After the defeat of the movements of 1968 the S.I. more or less dissolved itself acrimoniously. Some of those involved (Such as Baudrillard) barricaded themselves into the ivory towers of academia. Dwelling entirely upon the tantalizing aspects of the spectacle the bottom line of brute force was forgotten. However the radical potential of the S.I. was not forgotten. Around the world groups developed the ideas of the Situationists. The most successful was the Autonomia movement in Italy during the late 1970s. What the post-modernists saw as a splintering of the meta-narrative was seen entirely differently by these groups:
�From a multiplicity of singular conflicts a grand opposition arose, directly confronting the political power responsible for administering social production.�
Surely if the post-modernists were correct Professor Negri would have been given his own chat show rather than a jail sentence. The challenge the Situationists threw down before the spectacle has been taken up by groups who maintain a praxis such as the autonomists and the primitivists. Crucially these groups also maintain the idea of the dialectic. That capitals power develops only because those in opposition to it potentially have a counter power, it is the need to protect itself against this that has forced capital to develop beyond simple brute force. The post-modernists are too entranced by the spectacle to remember this fundamental truth.
�Without a doubt, the critical concept of the spectacle is susceptible of being turned into just another empty formula of sociologico-political rhetoric designed to explain and denounce everything in the abstract � so serving to buttress the spectacular system itself.�
�Postmodernism advertises itself as pluralistic, tolerant, and non-dogmatic. In practise it is a superficial, fast-forward, deliberately confused, fragmented, media-obsessed, illiterate, fatalistic, uncritical excrescence, indifferent to questions of origins, agency, history or causation. It questions nothing of importance and is the perfect expression of a setup that is stupid and dying and wants to take us with it.� |
