What: presentation / discussion Where: 16 Beaver Street, 4th floor When: Thursday Night 12.11.08 @ 7:15 PM Who: Open To All For more info: http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday http://www.ludiccrew.org/wark/

In some recent readings and discussions in Paris this summer, two of us wandered across the following text:

"The idea of investigating the conditions for a 'recuperation of political radicality' in contemporary art derived from the sudden proliferation of international exhibitions of contemporary art, seemingly organized around various left political 'isms' ... does contemporary art function critically in this context? or do these exhibitions, biennials, etc... fail, as Adorno wrote 'to let nothing inherited go unchallenged.' References to the cultural climate of the 1960's and 1970's have been ubiquitous in recent ..."

We thought it an interesting fragment to include in describing this evening's discussion and for introducing what we hope will be a case-study. How to be inheritors of various legacies of the left? How to avoid the traps of orthodoxy (which can result into idolatry) or fetishism and the flights into irrelevance and impertinence?

The Situationist International (1957-1972) is widely recognized today as one of the key movements of artistic and political experimentation of the 20th century. The interest in their work, their writings, their urban proposals, their concepts, their protagonists(particularly Guy Debord) have not only been extensive but intensive over the last decade or two.

And despite the strong reactions that any discussion of or engagement with their ideas elicits today (from feigned boredom or fatigue to outraged accusations of recuperation, appropriation, misreading, careerism), the depth and range of their experimentation and critique remains elusive.

Has the work, activity, writing and critique of the Situationist International been recouped? What if the answer is yes AND no?

What can we make of the answer yes? Yes, they were recouped, one could say, and their recuperation is evidence that the critique 'worked' or had some efficacy.

What can we make of the answer no? No, some aspects of their critique remain, not only valid, but unassimilable. What can we make of this unassimilability?

The Situationists bequeathed many key concepts to us, including psychogeography, the dérive, unitary urbanism, and of course the society of the spectacle. It also spawned at least one major work of critical and utopian architecture in Constant’s New Babylon. But rather than treat these as seductive historical curiosities, or as precursors to more “acceptable” notions, McKenzie Wark asks what might survive the recuperation of the Situationists and act as pointers to new practices.

Rather than attempting to make an unbearable totality “sustainable,” might we pick up the thread of those who dared to negate this world as a whole and imagine it anew?

Or one might simply ask, "How to recoup what cannot be recouped, what remains unassimilable?" "Is such a task a flight of fancy and utopia or a necessary part of the idea-logical struggle - the struggle to imagine and think a different world, different sets of values, and spaces for different forms of life?"

______________________________________________ About McKenzie Wark

McKenzie Wark is the author, among other things, of A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard UP 2004), Gamer Theory (Harvard 2007) and most recently 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International (Princeton Architectural 2008). He is the chair of Culture & Media Studies at Eugene Lang College the New School for Liberal Studies.

The website: http://totality.tv/

The book: http://www.papress.com/bookpage.tpl?cart=1228684469681857&isbn=978156898...