The Spectacle of Disintegration — Situationist Passages out of the 20th Century is Ken McKenzie Wark’s third book on the Situationist International, after The Beach Beneath the Street and 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International. The new book discusses the later work of the group and focuses on the material practices as well as the critical theory. Thomas Wensing spoke with Ken McKenzie Wark at his ofce in Manhattan. TW: So frst of, what I fnd intriguing about your bibliography is that you have a gaming background. You have written Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory, but then you write three books about the Situationist International. How did that happen? KMW: I was involved in something KMW: The Situationists got the idea of détournement from the poet Lautréamont, who was famous for the Songs of Maldoror. It turned out that in the Fifties Maldoror was hugely plagiarised, and the Situationists were the only ones who defended the practice of the theft itself by arguing that there is no private property in culture. That is a real, quite radical proposition. There are tens, or even hundreds, of millions of people all over the planet who are basically taking possession of their own culture, and they share it with each other. To reappropriate it consciously, that is what the Situationists call us to do. Can you correct it in the direction of hope? TW: Let’s talk briefy about the society of the spectacle, and what is meant by it. The premise of your book is that we are now witnessing the complete disintegration of the so-called spectacle. So, could you explain what is meant by the spectacle, and who is behind it? MKW: It is not a conspiracy, it is a system of social relations mediated by images. It is a doubling up of the system of production of things. What is really enabling about what Debord does, writing in the middle of the Cold War, is to expose that East and West are two versions of the spectacle. In the East it is concentrated; it revolves around Khruschev, or Mao, or whoever. In our version it revolves around pictures of cars and models and it is difuse, but it is still a transformation of being into having, and then of having into appearing. It is the two-stage declension with which we live. Then he revisits these ideas in the Seventies and observes that the states of France and Italy are integrating elements of the concentrated spectacle into the difuse ones. These are Western states, but they have become opaque and secretive in the manner of a Stalinist apparatus; they have started to deceive themselves. At this point the state can no longer perform the function of historical vision and leadership. The result of this process is not an integrated spectacle in my mind, but that it evolves into the disintegrating spectacle. We all know that we are presiding over slow- motion ruins in the making. TW: You use the metaphor of the Pacifc gyre in your book. The gyre is a current in the Pacifc Ocean in which plastic gets collected and just like an avant-garde movement in the Nineties, one of the names was Nettime [nettime.org]; a network of writers, activists and artists from one end of Europe to the other, out of which came Hacker Manifesto. Then I wrote Gamer Theory, which is the negative version of network technology, and what is now called ‘gamifcation’. I wrote these two books, but then I thought I should have done a bit more research on the pre-history of this. The book we all read was Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord. So I went back and read it again, and it turned out to be a much more captivating story than I thought. The most interesting chapter is not the frst one on the spectacle, that everyone knows, but the second last one on détournement, which is the idea that all culture is common, that we all plagiarise. I wrote about the Situationist International because the existing accounts don’t really help in the here and now. TW: You talk about détournement. I understand that détournement, to put it in computer terms, is diferent from remixing. Can you explain what the diference is there? Book The Spectacle of Disintegration — Situationist Passages out of the 20th Century by Ken McKenzie Wark Published by Verso, £16.99 1 revolves without end, without ever biodegrading. What surprises me is that even though such knowledge becomes increasingly available, is that society never seems to be able to address the root causes of problems; it only repackages it. MKW: Right! Well, that is the spectacle. We just give it a diferent wrapper and a diferent colour; we wrap it up in green, but it is still the same thing. So to understand science as part of a system of social relations we have to go back and ask: “How are things made?” The historical, materialist question is crucial, you know: “How do we socially produce this life?” This rereading of the Situationist tradition is trying to get back to that. In The Beach beneath the Street and in this book, The Spectacle of Disintegration, I explain that it is not just theory that they were doing, there are practices of making as well. And that is why I restored the fgure of Asger Jorn, or Constant, in the earlier book, and in this one the cinema of Debord and Rene Viénet. TW: It is astounding that Debord was not a flmmaker in the classical sense, he actually made flms by cutting them up. There is the physical labour of making these flms. So, you touch on something really interesting there: which technology gets developed is currently decided by a whole network of fnancial and industrial interests. When you put making back into individual people’s hands, that has a real transformative potential. This aspect of the Situationists, to promote doing things yourself — could this be replicated on a larger scale? MKW: Yes, exactly. And I want to be clear: they were not just doing that. But one of the things to ask is this question — what was Debord making? He made 12 issues of a really gorgeous journal, a really fascinating object, the contents of which were without copyright. So why are you producing a beautiful object, but then the contents are free? What is the dialectical relation you are setting up there? So there is the journal, and he is a flmmaker. On the one hand he is famous for expelling everybody from the Situationist International, and on the other hand he always has collaborators in all these things. I tracked down his flm editors and spoke to them to fgure out how he got flm editors to do new kinds of cinema. I think in the 21st century we need to extract diferent stories out of the avant-garde, in order to move forward, and one of the stories here might be to re-establish that relationship between critical making and critical theory. Can we do them together again? That strikes me as very, very important at this particular time, because they have become completely separate realms. That is the spectacle. We just give it a diferent wrapper and a diferent colour; we wrap it up in green but it is still the same thing 194