that the drift-like quality of Debordian montage is not approached, psychologically or textually, as an alienation effect – a discursive gestus – that would allow spectators to decipher the signs of the work in front of them, as if they were Brechtian cigar-smokers. On the contrary, the discombobulating gestus of Debordian editing is experiential; its primary function is to draw spectators into a syncopated movement, an arrhythmia. The politics of Debord’s rhythms, then, are not found in taking one’s time, but in feeling the heterogeneous movements of time, undergoing the anarchic play of its durations, pulses and cuts. ‘Syncope is an act of rebellion’, Clément contends, ‘an abundant jamboree of defiant inventions’ (261, 242). In the syncopated beat of the cinematic drift, time unmoors itself from spectacle’s rhythmic disciplinarity and drifts where it will, escaping all attempts to rivet it down.
By replacing the concentrated ‘drill’ of spectacular dressage with the ‘dance’ of moving images and (dis)associated sounds, Debordian syncopation, like the urban dérive, restores temporal heterogeneity to perception, attuning us to finitude and evanescence. Here, the awareness of ‘the passage of time’, its brevity, haunts the fixity and perpetuity of the present. Like the three voices in On the Passage, we are compelled to remember. It is important to note, however, that memory or repetition, for Debord, cannot recover the past as it was lived. The most – the best – that memory can do is to allow the past to return differently, to accept the very thing that spectacle is terrified by: loss, transformation, slippage: I have let time slip away. I have lost what I should have defended. (Debord 2003 [1959]: 34) This general critique of separation obviously contains and conceals, some particular memories. (34) Everything involving the sphere of loss – that is, what I have lost of myself, the time that has gone; and disappearance, flight; and the general evanescence of things. (35)
‘Rethinking the Derive’, Carl Lavery (2018)
What unites these disparate, sometimes warring etymologies is how the drift (la dérive) describes a complex, entangled relation, an ontology we might say, in which subjects and objects are acted upon by external forces. Simultaneously, we seem powerless to withstand drifting, and yet always tempted to give in to its movement, to be caught in its rhythms, its compelling grooves.
To drift, then, is not simply to flow without friction like the electronic currents of finance capital or the abstracted transmissions of the barcode that disembody the world; it is to be a part of a sticky universe of staggered movement, syncopated rhythms, fizzes and schisms. In its irregularities and contingencies, drift – at least in its hopeful or affirmative mode – is characterized by what the Stoic philosophers called the play of the clinamen, a dynamic ricochet effect that, on an atomic or molecular level, has the capacity to produce new worlds.
Rather drifting, as Charney reminds us, offers an aesthetics of non-productive behaviour, a mode of art making, defined by ‘empty moments’, that, precisely because it serves no purpose, contests capitalism’s attempt to financialize perception.
he drift is posited as a mode of ‘experimental behaviour’, related to and impossible to separate from a constellation of other concepts such as ‘psychogeography’, ‘unitary urbanism’ and ‘détournement’ (creative hijacking).
In contrast to ‘official’ post-war urbanism, which, in the 1950s, sought to remake the war-damaged cityscapes of Europe into a space for the easy circulation of commodities, (JHQ WAS ESTABLISHED IN THE 50’s, I THINK IT COULD DEFINITELY BE CATEGORISED AS POST-WAR URBANISM), ‘unitary urbanism’ instead, looked to create a ludic, labyrinthine city, one that was fit for human purposes. (JHQ NOW, COULD THE ABANDONMENT AND SUBSEQUENT DECAY OF JHQ BE SEEN AS A FALL INTO THE LABYRINTHINE?) As Tom McDonough remarks, ‘the city’, for the SI, was a quasi-Hegelian entity, ‘figured as a space of possible recognition – of the self, of the other, and, at its limit, of the collectivity in its revolutionary becoming’ (2010:3). To create this humanist milieu, the Situationists used the dérive to combat the destruction of everyday life by a new-fangled spectacular urbanism, grounded in the functionalism of Le Corbusier’s cité radieuse, with its hierarchical ‘verticalism’, technological fetishism, and predilection for ring-roads and motorways.
To counter the banalization of the garbage unit, the SI proposed the drift as an activity deliberately attuned to the affective, bodily play of surfaces, textures and atmospheres. Through this decidedly materialist method of enquiry in which, as in Artaud’s theatre, the city reveals its ‘secrets through the skin’, the SI were part a counter-tradition of French geography – one that was grounded in the minoritarian methods of Communard geographer Élisée Reclus and later developed by Marxist spatial theorist Henri Lefebvre.
Like theatre in many ways, the drift is an essentially open-ended practice, something ephemeral, affective and predicated on a script or score whose repetition is always with a difference. The aim is to effect permanent change through transient acts that can be performed again and again, but always differently.
To borrow from Giorgio Agamben’s and Boris Groys’ writings on contemporaneity, this is precisely what the historiographical model we advanced on pp. 4–5 seeks to do – namely to rummage in the wreckage, to create unlikely assemblages, to resuscitate abandoned futures that would have real political and aesthetic traction for theatre and performance studies in terms of an overarching thematics of critique.
The UK artist Ralph Rumney, for instance, used photographic stills and text boxes to create a visual narrative of his drift through Venice in the late 1950s; and Debord’s collaborations with Asger Jorn in the late 1950s – The Naked City (1957), Guide Psychogéographique of Paris (1957), Fin de Copenhague (1957) and Mémoires (1959) – are effectively driftmaps of Copenhagen and Paris. In the latter two texts, the spectator is confronted with a riot of colour, a type of visual chaos without any apparent plan or regularity. The chromatic anarchy is shot through with detourned images from adverts, comic strips, maps, academic primers and photographs of accomplices and lovers. In these passionate maps or cartes de tendres, to use a phrase that Debord borrows from the seventeenthcentury writer Madame de Scudéry, experience is depicted and transmitted as something corporeal, transversal and affective, what Deleuze and Guattari would come to call, in their work on Franz Kafka (1986:81–8), an assemblage of ‘percepts and affects’, and what Guiliana Bruno names a ‘voyage of emotions’ (2002:264). To encounter these maps – these ‘blocks of intensity’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1986:78) – is not to petrify what has been lived. Rather, it is to prolong and transpose the ‘motility’ of affect in ways that chime with attempts by contemporary performance artists and scholars to document and write about performance dynamically.31 In the SI’s work, the dérive is not to be represented as a mere index of a spatial performance that has happened, but as something that demands creative expression.
The key, in other words, is to articulate the singularity of an embodied encounter through the discovery of a sensate style, something that allows the reader/ spectator to drift, to embark on new lines of flight that undo easy distinctions between passivity and activity.
Conor McBride 