through europe

It was as if time had never been allowed inside the room. There were no windows and no pictures on the walls. Cream wallpaper stretched up to the ceiling, then broke into the circular pattern of shadows projected by the hanging lamps. The synthetic fur covering the floor purred along with the movements of the President’s feet over it. The President looked around the room, then towards a point right a couple of metres behind the screen of his computer. The muscles in his shoulder relaxed, lowering his elbows just below the edge of his desk. He wished that his were still the times of ticking clocks, counting the cascade of minutes as mothers repeat their lullabies night after night. But sound also seemed to have sunk silently into the rug, in the pores of the wallpaper. It had to look like his decision had been taken through doubt and suffering, and he needed the proof of passing hours.

The President run his hand along the balding top of his hair. The foundation was wearing off, and the edge of a scale rubbed against the tip of his fingers. He kept playing with it for a while, running it under his nails, one after the other, as deep as it could go without hurting his flesh. Social etiquette was an unnecessary concern in the depth of his underground bunker. There was no need to conceal his nature any more than a man would silence his bowels in the privacy of his bathroom. After all, it was only a few years earlier that his mutant nature had won him millions of votes during the elections. He had to tame it down to the minimum necessary visual proof, so to appear as reassuring to pure-breed humans as he was to the mutant underclasses. Hence the foundation, the human mannerisms and the elocution classes to help him control the intonation of his speeches – only dropping the mutant accent when required.

This 80 page book by Richard Barbrook and Fabian Thompsett is an extension  of the film script that forms the basis of Ilze Black’s film. Of the same name. It describes how a group was formed to popularize and play the Game of War which GuyDebord  spent the last 10 years of his life developing and playing with Alice Becker-Ho. It lists the various public venues where the group has played the game in real time, but also describes the game in detail and hints at why they think it is important. The first, unstated, is to rescue Debord, long term member and survivor of the Situationist International (SI), from the ironic recuperation of him and the SI by the cultural establishment they despised. Ironic because they were so hot on any kind of politics that could be, as they called it, recuperated, that is, absorbed by the very ‘Spectacle’ they had described. To have an exhibition devoted to them at the Pompidou Centre in 1987, and then for his personal archive to be described as ‘a national treasure’ by the French Minister of Culture in 2009 was the unkindest cut for someone who lived by the sword. The Game of War however does not fit this Debord-made safe, just as he himself truly did live by the sword, ripping of the bourgeoisie whenever possible and including with his own suicide that meant Alice would have some money. Instead, the Game claims a seriousness about not just analyzing capitalism and its monologue, but thinking strategically about how to go about participating in its downfall.

A metà degli anni ’70 Franco Fortini dedicò qualche pagina pungente all’impresa teorica del giovane Cacciari – si tratta più o meno dell’epoca di Krisis – impegnato allora a sdoganare Nietzsche e Wittgenstein dalla reazione idealistica e però, allo stesso tempo, deciso a ripiegare la potenza ermeneutica del pensiero della crisi sugli algidi orizzonti dell’analitica weberiana. Seppure timido rispetto a questi autori, Fortini ben colse già allora, il tentativo di apparecchiare un Nietzsche per tutti, buono per consolare i sacerdoti della pianificazione capitalista e carezzare i desideri sovversivi dei giovani filosofi. L’approccio di Cacciari fu allora descritto come un saggio immancabile di chi vuole ad un tempo dirsi belva e compagno: internazionalista e rivoluzionario certo, ma solo come sanno esserlo gli agenti delle multinazionali della finanza. È curioso notare come si ripresenti ad ogni tornante critico questa posa ambigua: antiaccademica ma d’ordine, coraggiosa nell’immaginare il futuro ma solo in quanto coincide col presente, tecnocratica ma certo infinitamente più sottile e forte di ogni nostalgia gauchiste, d’ogni amore per tutto ciò che é Stato.

 

This text is based on a panel talk (together with Nina Power) by Bifo during the event ‘We Have Our Own Concept of Time and Motion’, organised by Auto Italia in collaboration with Federico Campagna, Huw Lemmey, Michael Oswell and Charlie Woolley in August 2011.

 

I beg your pardon for the frantic way of my exposition, but the problem is that the object of my reflections is frantic. We are doing so many things without really understanding what is the framework of our actions. I do not pretend to clarify this framework or our understanding of it; I don’t even pretend to come to some conclusions in this short time. But I will try to say something about the coming problem; the coming collapse; the coming insurrection.