B U R E A U O F P U B L I C S E C R E T S |
Aragorn (Anarchy)
Bill Brown (Not Bored)
Oliah Kraft
Karl Young
Jean-Pierre Depétris
Wayne Spencer
REVIEW OF THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE TRANSLATION
Society of the Spectacle
by Guy Debord
translated by Ken Knabb
(Rebel Press, London 2005)
paper, 120 pages, $15
Ken Knabb has devoted his life to the work of Guy Debord. An
active post-Situationist since the early seventies, his editing and translation
of the Situationist International Anthology has been the most important
contribution to the Anglophone understanding of the SI till now. His translation
of Guy’s films are now in paperback and he has recently received the rights to
translate all of Debord’s works into English. [Not true. --KK] The
translations of the films were the first fruit of that responsibility but this
new translation of Society of the Spectacle is the real golden apple.
If past translations of Debord’s
masterpiece have suffered, it is from either being too literal (as in the case
of the Black and Red translation) or unnecessarily obscure (as in the case of
the one from Zone). Knabb’s translation is an American one meant for an American
readership (although ironically Rebel Press is based in London while Zone Books
is based in New York). It usually uses fewer words than Zone’s, often making
choices that are stripped of a subtlety that would evade and frustrate a
first-time reader.
A few examples in detail:
Black & Red: 5
The spectacle cannot be understood as an abuse of the world of vision, as a product of the techniques of mass dissemination of images. It is, rather, a Weltanschauung which has become actual, materially translated. It is a world vision which has become objectified.Zone: 5
The spectacle cannot be understood either as a deliberate distortion of the visual world or as a product of the technology of the mass dissemination of images. It is far better viewed as a Weltanschauung that has been actualized, translated into the material realm — a world view transformed into an objective force.Knabb: 5
The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual deception produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized, a view of the world that has become objective.
Let’s review these, as they demonstrate the kind of choices made
generally. Knabb chose to translate the German term Weltanschauung which
is unusual. Generally if the text you are translating uses terms from another
language it is because of a choice that the author is making to be more precise
than they are capable of in their own language. To translate that term into a
third language prioritizes readability over precision. “It is a worldview that
has been materialized” is inarguably more readable than “It is far better viewed
as a Weltanschauung that has been actualized,” but the intent of the
author seems obscured. Also, is there a substantive difference between something
(in particular a worldview) being actualized and it being materialized? It seems
as though one, to be pedantic, is a materialist project and the other is a
process that isn’t necessarily physical. Is becoming vegan a materialized
worldview or an actualized one? Black and Red provides another twist: “It is,
rather, a Weltanschauung which has become actual,” providing a term that
connotes neither motion (actualized), nor stasis (materialized), but truth.
Naturally the following sentence
leavens the potential of widely different interpretations of this aphorism. “A
view of a world that has become objective” connects some of the major themes of
Debord’s thought; the connection between sight, alienation from the world, and
the capitalist system of objectification.
Another example:
Black & Red: 129
Cyclical time in itself is time without conflict. But conflict is installed within this infancy of time: history first struggles to be history in the practical activity of masters. This history superficially creates the irreversible; its movement constitutes precisely the time it uses up within the interior of the inexhaustible time of cyclical society.Zone: 129
In its essence, cyclical time was a time without conflict. Yet even in this infancy of time, conflict was present: at first, history struggled to become history through the practical activity of the masters. At a superficial level this history created irreversibility; its movement constituted the very time that it used up within the inexhaustible time of cyclical society.Knabb: 129
In itself, cyclical time is a time without conflict. But conflict is already present even in this infancy of time, as history first struggles to become history in the practical activity of the masters. This history creates a surface irreversibility; its movement constitutes the very time it uses up within the inexhaustible time of cyclical society.
The last sentence of these translations should remind the reader
of the Hegelian contortions of Marx and Debord. These three translations read
quite differently as a result. Black and Red reads that “history superficially
creates the irreversible,” Zone that “At a superficial level this history
created irreversibility,” and Knabb that “This history creates a surface
irreversibility.” These may seem like a quibble but it is a very different
statement to talk about history creating superficial irreversibility or that at
a superficial level history created irreversibility. These nuances thread
through the entirety of a side-by-side reading of the Knabb and (especially) the
Zone translation. Sometimes the differences are easily identifiable as being
about readability and at other times they seem to choose sides in arguments that
are obscure and lost in time, but interesting to Debord scholars and persistent
readers of the increasing body of English translations of the Situationist
International.
Guy’s articulation of our separated
world, of our “spectacular” reality, remains the truest theoretical statement of
the time we live in and how things ended up this way. Knabb’s translation now
sits as the most approachable way to discover Guy Debord, the Situationists, and
the body of thought that has relied on this text, including those of the
post-Situationists, Primitivists, many anti-state communists, and post-left
anarchists.
—Aragorn, in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed #61
(Berkeley, Spring-Summer 2006)
[This is the complete review. A brief response can be found here. ]
ONE STEP FORWARD, ONE STEP BACK
Ken Knabb’s Pas de deux
In December 2006, Ken Knabb took the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary
of the first edition of his Situationist International Anthology (Bureau
of Public Secrets: Berkeley, 1981) to publish a “revised and expanded edition.”
A major development in Anglo-American radical politics, Knabb’s Situationist
International Anthology was the first such collection of translated texts
since 1974, when the ex-situationist Christopher Gray published Leaving the
Twentieth Century. Though Gray’s selections were far from complete and his
translations and commentaries were weak, Leaving the Twentieth Century
was also an important work: illustrated by Jamie Reid, it exerted a strong
influence on English punk. But unlike Leaving the Twentieth Century,
which was not reprinted in its original format, well distributed or widely read,
Knabb’s Situationist International Anthology became a kind of “Bible” for
that part of the English-speaking world that loved and learned from the
situationists. It was reprinted once in 1989, and then again in 1995.
The new version of the
Situationist International Anthology is both longer (532 pages, up from 406)
and smaller (the size of the type has been decreased and there are more lines
per page). It includes six “new” texts: one from the pre-1957 period (“Proposal
for Rationally Improving the City of Paris”); three from the 1958 to 1962 period
(“Theses on the Cultural Revolution,” “Another City for Another Life” and “The
Use of Free Time”); two from the 1966 to 1969 period (“Contribution to a
Councilist Program in Spain” and a selection of graffitied slogans from May
1968). Ten texts that had only been partially translated in the first edition
have now been translated in full. They include such important texts as Guy
Debord’s “Report on the Construction of Situations” and “The Situationists and
the New Forms of Action in Politics and Art”; Raoul Vaneigem’s “Ideologies,
Classes, and the Domination of Nature”; and the unsigned “How Not to Understand
Situationist Books.” Knabb has also greatly expanded his “Translator’s Notes”
(annotated references to historical events) and his “Bibliography” (Pre-SI
Texts, Guy Debord’s Films, French SI books, SI Publications in Other Languages,
Post-SI Works, and Books About the SI).
And yet the Situationist
International Anthology remains a deeply flawed book. It continues to
under-represent the SI’s “early” period: only a few texts are included from the
following issues of the group’s French-language journal, Internationale
Situationniste: #2 (1958), #3 (1959), #4 (1960), #5 (1960) and #9 (1964).
And so Knabb seems rather silly when he criticizes Tom McDonough, the editor of
Guy Debord and the Situationist International, for presenting “a
misleadingly one-sided selection of 150 pages of SI articles (mostly early ones
on art and urbanism, with virtually nothing from the last two-thirds of the
group’s existence),” precisely because Knabb’s book is such a good symmetrical
match for it (mostly later articles on politics, with virtually nothing from the
first third of the group’s existence). Unfortunately, neither book
documents such important moments as the formation and subsequent collapse of the
Dutch and German sections of the SI.
Knabb’s Anthology also
under-represents the SI’s “final” period. Absolutely nothing from The Real
Split in the International (published in 1972) — not even Vaneigem’s letter
of resignation or Debord’s famous response to it — is included because, as
Knabb says, “anyone who is serious” will want to read it in its entirety. And
though forty texts were contributed to the group’s “orientation debate”
(also called the “debate on organization”), which took place between August 1969
and February 1971, Knabb only includes five of them. Worse still, nothing
changed between the 1981 and 2006 editions: Knabb offers us the same five
texts and three of them are (still) not offered in their full
versions. It is “misleading,” perhaps even mendacious, to say that Knabb’s
translations of two of these five texts — “Remarks on the SI Today” (27 July
1970) and “Document Beyond Debate” (28 January 1971), both by Debord — are
“excerpted.” They are flat-out butcheries, just as Knabb’s previously
“excerpted” (and now restored) version of Attila Kotanyi’s “Gangland and
Philosophy” (at one time the only text from issue #4 of the SI’s journal)
was a bloody murder. Note well that one of Knabb’s other crime scenes — his
“excerpted” version of “Maitron the Historian” (from 1969) — has been
dropped from the 2006 version of the Anthology, and without any
acknowledgement or explanation whatsoever.
And so, Ken Knabb has a lot of
goddamned nerve to haughtily ignore or look down his nose at other translators
and readers of the situationists’ texts. His “Bibliography” contains such
pompous idiocies as these:
The online translations tend to be less reliable than the published ones, but many of the latter are also inadequate. The three main faults are excessive literalness, excessive liberty, and pure and simple carelessness [...] I have not attempted to mention, let alone review, the thousands of printed articles or online texts about the SI. Suffice it to say that the vast majority are riddled with lies or misconceptions, and that even the few that are relatively accurate rarely offer much that cannot be found better expressed in the SI’s own writings.
And, as a kind of postscript to “The Blind Men and the Elephant (Selected
Opinions on the Situationists),” which he has not updated since 1981, Knabb
claims that “most of the recent reactions are as laughably clueless as the
earlier ones.”
This isn’t merely a matter of Ken
Knabb’s great opinion of himself. It also exposes a basic contradiction in his
presentation of the situationists and their writings. On the one hand: “Despite
the situationists’ reputation for difficulty,” he says, “they are not really all
that hard to understand.” On the other: only Knabb himself is smart,
educated, patient or attentive enough to understand the situationists; everyone
else is a fucking idiot. Well, not everyone: “In certain regards,
however, the general level of comprehension has improved (particularly among
those engaged in radical practices), because the [sic] society’s increasingly
evident spectacularization has made some of the situationists’ insights more
clear [sic] and undeniable.” And there it is folks, the root of the
problem: despite everything that the situationists said and did, Knabb does not
seem to realize (or remember) that what’s important is not “comprehension,” especially not its “general level,” as if comprehension can be
quantified or averaged out. No: what’s important is “radical practice.” And Ken
Knabb hasn’t engaged in any “practice,” radical or otherwise, since the
early 1970s, when he did precisely those types of things that he thought that
the situationists would approve of. But the situationists were not prophets of
some eternal truth, nor were they scientists who discovered “undeniable” facts.
They worked in and for their own time. And the times have certainly changed
since 1972. The situationists’ texts or theories can’t be used today “as is”:
they can only be useful when they are used, that is, when they are detourned.
—Not Bored (25 May 2007)
[This is the complete review except for a few footnotes. The latter
can be found at
www.notbored.org/ken-knabb.html.]
Of the few books I’ve read recently, I was particularly intrigued by Ken
Knabb’s Public Secrets: Collected Skirmishes of Ken Knabb 1970-1997.
I was drawn to this book by my interest in Situationist theory. Knabb has been a
key figure in the Situationist movement in the United States, having translated
the bulk of the Situationist International’s works into English.
First, I read “Confessions of a Mild-Mannered Enemy of the State,” his
autobiographical sketch, in order to get a better idea of who the person behind
all this theoretical writing is — his personal history and development.
Throughout the author’s life experience, certain basic themes stand out: his
love of learning (particularly self-education through books), and his quest for
experience, awareness, consciousness of self and world, and of course, his
evolving revolutionary anti-capitalist perspective. It was this critical process
that attracted Knabb to the Situationist International in 1969, and later led
him to become critical of tendencies within the Situationist milieu. Knabb
especially appreciates the S.I.’s dialectical approach. He explains
it thus, “The dialectical method that runs from Hegel and Marx to the
situationists is not a magic formula for churning out correct predictions, it is
a tool for grappling with the dynamic processes of social change. It reminds us
that social concepts are not eternal; that they contain their own
contradictions, interacting with and transforming each other, even into their
opposites; that what is true or progressive in one context may become false or
regressive in another.” He emphasizes the importance of dialectics
throughout the book.
Knabb introduces the book with an overview of “how we got to this absurd
position,” that is, capitalism — what it is, how it is degrading our lives, etc.
He goes over some radical history, referring back to Marx’s “primitive
accumulation,” in Capital I. He looks at various corrupted attempts at
revolution (Stalinism, Leninism) to define what revolution is not. He then
mentions some of the more effective revolts through time — Italy 1920, Spain
1937, and France 1968 are a few examples. He suggests problem-solving
strategies, including writing pamphlets — getting one’s ideas out there (part of
what inspired me to write this zine), and again underlining the need for
dialectical analysis, including self-examination.
I was especially enamoured of Ken’s “Affective Detournement:
A Case Study,”
an account of his several-month-long Reichian experimentations in critical
self-analysis. He examined his personal “psychogeography”, on the principle
that “you discover how society functions, by learning how it functions against
you.” I thought, “wow, here’s an intelligent radical theorist who is actually
examining his flaws, criticizing his own past, and trying to break out of his
rigidity/‘character armor’ and habitual behaviors. This is something we should
all engage in, and often.” I was moved to laughter by such passages as, “I
particularly aimed at countering any defensive seriousness by constantly holding
up to myself the absurdity and silliness of my ego. Sometimes, when no one else
was around, I would walk down the street singing free-associations and laughing
at myself.”
After reading that, a friend of mine
said, “Ah, but I do this even when others are looking.” People have different
thresholds for overcoming their “biologic rigidity.” Nonetheless, it's
refreshing to see those who talk or write about “liberation” actually practicing
it (or at least striving to achieve self-liberation).
In “Joy of Revolution,” Knabb enthusiastically puts forth
anti-hierarchical revolution as the only sane solution to capitalist insanity.
He gives an idea of how this global social change might unfold and also sketches
out how a post-revolutionary world could look. He strikes me as very optimistic
about what technologies would be retained in a liberated society, when he
proposes that, “airplanes would be kept for intercontinental travel (rationed if
necessary) and for certain kinds of urgent shipments, but the elimination of
wage labor will leave people with time for more leisurely modes of
travel — boats, trains, biking, hiking.” Though I agree with the latter part of
that statement, I find it hard to believe that a truly rational society would
continue to use airplanes, which are highly polluting machines, without
significant alterations to make them much less polluting. However Ken does
suggest that a lot of technologies would be phased out, ecologically improved,
and redesigned “for human rather than capitalistic ends.” In any case, he states
that these are merely some ideas of how a liberated society may work out, and
they are not an exact blueprint. Knabb’s idea is that, once we’ve finally
conquered the mundane stumbling-block that is capitalism, revolution will
present us with far more interesting problems to grapple with, “An
antihierarchical revolution will not solve all our problems; it will simply
eliminate some of the anachronistic ones, freeing us to tackle more interesting
problems.”
The latter part of the book is a collection of previous publications by Knabb
and other Situationist-influenced people, including critiques of certain
non-dialectical aspects of the Situationist milieu — such as the fad it later
degenerated into, or its inadequate
critique of religion.
Knabb also includes his own critique of religion,
specifically “engaged Buddhism,” and an
introduction to the works of revolutionary thinker, poet and literary genius Kenneth Rexroth. Rexroth is
certainly an unusual gem of an individual, particularly in U.S. history, who I had not looked into prior to
reading Public Secrets.
I would highly recommend this book to
anyone, especially those interested in anti-capitalist/revolutionary theory. It
is a clear, straightforward, honest, well-written, and dialectical composition.
—Oliah Kraft, Allergic to This World
(Oregon, 2007)
REXROTH ON THE WEB
Although Kenneth Rexroth complained considerably about new
technologies in his later years, his work has enjoyed good fortune on the World
Wide Web.
In 2000, I put an expanded version of
Morgan Gibson’s study Kenneth Rexroth: Poet of East-West Wisdom online at
my Light and Dust site. . . . At the time I put Gibson’s study
on-line, Ken Knabb had made a good start on his Rexroth Archive. By securing
permission to reprint significant amounts of work from the Rexroth Trust and New
Directions, Knabb was able to build what to me is the most thorough and useful
site for a 20th Century poet on the web today. As much as this is the result of
Knabb’s hard work and judicious choices, it also reflects and enhances
characteristics of Rexroth’s personality and opus.
The large volume of reprints at Knabb’s site inherently make it
an ideal resource for Rexroth’s fans. But the fans aren’t the most important
people on the web. The first of the major virtues of the site comes from the way
it uses web technology to bring new readers to Rexroth. Knabb has a large
mailing list, and sends out notices when he adds new entries to the site. The
entries, in turn, get listed in search engines quickly enough. At the present
time, search engines form the literary world’s most important source of access
to new material. Knabb can get a sense of how this works from reader feedback.
Within days of the addition of Rexroth’s essay on Henry Miller at the site,
Knabb received dozens of e-messages from people with comments such as, “This is
the best thing I’ve seen on Miller. Who is this guy Rexroth, anyway?” Knabb
includes articles Rexroth wrote for newspapers and other now difficult to find
sources, often in conjunction with current events. When the Taliban dynamited
Buddhist statues, for instance, Knabb put up an article by Rexroth on the
Buddhist art of the region. For Rexroth, poetry was news that stayed news in a
literal sense as well as in the more abstract sense that Ezra Pound meant the
phrase. Seeing Rexroth as a poet and essayist in love with the world, the
varieties of his interests and his ability to comment on just about anything
succinctly and memorably, mean that in the infinitely indexed and
cross-referenced environment of the web he will always find new readers. Rexroth
perpetually recommended books, paintings, music, religious and political
organizations to his acquaintances. The web allows him to continue to do that
long after his death. . . .
If the web seems a medium almost designed for Rexroth, Rexroth’s
suitability to it makes important comments on the nature of readers and
literature today. At a time when literature turns in on itself as a cabal of
theorists, readers demonstrate that they have not given up on poetry. There are
still plenty of people who want to read Homer and Montaigne, Tu Fu and Sappho,
major figures in the development of Christianity as well as Buddhism, Utopian
Communalism and Song Dynasty science, The Tale of Genji and the
Kalevala. The list now includes people whose first publications Rexroth
arranged or whom he first reviewed. If he has the most useful 20th Century
author’s site on the web, he earned it.
—Karl Young
(Rexroth symposium, Kanda University, Japan,
October 2007)
REVIEW OF SECRETS PUBLICS
Ken Knabb has so thoroughly assimilated French language and
culture that I sometimes have the impression that I’m talking with a compatriot. He
does, however, retain that eminently North American quality of speaking clearly
and directly, without showing off his intelligence or drawing attention
to himself. Does this mean that his work is a sort of “Situationist
International
for Dummies”? No, although it could undeniably serve as such — anyone who is unfamiliar with the SI, or radical
critique, or the American counterculture should put his book at the very top of
their reading list.
But Secrets Publics is also the
work of a particular individual. Knabb’s successive writings reflect the
development of a perspective that is both penetrating and personal. His seemingly casual tone should
not make us overlook his variety of experience and erudition, nor his agility and subtlety. Knabb is personally involved in everything he
writes, always present as a participant rather than a
mere witness or observer. This is what enables him to tackle the
most diverse topics while remaining low-key and grounded.
—Jean-Pierre Depétris (October 2007)
[Another more extensive article by Jean-Pierre
Depétris]
[Other French reviews of Secrets Publics]
2007 AND I
In an attempt to understand my life and the society in which I
find myself, I read widely. Amongst other things, I took in academic social
science, fashionable theorists such as Zizek and Negri, less fashionable figures
such as Takis Fotopoulos, old Marxists such as Korsch, newer strands of Marxism
such as that of CLR James, Castoriadis, and the Italian theorists of the 60s and
70s, plus a selection of contemporary anarchists and non-Leninist communists.
Although I found some fragments of illumination here and there (for example, in
the work of a group of British sociologists who have looked at the development
of a hedonistic night-time economy to replace the decayed heavy industrial
economy of parts of Britain), I was driven to the conclusion that only the work
of the situationists provided a substantial basis for a critical theoretical
engagement with the alienations of the ordinary person in advanced capitalist
societies.
Looking around for contemporary
material that draws on situationist theory, I soon found that the individuals
who had been associated with the “Declaration Concerning the Center for Research
on the Social Question” and the “Notice Concerning the Reigning Society and
Those Who Contest It” and who had largely been responsible for extending
situationist theory after the demise of the SI had largely abandoned the field.
The one exception, of course, is you. I see that you have refined and added to
your invaluable translations of the situationists (especially with your
translation of The Society of the Spectacle) and that you added a number
of new works of your own (notably the autobiography and “The Joy of Revolution”)
in a new style that evidently aims for greater simplicity of expression.
However, my sense is that in the post-Notice period you have somewhat stepped
back from a critical examination of the development of contemporary alienation
(and the resistance to it). Relatedly, you seem to have grown publicly rather
uncritical about your own cultural consumption (Rexroth, rock-climbing,
meditation, folk music, etc). This is not to say that there is no criticism at
all, but at least some your personal enthusiasms touch on important developments
in commodity society about which you are silent. For example, meditation would
appear to be one facet of a constellation of “non-material” and non-mundane
consumption that now offers distinction, enlightenment or patient resignation to
sectors of society who have either satisfied their basic needs to their own
satisfaction or consumed the more ordinary and tangible commodities to the point
of nauseous exhaustion. Moreover, in an age in which ecological pressures, and
the patent failure of increased consumption to produce a better quality of life,
might yet dictate a general shift away from resource-intensive consumption,
“spiritual” practices might perhaps best be thought of as an avant-garde
laboratory for the reformed alienation of coming years. Your own experience
might shed light on these hypotheses. . . .
Looking further afield, I see
numerous new translations of texts by the SI and former members of the SI albeit
that the majority appear to be execrable (Bill Brown in particular has converted
the unavailable into the unreadable on a quite industrial scale). Sadly, there
appears to have been very few fresh and incisive applications and developments
of situationist theory in recent years. Worse still, elements of the academy
have taken up the situationists with gusto, transforming abstracted and
misunderstood fragments of that theory into material for empty speculation,
disarmed analysis, inconsequential debate, and the approval-seeking displays of
bored students in search of qualifications.
Wayne Spencer
(January 2008 letter to Ken Knabb, posted at the
author’s
blog)
[The same blog also features our subsequent correspondence about some of these
issues:
A Discussion with Ken Knabb.]
[Earlier opinions on the BPS (1975-1996)]
[Earlier opinions on the BPS (1997-2005)]
Bureau of Public Secrets, PO Box 1044, Berkeley CA 94701, USA
www.bopsecrets.org knabb@bopsecrets.org