Resisting Zombie Culture

I’m addicted. And, I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. Recently, traveling on the sky-train in Bangkok, I was suddenly struck by the blindingly obvious: urban-dwellers are constantly surrounded by screens. Looking around the sky-train, I saw a long line of screens high on the walls - pumping out ads, music videos, news - while underneath those screens, more screens in the hands of passengers - texting, playing, watching. Coming to a stop, there were more screens waiting. There were screens while walking to the shops; there were screens while shopping. And, screens waited at home. Screens at which I worked - and relaxed. Clearly, we like to watch. We like to watch a lot. We like to watch like an alcoholic likes a drink.

In May 1968, students and and workers took to the streets of Paris in protest. Almost eleven million workers went on wildcat strikes (in fact, it is from the May ’68 protests that the term wildcat strike was first used). The protests had began when students occupied an administration building at the University of Paris at Nanterre. At the beginning of May, they were joined in their protest by students of the Sorbonne; by mid-May, two-thirds of the French workforce joined students in support and began strikes that brought the entire economy of France to a complete standstill. The president of France, Charles de Gaulle, was flown to a French military base in Germany. France was on the cusp of another revolution. However, the protests - and the violence that accompanied them - subsided almost as quickly as they began. De Gaulle, who quickly called elections for June of that year, was returned by the largest majorities in French history. Though the protests were a political failure, the term mai 68 is a term still used in France to demarcate a seismic shift in French society and cultural attitudes from the conservative France of pre-May ’68 to what is considered the more progressive and liberal France of today.

What were they protesting? The protests had begun with university students resisting what they saw as class discrimination and bureaucratic control within the university; however, as the protests grew it become clearer that what was being objected to was the way in which technology, consumerism, and capitalism were a mix that increasingly worked to control lives and limit freedoms. Central to this notion and to May ’68 itself were the ideas of a group of intellectuals and writers loosely coming together - beginning in 1957 and dissolving in 1972 - as Situationist International (SI). SI argued that - even though much of the West had entered a post-scarcity world - the system of capitalism - for its very continuation - needed to maintain the notion that we need to struggle to survive. This supposed need to continually struggle for our day-to-day survival cuts us off from the possibility that in a post-scarcity world we had now become free to live our lives as a play of desires, the realization of pleasures, and the creation of intensely lived situations of our own choosing. This sense of struggle arises and is maintained, particularly in advanced or late capitalism, through commodification and alienation. By separating commodities from their use-value and increasingly stressing and amplifying their exchange-value, one is no longer satisfied merely by acquiring the commodity for its use (e.g. I don’t just want to tell the time; I want a Rolex), but rather  begins a self-imposed struggle to grasp the seemingly magical quality that the commodity promises and yet never ultimately and finally delivers. In late capitalism, this exchange-value commodification spreads to all aspects of our lives, including our work and our leisure. We have not only become alienated from our work  - alienated in the sense that we can no longer recognize our work as our own - (e.g. these are not shoes that I made; I am only a cog in a long process that goes into making these Nike shoes), but have also become alienated from our leisure as it too has become progressively commodified. We now find ourselves in a world where virtually all our relations are mediated by commodities, and connection and lively situations between people seem vanished. More and more we are propagandized into believing that there are only two modes of being in the world: producing and consuming. Thus, in this world of late capitalism, and in a similar vein to Martin Heidegger’s critique of instrumental reason, situations and activities, such as laughter, poetry, playing, drinking, wandering, chatting, creating, joking, reading, and loafing (any human activity that lies outside of commodification and instrumentality) become forms of resistance.

In his work of critical theory, Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord, one of the key founding members of SI, writes that the Spectacle is not merely a collection of images, but rather images which mediated the social relations between people. In late capitalism, argues Debord, the commodity has completed its colonization of social life: being has become having, and having has become merely appearing. The Spectacle offers up images where commodities take the place of relationships between people, and where increasingly people become passive observers. Simply put: where commodity fetishism dominates, we substitute living/being for having; however, the impossibility of having all, most, or even particular commodities, means that having quickly becomes supplanted by appearing to have - that is, by images of having. Thus, passive identification with images replaces living and being, while our social relations become almost completely mediated not just by what we have, but by what we have become to believe - via the Spectacle - we are on the cusp of having.

In advanced Western capitalist countries, technology has increase our productive efficiency by ten-fold in the last half-a-century. And yet, many, if not most of us, are convinced that the world of work is an absolute necessity to survival. Where are the hours of leisure that were promised decades ago when technological advances were then on the horizon? That excess of time promised to us to be a parent, a citizen, an artist, a loafer, a thinker, a wanderer, a friend. But it is not just our time that has been colonized; have a look around your city and you will see that space is almost wholly constructed for the purposes either of production or consumption. One of the forms of resistance suggested and practiced by members of SI was that of the dérive. The dérive is basically purposeless wandering through an urban landscape. This seems in itself seems innocuous enough - i.e. wandering through the streets without any purpose or place to go; however, as you walk, perhaps a little slower than usual, leaving yourself open to whatever impression or feelings that may come, you may notice how the space has been constructed to keep you on the move and in a certain direction; how at almost every point you are being sold something; how the mere slowing down of your pace draws sighs of frustration from others as they hurry past, or looks of suspicion when you stop for a period of contemplation in the mall - a mall crammed with cameras and surveillance. Situationist International partly drew its inspiration for the dérive from Charles Baudelaire’s writings of the flâneur - coming from the French verb, ‘to stroll’ - the notion of the flâneur is not limited to the peripatetic stroll in the Baudelairian sense, but can also include a "complete philosophical way of living and thinking" and is often used to critique modernity. Walter Benjamin, the cultural theorist and thinker, utilizes Baudelaire and the notion of the flâneur in his unfinished masterwork, The Arcades Project. The dérive is closely associated with psychogeography, which, as Guy Debord and others in SI defined it, was "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals” and,  "a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities ... just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape.” (I suppose that means no sky-train!)

The practice of psychogeography is central to the writings of Ian Sinclair in books such as: London Orbital and Lights Out in the Territory. Will Self’s recent novel, Walking to Hollywood, is informed by his practice of psychogeography. Amongst books that give a history of Situationist International are: Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century, which draws out the influence of SI on late 1970s punk rock; Sadie Plant’s The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age; and, the recently published, The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International by McKenzie Wark.

Recommended Reading:

Wark, McKenzie. The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (New York: Verso, 2011)