The Most Radical Gesture (Sadie Plant, 1994), about the Situationist International. With this book I am finally getting some hold on 1968, an event which has been an object of my admiration since forever.
A plausible explanation for why the theory of this period, and that of its disciples, looks so "strange" (or some might say, "nonsensical"):
The interests, vocabulary and style of the situationists reappear in Lyotard's railings against theory and Foucault's maverick intellectualism, and the desiring philosophies invoked by Deleuze and Guattari continue to offer words on the "art of living". The breadth of situationist theory and its magpie tactics of appropriation and détournement find their expression in the deconstructive eclecticism of poststructuralist writing, which similarly has no scruples about taking ideas, examples and forms of expression from anywhere. Many poststructuralist texts are mixtures of poetry and philosophy, fiction and journalism; distinctions between disciplines, styles, and media are removed, and rigorous argument sits alongside unfounded speculation and unanswerable polemic.
Like the situationists, they observe that the world now seems to be a decentered and aimless collection of images and appearances, characterise consciousness as fragmented, dispersed, and constructed by the social relations in which it arises ...
Other enlightening passages:
As a member of the mouvement du 22 mars, Lyotard's engagement in the 1968 events confirmed his doubts about traditional conceptions of revolutionary politics. The spontaneous upsurge of a multitude of perspectives, interests and desires suggested that the attempt to reduce every manifestation of dissent to a single project belied a dangerous tendency to totalitarianism, squashing and concealing the real variety of differences and subversive forces which contribute to the revolutionary moment. Lyotard developed this position to argue that totalizing theory, of which Marxism is a perfect example, is itself an agent of oppression and domination.
Dialectical criticism, the act of negating and opposing a body of thought or system of social relations, poses contradictions not for the pleasure or disruptive effect of making a difference in the world, but as as means to their resolution: the synthesis of opposites into a new and single unity. It is a "deeply rational" and "reformist" activity which challenges nothing and is "deeply consistent with the system", since it shares the presupposition that a better theory is both desirable and necessary. [...] And it is also
deeply hierarchical: where does his power over the criticised come from? he knows better? he is the teacher, the educator? he is therefore universality, the University, the State, the City, bending over childhood, nature, singularity, shadiness, to reclaim them? The confessor and God helping the sinner save his soul?
"This benign reformism", he concluded, "is wholly compatible with the preservation of the authoritorian relationship."
We should "fight the white terror of truth with and for the red cruelty of singularities", declared Lyotard, finding new and non-dialectical ways to challenge the dominion of theory, interrupting its unity, and breaking the consensus it demands. Taking up the situationist vocabulary of desires, Lyotard argued that the flux and becoming of the Nietzschean world is a realm of real intensity and desire allowed to exist only in the theoretical frameworks which deny and conceal its essential dynamism. But intensities continually break through the codes of theoretical discourse, interrupting its claims to intellectual rigour and revealing the extent to which the world is shaped and dominated by its discursive order.
Thus in 1968, Lyotard saw the subversive explosion of eroticism, creativity, and the spontaneity of the prevalent "attitude of here-now" as an attack on both the social and discursive codes of existing order and the unifying dialectic of revolutionary theory. He argued that this "politics of desire" prefigured new forms of social critique subversive of capitalist and revolutionary values, both of which codify desire and refuse to let it speak in its own voice.
