Re: "Historicizing the Spontaneous Revolution"

[Jim Fleming <jim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I did not post in response to the Cuban Situationist thread. I have had
only one recent Cuban visit, and I didn't learn much about Situationism
in the Museum of the History of the Revolution. However, I did learn
much about the "pretty grim business" of revolution Cuban style, and
before I am the excuse for any more kitten dinners, or the consequent
Proyectile vomiting, I will only recommend the mid-20th-century chapter
of Frank Fernandez' book Cuban Anarchism for why the Sits might not
have been so comfortable where Louis might have sought them. Jim


> Jim Fleming wrote:
> >     "Historicizing the Spontaneous Revolution:
> >     Anarchism and the Spatial Politics of Postmodernism"
> >     Nicholas Spencer, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
>
> SPENCER:
> Richard J. Bernstein has probed more deeply than most into the
> political "horizons" of postmodernity. For example, Bernstein argues
> that the writings of Jacques Derrida are fundamentally
> ethical-political. However, Bernstein is bemused by the fact that
> these texts "can be read . . . as being nihilistic, obscurantist,
> self-indulgent logorrhea and. . .passionate, political, subversive,
> committed to opening the spaces for diffrance and respecting what is
> irreducibly other"; Bernstein's frustrated conclusion is that Derrida
> rejects political methods or "positions," while simultaneously
> "point[ing] us toward the promised land of a postmetaphysical ethics
> and politics without adumbrating its geography" (Bernstein 191).
>
> COMMENT:
> I ran into Bernstein about 7 years ago at an open house down at the
> New School Graduate School, when I was inquiring about what it would
> take to re-enroll and complete my PhD (he is chair of the philosophy
> department.) He told me that all my past credits earned from 1965-1967
> were worthless and that I would have to start from scratch. The only
> conclusion that could be drawn is that the New School of those days
> was not a proper educational institution in the newer administrations'
> eyes. These were the people who went out and hired the baby-killer Bob
> Kerrey as President, I should add. After seeing Bernstein's
> endorsement of Derrida, I am glad that I didn't waste my time and
> money.
>
> SPENCER:
> Luxemburg was not an avowed anarchist, but her theoretical criticisms
> of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and her practical involvement in
> the spontaneous Spartacist uprising in Germany in 1919 indicate an
> anarchist disposition. For example, Luxemburg was a fierce advocate of
> direct action democracy and spurned both Leninist dictatorship and the
> bourgeois democracy proposed by Karl Kautsky.
>
> COMMENT:
> I wonder if Spencer has actually read Rosa Luxemburg. Her differences
> with Lenin and Trotsky revolve around the Constituent Assembly, which
> she counterposed to the Soviets. In the chapter titled "The
> Constituent Assembly" in her 1918 "The Russian Revolution", she
> writes, "To be sure, every democratic institution has its limits and
> shortcomings, things which it doubtless shares with all other human
> institutions. But the remedy which Trotsky and Lenin have found, the
> elimination of democracy as such, is worse than the disease it is
> supposed to cure; for it stops up the very living source from which
> alone can come correction of all the innate shortcomings of social
> institutions." In other words, the bourgeois parliament is preferred
> over the Soviets, which most people wuld regard as authentic working
> class instruments of direct democracy. If this indicates an
> "anarchist" disposition, then I am a monkey's uncle.
>
> SPENCER:
> In the postmodern era we are likely to give more credibility to terms
> such as cultural politics, appropriation, commodification,
> recuperation, playful disruption, and reification than the language of
> dialectical materialism, and while there are many currents that have
> created this situation (and many things to mourn about the dominance
> of cultural, as opposed to political, politics), the situationist
> current emanating from Georg Lukacs' writings on the commodity and
> reification and dada and surrealist art is one of the most
> significant. For example, the influence of detournement is strong, as
> is evidenced by the postmodern art of Cindy Sherman, Kathy Acker, and
> many others; also, the most prominent French theorists of the
> postmodern or post-Marxist phase, such as Baudrillard, Lyotard,
> Deleuze and Guattari, etc., acknowledge the situationists' influence.
>
> COMMENT:
> I wonder if Jim Fleming posted this in response to the bit about Cuban
> situationism I posted earlier. It is important to get the sequence of
> events correct. Cuba had a revolution, which has triggered all sorts
> of novel cultural innovations, including a kind of situationism. But
> situationism does not lead to revolution. Now, it cannot be gainsaid
> that it does provide a lot of laughs, especially for the participants
> but making revolution is a pretty grim business that requires a kind
> of scowling ruthlessness from its participants. When we were in the
> Trotskyist movement, we had to prove ourselves by killing kittens and
> eating them raw. This was necessary because our adversaries were so
> single-minded and ruthless themselves. When was the last time you saw
> Donald Rumsfeld showing photographs of himself in a Tribeca gallery
> gussied up like a pimp?
>
> --
>
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