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OCTOBER 141, Summer 2012, pp. 59–69. © 2012 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In this unpublished text from ca. 1955, Jorn further develops the aesthetic theory he first laid out in Held og hasard (Luck and chance).1 In some ways the text is linked to a longer unpublished manuscript titled “Tegn og underlige gerninger” (Signs and Strange Actions) from ca. 1954, which bridges Held og hasard and Pour la forme. There, he takes account of his reading of John Hospers’s Meaning and Truth in the Arts, Suzanne Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key and Feeling and Form, and Herbert Read’s The Meaning of Art, among other texts. He critiques the two American philosophers for their “fear of the superficial,” a theme picked up again here, and suggests an “aesthetic triangle” consisting of the aesthetic, the ethical, and the scientific points of view, elements explored further in this text. In “Tegn,” Jorn writes that people had understood “sensation” and “superficiality” as dangerous, but that we now have a greater understanding of such concepts. Our curiosity about the sensation of unknown phenomena, he writes, is basic to the aesthetic. For Jorn “sensation” signifies “materialism,” meaning the direct physical experience of the world via the senses.2 The term takes on more complex connotations in contrast to the Situationist concept of the “spectacle,” which artificially replaces what Jorn calls in this text the “craving for direct sensation” with passivity. —Karen Kurczynski

After a spate of suicides, the Foxconn factory in Chengdu, China, now obliges its workers to sign a document in which, among other things, they promise not to kill themselves. In exchange, they can expect to work extremely long hours for a paltry wage, which they can spend on precious little of any interest, and to live in cramped and often intimidating factory-owned quarters. No wonder Foxconn workers stage strikes, which is unprecedented in the export-oriented component of the Chinese economy.1 And what were these workers actually producing at this facility? Among other things, iPads. The smooth perfection of Apple’s products for their consumers requires submission to a ferocious disciplinary regime for their producers. The iPad is nevertheless an object that speaks to a certain anxiety on the part of Apple and the rest of the emergent ruling class. The iPad is insinuated into everyday life with the primary objective of presenting an ever-ready interface to the Apple store, at which Apple intends to extract a rent from every small business that comes to set up shop. The ambivalent gift for Apple with companies like Foxconn is that while they make the production of sophisticated objects cheap and routine, these qualities threaten to turn Apple’s premium-priced objects into mere commodities, in the least glamorous sense of the term. Beneath the headlines about the Foxconn anti-suicide pact and the tactile glamour of the iPad is a vast and abstract world that is evanescent and intangible but nevertheless more real than any particular fact or thing. As Guy Debord might put it, the spectacle is philosophy made concrete. How then could any aesthetic practice or discourse ever claim to have any purchase on it? This essay pursues a three-fold strategy. First, it looks at a moment in which the Letterist International and its successor, the Situationist International, pointed out the path to a different world, one in which the digital made possible not death on the installment plant

In June 1958, Guy Debord, Gil Wolman, Michele Bernstein, and other founding members of the Situationist International (SI) published the first issue of internationale situationniste (IS). There, interspersed among essays on police brutality, functionalist architecture, and industrialization essays all invested with a clear sense of import and urgency are found photographs of sexy, flirtatious women. One stands underneath a shower, smiling as water trickles down her neck, while another wears nothing but a man's trench coat, an erotic accouterment through which she exposes a thigh and a tantalizing glimpse of decolletage. What are sexually charged images such as these doing in a periodical whose twelve issues published some of the most incisive critiques of alienation, capitalism, and spectacle along with astute analyses of current events like the Franco-Algerian War and the Watts Riots to appear after World War II? Readymade photographs of nude and semi-nude women are one of the leitmotifs of Situationist visual production. They embellish everything, from its collages and artist books to its films and publications. Nevertheless, these images have received only cursory attention from historians, and in the opinion of those who have addressed them, they constitute little more than a gratuitous sidebar to the group's more lofty, less compromised pursuits. Susan Suleiman's view, expressed in a footnote to her 1990 book Subversive Intent, typifies the scholarly response to date. "The Situationists appear to have been more of a 'men's club' than the Surrealists," Suleiman writes. When they weren't ignoring women, they were treating them as "sex objects in the most banal

painters may be perpetrating frauds; the tone of an impostor, who suggests that he may share in the activity he is criticizing; and the tone of a real artist, who by breaking the artists’ taboo and allowing the imputation, even about himself, that some artists may be hypocrites shows how sincere he is.37 In short, in a world in which everything has become myth and spectacle, only the spectacularization of myth and spectacle can contain a parcel of truth: as their indictment. And here we come back to Adorno and Wagner.

OCTOBER 115, Winter 2006, pp. 39–45. © 2006 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Long taken for a nonentity, in other words passed over in silence, then taken for a brilliant if rowdy character of chilly arrogance, the chances are good that Guy Debord will purposely spare himself the third stage of embalming: that of being taken for a remarkable writer.”1 So wrote journalist and author Claude Roy in 1974 at the time of the release of Debord’s first feature-length film, The Society of the Spectacle, and at the time this appeared to be a rather reliable prediction. Debord was still thought of primarily as one of the founders and associates of the (recently defunct) collective enterprise known as the Situationist International, and as the author of the concise but dauntingly dense text upon which his film was based. His colleague Raoul Vaneigem tended to be considered the better writer, even if both were criticized for muffling their arguments “under [a] dense Hegelian wrapping.”2 The intervening thirty years, however, have provided ample evidence to contradict Roy’s confident forecast: it has, perhaps ironically, become a commonplace that Debord’s legacy is precisely that of a great author-essayist, a memoirist and moralist in a long line of classical French writers. If we were to date the arrival of this unanticipated reception of his work, we could do worse than to point to the year 1989 and the publication of his Panegyric, a slim volume of memoirs that was quickly and unexpectedly hailed by Philippe Sollers in the pages of Le Monde.3 Since that date Sollers has written a series of important articles on Debord for the French literary press, has aided in the publication of his works by the prestigious firm of Gallimard, and has even produced a television documentary on him; perhaps no single figure has played a greater role in defining Debord’s legacy for the reading public, at least in France. Sollers has been instrumental in consolidating Debord’s reputation as the author of a distinct and exemplary oeuvre: “Guy Debord’s style

OCTOBER 115, Winter 2006, pp. 31–38. © 2006 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. What would Guy Debord’s intellectual heritage be? Can one speak of a heritage here? The question seems to imply that Debord was a French intellectual like so many others who have become part of academic curricula; or that he has imposed himself as an author, with a work that deserves respectful comment, replete as it is with a stock of sophisticated concepts. But for many reasons, this is not really the case. Debord can hardly be considered a French intellectual—whatever model of the “intellectual” one chooses as a frame of reference—so that the answer might therefore be that, indeed, he left no heritage. At least Debord did not behave as most well-known intellectuals did: he never made any attempt to be part of the “milieu” or to be recognized by his supposed peers; he kept silent about them, despised them with almost no exceptions, and hated Sartre as manifestly as he could, or at least to the point that Situationism would probably not have been called Situationism if Sartre had not written his endless Situations. That would be Debord’s specificity: the refusal to appear on the French intellectual stage, to play a role on this scene (or, to put it in his terms: in this spectacle). This is precisely what makes him interesting, appearing as it does in all the forms of expression he has chosen to test (collage, autobiography, theory, film, political activism, etc.). If there is no heritage, there is still a lesson to be kept in mind stemming from Debord’s will to escape what Bourdieu might have called the economy of the French intellectual field. And the point of this essay would be to show that this lesson is ultimately a lesson of freedom. Let’s start at the beginning, with his childhood and a few psychoanalytical remarks (very few, I promise). In Panegyric, his autobiographical account from 1989, Debord makes the following statement toward the beginning of the book

Recent proposals and debates over the architectural redevelopment of Ground Zero have highlighted the way in which, over the last two decades, the public role of architecture has been gradually reduced to the symbolic and the emblematic. Its forms of expression are no longer closely tied back to the urban issues and physical planning questions that, from Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) to Team X, Neo-Realism to NeoRationalism, Rotterdam to Internationale Bauausstellung Berlin (IBA), once energized and mediated the practice of urban architecture. The questions that have arisen around the ethics and aesthetics appropriate to a site marked by disaster and catastrophe have thrown into relief the drawbacks of an architecture overinvested in symbolic form and individual meditation on memory. Many discussions of the proposals for reconstruction, indeed, seemed to bear out Guy Debord's 1964 anticipation of an allpervading spectacle culture. The difference, expressed by Hal Foster with reference to the perceived effects of new and dramatic designs such as that for the Guggenheim Museo Bilbao by Frank Gehry, is that "thirty years ago Guy Debord defined spectacle as 'capital accumulated to such a degree that it becomes an image, ' but "the reverse is now true as well: spectacle is an image accumulated to such a degree that it becomes capital. "1 The issue here is, once again, one of "program," a word all-but jettisoned in the high days of postmodernism and deemed irrelevant to architectural "meaning" since the discrediting of the seemingly narrow functionalism of the modern movement. In revisiting this concept, one of the oldest in the history of professional architecture, there is no intent to invoke program in the limited functionalist or political approaches of early modernism, nor even in the revived typological and diagrammatic forms of late modernism. Rather, a contemporary sense of program would imply the radical interrogation of the ethical and environmental conditions of specific sites, which are considered as programs in themselves. Such programs might not privilege architecture in the conventional sense, but stimulate the development of a new environmentalism construed according to what might be called the "technologies of the everyday. " Such a new environmentalism would not imply a subservience to "green" building mired in the static response of existing economies and primitive technology, nor would it follow the static contextualism of the new urbanism mired in the nostalgic response to a false

"German Volk, come and judge for yourselves!"I Thus Adolf Ziegler, National Socialist president of the Reich Chamber for the Visual Arts, opens the 1937 Munich exhibition Degenerate Art. What they could 'judge for themselves" is clear enough-a quickly assembled selection of over six hundred modernist works of art seized from museums throughout Germany. Just what kind of an event Ziegler invites the German Volk to take part in has proven, however, a little more difficult to decipher. Although the exhibition can clearly be classified as a species of propagandathe fascist art form nonpareil-when critics turn their attention to Degenerate Art they tend to forget they are examining propaganda and concentrate instead on what the Nazis do, or fail to do, as curators of an exhibition of modernist art. As such, Degenerate Art is judged extraordinarily incompetent: the pictures are hung too closely together; works are incorrectly attributed and labeled; groupings meant to represent a single artistic movement (say Dadaism) include works from quite unrelated movements (like Der Blaue Reiter); quotations from artists and critics are displayed without regard for either their accuracy or their original contexts. Through this flurry of corrections postwar art historians express their desire to overcome the past. Yet reprimanding these art-historical errors does not help us understand the spectacle and function of Degenerate Art. Whatever else they reveal about the function of modernist art in Nazi propaganda, the mistakes must also be seen as integral to the exhibition, displays by the National Socialist state of its power to exercise its will with impunity. Casual errors flaunt the speed with which this state was able to expropriate works from museums all over Germany so as to erect the exhibition in less than three weeks. Furthermore, the main targets of the exhibition are precisely those critics, dealers, and museum directors who claim to comprehend this

In contemporary art and theory, let alone in contemporary fiction and film, there is a general shift in conceptions of the real: from the real understood as an effect of representation to the real understood as an event of trauma. There are several ways to think about this shift, yet as it bespeaks a pervasive turn to psychoanalysis in critical culture, I want to graph it here in its terms-specifically in relation to the Lacanian discussion of the gaze in The Four Fundamental Concepts ofPsychoanalysis. This is a notorious text, of course, much cited but little understood (so little that I will risk another resume). For example, there may well be a male gaze, and no doubt capitalist spectacle is constructed from a masculinist perspective, but there is little brief for such arguments in this seminar of Lacan. For here the gaze is not embodied in a subject at all, at least not in the first instance. To an extent like Sartre in Being and Nothingness (1943), Lacan distinguishes between the look (or the eye) and the gaze, and to an extent like Merleau-Ponty in The Phenomenology of Perception (1945), he locates this gaze in the world. As with language in Lacan, then, so with the gaze: it preexists the subject, who, "looked at from all sides," is but a "stain" in "the spectacle of the world."I Thus positioned, the Lacanian subject feels the gaze as a threat, as if it queried him or her, and so it is that "the gaze, qua objet a, may come to symbolize this central lack expressed in the phenomenon of castration" (77). Even more than Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, then, Lacan challenges the presumed transparency of the subject in sight. His account of the gaze mortifies this subject, especially so in the famous anecdote of the sardine can. Afloat on the sea and aglint in the sun, this can seems to look at the young Lacan in the fishing boat "at the level of the point of light, the point at which everything that looks at me is situated" (95). Thus seen as (s)he sees, pictured as (s)he pictures

Armstrong: How did you first know about Duchamp? Was it through art school? Ruscha: I think it was in a book, a reproduction of the Nude Descending a Staircase. It was as if there were an asterisk on that picture; his Nude Descending a Staircase was such a spectacle at the time that you remembered it for that. That was part of its value. Then, there were my teachers in school [Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles], who were more along the line of Abstract Expressionists. These people admired Duchamp, but probably didn't like his work; they couldn't see it for its true value. So he was only marginally mentioned, but all the students knew about him. Armstrong: You have said that your teachers were often disparaging in their remarks about Duchamp. Did that have a certain appeal to students then? Ruscha: Yes, it did. And it probably had precisely the effect that Duchamp would have liked to have had on students, and that is to be a rebel. He was against a kind of academic slavery that artists went through who followed a traditional path; he was for the spirit of revolt. Armstrong: Did his rejection of painting, and especially of the retinal in painting, cause you to reevaluate your approach to art early in your career? Ruscha: It just made me aware that there was another way to think about things. Finally, the ultimate mystery of his work is its value. It's hard to be taught how to look at Duchamp's work; it has to be felt somehow. Armstrong: You once said that your books were the most Duchampian of your work. Ruscha: I feel that the spirit of his work is stronger in my books than in anything else. But I don't use him as a reference; he's just so much a part of my history and my art--as he is for so many artists. Armstrong: You were once quoted as saying: "If Marcel Duchamp hadn't come along, we would have needed to invent him." Could you elaborate?

During the 1970s, fetishism was a key concept for the political aesthetics of modernist-influenced anti-Hollywood cinema and psychoanalytically influenced feminist theory. As fetishism, like a portmanteau, answered a number of conceptual needs, the ideas it provoked appeared on the contemporary agenda of debate, in writing, discussion, filmmaking. The agenda included: willing suspension of knowledge in favor of belief; a defense against a male misperception of the female body as castrated; the image of femininity as fragmented and reconstructed into a defensive surface of perfect sheen; an apotheosis of spectacle in consumer capitalism; the sheen of Hollywood cinema in which the erotic spectacle of femininity contributed to the invisibility of filmic processes; the erasure of the cinematic signifier, and its specificity, under its signified. In these polemics, the influence of Brecht met psychoanalysis and modernist semiotics. Furthermore, an aesthetic that intends to make visible the processes hidden in cultural production could, by analogy, or rather by homology, point toward labor power, also concealed by the sheen of the commodity product under capitalism. This was an agenda composed at the closing moments of the machine age. Contemporary critiques of realism have drawn attention to the way its aesthetics were formally, even fetishistically, imbricated within an apotheosis of vision which assumed that an image represented, or referred to, the object it depicted. For feminist aesthetics, concepts that made visible a gap between an image and the object it purported to represent and, thus, a mobility and instability of meaning have been a source of liberation. It was, of course, semiotics and psychoanalytic theory that played a central part in this conceptual liberation, not only opening up the gap in signification but also offering a theory that could decipher the language of displacements that separated a given signifier from its apparent signified. The image refers, but not necessarily to its iconic referent.

Whether or not the term spectacle was originally taken from Henri Lefebvre's Critique de la vie quotidienne, its currency emerged from the activities in the late 1950s and early 1960s of the various configurations now designated as presituationist or situationist.1 The product of a radical critique of modernist art practice, a politics of everyday life, and an analysis of contemporary capitalism, its influence was obviously intensified with the publication of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle in 1967.2 And twenty-two years later, the word spectacle not only persists but has become a stock phrase in a wide range of critical and not-so-critical discourses. But, assuming it has not become completely devalued or exhausted as an explanation of the contemporary operation of power, does it still mean today what it did in the early '60s? What constellation of forces and institutions does it designate? And if these have mutated, what kind of practices are required now to resist their effects? One can still well ask if the notion of spectacle is the imposition of an illusory unity onto a more heterogenous field. Is it a totalizing and monolithic concept that inadequately represents a plurality of incommensurable institutions and events? For some, a troubling aspect about the term spectacle is the almost ubiquitous presence of the definite article in front of it, suggesting a single and seamless global system of relations. For others, it is a mystification of the functioning of power, a new opiate-of-the-masses type of explanation, a vague cultural-institutional formation with a suspicious structural autonomy. Or is a concept such as spectacle a necessary tool for the figuration of a radical systemic shift in the way power functions noncoercively within twentieth-century modernity? Is it an indispensable means of revealing as related what would otherwise appear as disparate and unconnected phenomena? Does it not show that a patchwork or mosaic of techniques can still constitute a homogenous effect of power?

Since 1974 Stuart Sherman has been giving performances, usually unaccompanied, sometimes with other participants, in the lofts of lower Manhattan and on the street in various locations around the city. He has completed his Eleventh Spectacle as well as two other presentations that have not been numbered. Most of his performances, executed in silence with an almost religious concentration, consist of the manipulation, generally on a fragile little folding table, of different kinds of objects, usually plastic toys, but also bars of soap, kitchen utensils, and other objects manufactured in assembly-line imitations of one another, that cost little, and are easily obtainable,' It is Sherman's manipulation of objects that makes his performances resemble a magic show, but magic without tricks, suggesting that the point of his activity is something other than what it seems to be, that it is not the transformation of objects that is important, but, as Noel Carroll has observed, the order that is imposed on them.2 Some of the performances have titles, for example, the different sequences of Ninth Spectacle (Portraits of People): "Bill Ives," "Nancy Tobin," "Sam Sherman," "Richard Needle," "Richard Foreman," "Stefan Brecht," "Kate Manheim," "Charles Ludlam," "Stuart Sherman," and so on. But the use of titles should not mislead us. Sherman's performances do not depict anything; they have no representational content. In the Tenth Spectacle, for example, the sequence of manipulations called "Paris" is not a signifying chain whose referent is Paris