A: I don't think I could understand Virilio in the same way as Hegel
understands Napoleon, though the parallelism is suggestive. My
strategy--which is inspired by the Situationists--is to find a way of
questioning current banalities by turning them back against themselves.
I find Virillio's techno-determinism, like Baudrillard's techno-nihilism,
highly questionable enterprises. Baudrillard could not consider a
kind of critique beyond "critical distance" so he decided to roll over and
jerk off to the spectacle instead of questioning it and using other strategies.
His Nietzschean version of Marshall McLuhan is tiresome. Johnathan Crary's
epigonal "Eclipse of the Spectacle" is similar: he confuses the then
embryonic rise of the net--I think he was talking about cable tv but he
keeps repeating "CRT" like some kind of mantra--with a major social
realignment. This development may correspond to what Debord came to call
the "integrated spectacle" but it hardly transcends the category of
existing categories. The non-linearity of the net calls for the need
for a new understanding of "history" but it hardly makes the category
obsolete.
Q: Do you consider digital architecture as a reconfiguration of Georges
Bataille's accursed share or as a possible move toward a headless
society, an acephalic network, of replusive gestures which will allow
a labyrinth of distinct singularities to flow without constraint?
Or is this just another version of Las Vegas--as "The Gift"--that excretes
without end? The WEB as a floating dead man in the Luxor pool? A shadow
at the blue of noon under of the neon pyramid of vitual
history?
A: Digital architecture will be what we make it. I find the excesses of
Vegas at once fascinating and repulsive. You see, unlike those who have
sung its pomo praises, I actually lived there 365 days from one birthday
to the next. It's a fucking suburban hellhole. The most evil and banal
place I have ever inhabited and I grew up in the middle of nowhere.
There are those who consider the notion of habitation to be quaint since
global culture has become so interchangeable and transient; I do not.
Or to put it another way, I don't see Robert Venturi moving to Vegas because
it's so groooooovy. "The Gift" is a long project which I hope to finish in
the next 6 months or go insane. It's a moderately personal and global
exploration of sumptuary expenditure in architecture: Disneyland-Neuschwannstein
-The Excalibur is one migrating form; the Pyramids at Giza-the Transamerica
Building-the Luxor Casino is another. And yet it is only the forms which are
interchangeable in the most banal fashion. Perhaps looking at a picture of one
may be equivalent to looking at a picture of another, but the experience of being
there is not. After years of making only "found footage"/detourned/appropriated/
expropriated films with pre-existing images, I wanted to actually return to going
places and filming there. Architecture is amazing easy and almost impossible to
convey on film. It's not just the obvious banality of 3-D vs. 2-D space,
it's the haptic quality, the sense of being in a particular cultural
locus which is difficult to convey.
Q: That fucking hell hole is my home town! I was born next to the voice of the
Sun King, took a dump at the shrine of his death--slot machines and dice were my
Dasein--I lived within the architecture of excess as a floating liminal flicker
in the bland American will to virtuality as it emerged--The Circus, Circus--1972
or 73--it was at this point that the Mormon force for God, family, and mega-money
copulated in utter ectasy with the MOB's will to God, family, and mega-money
beating any of Disney's grandest hopes of manifesting America's virtual destiny.
A: Sorry to dis your home town, I didn't know you were from LA--of which Vegas
is a suburb. But I still hate the experience of living in Vegas. The
mornings after the nights before on the butt-ugliest stretch of the Mojave
known to man. Downwind Atomic Clouds and Area 51, 57 etc in the background
with Saucers. Redefines hangover. Fascinating to visit, but after 2.5
days you feel like you're serving out a sentence, unless you've got it
really bad for games of pseudo-chance. Believe me, I understand the appeal
and I also loved Vegas as well as hating it, but why leave if you find
ecstasy there? The answer is: I wouldn't want to live in Vegas or in a
casino anymore than I would want to live in a monastery or a cathedral.
Vegas just takes the religious elements of gambling and reduces them to
consumerism. It's another fucking carney ride, 3-card monte routine. One
motherfucker picks your pocket while the other one keeps you distracted.
It's the essence of the [fake] "American dream": a con-game for suckers.
Like the Lotto sez: "You gotta be in it to win it." On the other hand if
you think you can win, you're a loser. I know, I know, banal ethical
considerations, but the aesthetics are boring too. Casino architecture is
more like a product of some behaviorist laboratory of social engineering than
it is like a funhouse or sacred labyrinth. The Mormon cathedral in San Diego
is essentially the same. I've been inside. And I can see the difference. Vegas
is virtual, but like the MSN, it's another virtual con game of pseduo-choice.
Gambling, in its origins, is about the sumptuary destruction of wealth.
Individuals play against/with each other; in Vegas, you're always betting against
the house [except in Poker gets its hundred cuts another way] and unless you're
a high-tech card counter, you lose, by the law of large numbers and by the end of
the night. I used to play video poker every day. Sometimes several sessions.
I know the electronic divination offered for consumption; I have experienced
the gamblers fallacy in electronic form. I have surfed the waves of chance.
A great high, but still a fucking con-game. A good arena against which to form
a radical subjectivity, but not my idea of an interesting place to live. Vegas
is Kapital is boredom and you can take that to the Mouse.
Q: Taking on this hyper-colonization effect by reestablishing the filmic as memetic
account of expediture, migration, and banality seems to counter your earlier
situationist manuevers--as you state it seems to be an'impossibility'? Is "The Gift"
a sacrifice of your previous gestures? Has "The Dead Man" by Bataille. that you published
in Las Vegas, come back to haunt your work?
A: No, I disagree. Both are approaches to an encounter of radical, subjectivity and the
social. Two games, two different sets of rules. In detournement, I'm forced to play with
the House's deck, but I make the rules.In long take looks at architecture it's kind of a
staring contest. See who blinks first. Then there's always editing. Deadmen on Sunset Boulevard
do tell tales; the electronic signs in Las Vegas only cycle. And it's Baudrillard who sez
disturbing the virtual is impossible, not me.
Q: You have also said that digital architecture will be "what we make of it." What, if
anything, do you hope to make out of your expropriation techiques on the WEB--do you
have any sense of what you think its most useful elements are--in terms of resistance
culture? Or is it to early to really tell? What would the Situationist have done with it?
A 'what if' question--similar to 'what if'Napoleon had B-52's at Waterloo?
A: Well, my mouse finger just sits here twitching. My paltry expropriation
techniques--I have no illusions, I haven't taken it very far yet--it's
just a start. A Shack out on Info Highway 109. I think the most inspiring
deployment of strategies against the infokultur was the hack of the CIA
website, though I also liked www.Dole96.org and related adventures.
Finding those little chinks in the armor. The problem is--as the Situationist
would say: 'Whatever is lost in partial contestation against the old world,
tends to strengthen it.' Or in infospeak: if you're not careful, you're
just helping them plug security leaks. But with games, the rules are never
settled, there's always new mutatations. The net shows that because it
evolves so quickly, but it didn't invent that aspect of human culture. It
does't really matter if there's no way out of the labyrinth and it's not
only a matter of writing on prison walls. Infospace can be rebuilt and
even ignored when appropriate. They offer us crumbs, we want it all.
Though early on, the Situationists were intrigued with the Disney futuristic
aspects of technology, they ultimately saw cybernetics as another aspect of
Kapitalistic scientism, see correspondence with a cybernetician: (A. Moles.
Part of the institutional framework of Kapital). The net is rife with
pseudo-utopian, religious claims, which can easily be dissected as our old
friend the spectacular commodity in yet another, not-so-new form.
CIA:BIA:MSW:AOL. CNWA.
ricardo dominguez
Email: ThingReviews
NOT BORED! sees value in Keith Sanborn's production of a subtitled
videocassette version of Guy Debord's 1973 film La Societe du
Spectacle. The availability of such a videotape cannot fail to
introduce Debord and the other situationists' critique of "the society
of the spectacle" to English-speaking audiences that might not have
otherwise been aware of or receptive to the significance and enduring
usefulness of Debord's 1967 book (which bears the same title as the
film). NOT BORED! also believes that Keith Sanborn should be
adequately compensated for his efforts, which mostly involved the
subtitling and duplication processes. (Very little "new" material
needed to be translated, precisely because the film so closely follows
Debord's book, of which translations have been in circulation since
the 1970s.)
But it is clear that Keith Sanborn is demonstrably attempting to
receive more financial compensation than is appropriate for someone
who claims to be interested in furthering the situationist project,
and not simply making a buck off of it. In a word, we firmly believe
that -- in charging between $30 and $40 for copies of the subtitled
tape -- he is gouging. We believe this even though we know that (he
claims) this admirable project cost $7,000 to bring to completion. We
also believe that he should be held accountable, so to speak, for his
shameless profiteering, if not financially, then at least in the eyes
of his peers in the international post-situationist scene.
We must remind all concerned that Sanborn's videocassette is nothing
but a pirate edition, a bootleg, an illegal duplication of a film that
was originally made by a man who committed suicide in 1994 and thus
cannot do anything to prevent or denounce clear abuses such as this.
Sanborn's "new" translation of the film's voiceover, as well as his
creation, distribution and very well-attended (and thus highly
profitable) public screenings of the subtitled videocassette, are most
definitely NOT authorized by the estate of Guy Debord. As Sanborn
himself knows, it is only a matter of time before Alice Becker-Ho
(Debord's widow) learns of what he is doing, and instructs her lawyers
to ask Sanborn to cease and desist from these unauthorized and illegal
activities.
In the meantime -- or, rather, before the situationist shit hits the
international fan -- Sanborn is trying to receive more than adequate
compensation for his efforts: he is clearly trying to make as much
money as possible. If it cost a total of $7,000 to complete this
project, why aren't copies of the tape priced at $10 each? It is
clearly reasonable to expect that, over a reasonably short period of
time, 1000 people would buy a copy of the tape if it were reasonably
priced. At $10 a copy, Keith Sanborn would stand to get back all of
his original investment and a $3,000 profit as well. But at $30 a
copy, he stands to make a profit of $23,000 (again assuming 1000
people will eventually fork over the money).
Think of it this way: What other 90 minute videotape on the market
costs $30 or $40? If one were to go to, say, Blockbuster Video (not
known for its low prices), and discretely inquire as to what item in
the store costs $30, the answer would be, "Well, the director's cut of
Natural Born Killers, which includes one full hour of previously cut
footage, as well as never-before-seen interview segments with the
director himself and all the important actors, retails for $27.95." In
other words, Sanborn has drastically over-estimated or deliberately
ignored the relative cultural value of the subtitled bootleg he has
produced. But professional bootleggers -- who are not widely known or
respected for keeping their greed under control -- do know the
relative cultural value of a bootlegged videcassette, which translates
into $15 or $20 a copy, at the very most. "To live outside the law,
you must be honest," Bob Dylan sang many years ago. Keith Sanborn is
living outside the law, but he is not being honest.
One thinks here of Ken Knabb, and how much Keith Sanborn is different
from him. In 1981, when he first published The Situationist
International Anthology, Knabb priced it at only $10 a copy, despite
the facts that it was a huge book (many times the size of Debord's
1967 book) upon which he'd spent years of his time, and that it was a
book that he published himself, with his own funds. Quite obviously,
Knabb -- as someone genuinely committed to the situationist project --
knew that he was undertaking a long haul: there would be very little
demand for the Anthology in the short-term; he wouldn't make any money
(back) for several years, if at all; over the course of 10 or 15
years, he might be adequately compensated for his efforts. Hindsight
shows that Ken Knabb was right. Today, copies of The Anthology cost
$15 (still a bargain) and Ken Knabb is well-respected by nearly
everyone in the post-situationist milieu. But what will people say
about Keith Sanborn in 10 or 15 years? Well, what are they saying
today?
When priced at $30 to $40 each, copies of Debord's film are too
expensive for students, the unemployed and the working classes -- in
other words, for precisely the very people about and for whom Debord's
film was made in the first place. Indeed, Sanborn's subtitled
videotape is so expensive that even independent bookstores cannot
stock it without losing money. The only "people" who can afford these
ridiculously inflated prices are relatively large institutions such as
libraries and film societies, and such relatively-well paid
college-level teachers as Sanborn himself -- in other words, the very
people and things from which Debord so unequivocably and completely
distanced himself during his lifetime.
NOT BORED! has obtained one of Sanborn's over-priced, unauthorized and
subtitled reproductions of Debord's film, and has used it to generate
good quality second-generation copies, which we are selling for $5
postpaid (domestic orders) and $10 postpaid (international ones),
while they last. Please send cash only to PO Box 1115, Stuyvesant
Station, NYC 10009-9998. E-mail can be directed to rose@thorn.net.
Since Sanborn is also selling unauthorized, subtitled videocassettes
of Rene Vienet's 1973 film Can Dialectics Break Bricks? for $30 to $40
each, we would be obviously be pleased if this film escaped from
Sanborn's clutches in the way we have helped La Societe du Spectacle
escape.
This text may be freely reproduced and distributed, for if and when
Madame Debord's lawyers contact us, they will be contacting both clear
consciences and meagre bank accounts.
16 November 1996
Whatever! No matter whether you are buying the deluxe $30 Sanborn edition, or the $5 2nd generation copy, you can now preview the tape on:
Only for one week! 12/10/96 - 12/17/96
Jump Guy Debord's Bones for $25/mo.
Re: SOS @ Thing.net
I don't like being suckered into the
position of supporting the pimping of
any indigenous product, above all a
by-product of conscious sacrifice.
Thing.net is pushing it!
GLOVE
va chier connard
21 June 1997: We've added Sanborn's subtitled video of Rene Vienet's detourned film Can the Dialectic Break Bricks? to our As Fast As Far and As Free As Possible Distribution Network. Send $5 cash to NOT BORED! PO Box 1115 NYC 10009-9998. Make it $10 if you are outside the USA.
Interview with Keith Sanborn
by Ricardo Dominguez
Q: Recombinant culture, the implosion of genetics and speed, creates
a spasm of hypermorphic delusion wherein Sandborn-understands-Virilio
-as-Hegel-understands-Napoleon. A selective and secret code that attempts
to out maneuver--the process of virtual de-realization within the excessive
architecture of digital dialectics. Is this strategy a continuation of those
used by Debord and the Gang to counter spectacle society? Or do you see the
WEB as a new type of possible maneuver against something that has arisen beyond
the end of history? The end of the End and it's delusions?
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