The Spectacle of Ressentiment
T.J. Clark on Why art still can't kill the Situationist International
8- The Spectacle of Ressentiment
T.J. Clark on Why art still can't kill the Situationist International
According to journalistic legend: the Situationist International (S.I.) started out in 1957 as an Art group comprised of disillusioned Surrealists; then in the 1960s became influential ‘anti-Art’ rebels under the influence of leader Guy Debord’s seminal critique of consumer capitalism in Society of the Spectacle; then became a dwindling, warring sect of council-communist utopians, before finally dissolving in 1972.
The derision intensified after Debord’ suicide in 1994 - especially from the ‘Left’ - which prompted a challenge to the critics from T.J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith, two of the four members of the English section of the Situationist International. The English Sits - Clark, Nicholson-Smith, Charles Radcliffe and Chris Gray - had collectively written an 8,000-word statement titled The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution, which began:
‘Modern Art is at a dead end. To be blind to this fact implies a complete ignorance of the most radical theses of the European avant-garde during the revolutionary upheavals of 1910-1925: that art must cease to be a specialised and imaginary transformation of the world and become the real transformation of lived experience itself.’
…and concluded:
‘It is not enough to burn the museums. They must also be sacked. Past creativity must be freed from the forms into which it has been ossified and brought back to life. Everything of value in art has always cried aloud to be made real and to be lived. This “subversion” of traditional art is, obviously, merely part of the whole art of subversion we must master. Creativity, since Dada, has not been a matter of producing anything more but of learning to use what has already been produced.’
Because the four authors were ‘excluded’ by the Paris leadership of the S.I. in 1967 (at the behest of Raoul Vaneigem), the statement remained unpublished until Michel Prigent of Chronos Press brought it out it as a pamphlet 30 years later. Clark was among the ex-English Situationists who in 1968 founded the King Mob Echo, for which he wrote under the nom-de-plume 'Huelsenbeck' (after Richard Huelsenbeck, the German Dadaist).
In 1997, in an essay entitled ‘Why art can't kill the Situationist International’, which was published in the arts journal, October (Winter 1997), Clark and Nicholson-Smith counter-attacked the critiques of Debord by Regis Debray in Le Monde and Peter Wollen in New Left Review. Clark and Nicholson-Smith showed that Debord’s alleged ‘sectarianism’ towards the ‘Left’ was a myth, as Situationists had engaged in intense discussions and collaborations with up-and-coming anti-Stalinist individuals and groups of the new generation.
‘This activity… was conceived as an aspect of a practice in which "art" - meaning those possibilities of representational and anti-representational action thrown up by fifty years of modernist experiment at the borders of the category - might now be realized. This was the truly utopian dimension of S.I. activity… It was the "art" dimension, to put it crudely - the continued pressure put on the question of representational forms in politics and everyday life, and the refusal to foreclose on the issue of representation versus agency - that made their politics the deadly weapon it was for a while. And gave them the role they had in May 1968. This is the aspect of the 1960s that the official Left wants most of all to forget.’
Today, in 2025, what has changed in the Spectacle? Happily, T.J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith are still around to tell us. In a piece for London Review of Books (23 January, 2025), entitled 'A Brief Guide to Trump and the Spectacle', T.J. Clark reminds us:
'Essentially, at the beginning, the theory of the society of the spectacle was an effort to understand the disembodiment of human sociality. It was still possible to be baffled by the process. Inquisitive, manipulative, contact-hungry homo sapiens, that craver of attention and mutuality, had ended up existing in a world at one remove.'
Clark says that the Situationists, writing in a time of upheaval, referred to what Marx (after Feuerbach) formulated as ‘Species-being’: the ‘essence’ of the individual realising his/her self concretely within ‘the ensemble of the social relations’. The Situationists believed that Species-being would reassert itself. However,
'They could not anticipate the spell that would be cast through the following half-century by a speeding up and miniaturising of the image, putting the spectacle at everyone’s fingertips, making it a form of life. (Those who lived to see it often despaired.)'
The apparent triumph of Spectacular neoliberalism and its counterpart in postmodernism terminated artistic modernism’s engagement in ‘actual struggles for power over images and power through images.’
Many Left-leaning observers of Trumpism blamed the Democrats and MSM for Trump's election victory in 2016. It was thought that the debacle had been due to the misinformed viewers of Fox News and the like not being offered an informed, rational alternative, and a party that could be seen to be 'delivering'. However, ‘going forward’ - as the fakers of the cancelled future like to say - the liberals, having got their sense of entitlement back in 2020, screwed it again in 2024. However, if ‘facts’ were ineffective, so was spleen. T.J. Clark poses the problem of anti-Trump journalism:
'Isn’t writing obliged to answer the loathsomeness and cruelty with spleen? But isn’t that what Trump-fiction depends on? Go in close, grapple and smear, and one immediately feels Trump-fiction exulting in one’s distaste. He rides the late-night laughter. The things they say about me! His Arnold Palmer swells.'
T.J. Clark says that the reality of Trump 2.0 America is of an empire in decline, which 'depends now on an economic system that fails to satisfy its own ordinary middle (read, working) class.'
'But however berserk or bizarre the particulars of decline, it is easier and easier to look through them to the simple bitterness of those who once, so recently, were empire’s low-level beneficiaries. Where did my job go (and with it my health plan)? What are my kids on? What the hell is racial sensitivity training? (Wasn’t whiteness the keystone of the whole deal?)'… They need replacement theory. It’s the elites. Antisemitism. The lab in Wuhan. Abortion. Marxists. The Pizza Paedophiles. Hollywood. Muslims. Mexicans. Anthony Fauci. The EPA.'
Digging down further, Clark has recourse to the concept of Ressentiment, which Nietzsche explained as a very deep feeling that goes all the back to tribal vendettas and Greek tragedies. This is manifested today, for example, in white nativism and certain brands of IDPOL which both promote ‘the feeling that one’s energy should be spent looking around for someone to blame and to wreak vengeance upon.’
'[Trump's achievement is] to have made ressentiment the main form of politics, to have made himself the very image of it, to have it written it into every shaking of the jowls and ‘It-wasn’t-me-Sir’ stare – that’s Trump’s achievement. Here I am: rich, bankrupt, fraudulent, criminal, surrounded by toadies, destroyer of politics, president ... And I still haven’t been given my due!'
However, Clark adds, 'untruth consumes resources, at least on the scale now necessary. And resources will grow fewer, be fought for more ruthlessly. You cannot have a society of the spectacle without a constant increase in the rate of illusion.'
Certainly, after just a few weeks of Trump in office the phantasmagoria of accumulated illusion is dazzling: Canada is touted as the 51st state, and along with Mexico, ls faced with the threat of massive tariffs, which Trudeau and Scheinbaum knew all along to be a lame sleight-of-hand ‘bargaining chip’; Denmark is also threatened with massive tariffs and military invasion of Greenland (in that order), even if would break up NATO and starve the US military industrial complex of contracts; mass deportations of migrants, designed to make their jobs available to ‘real’ Americans, don’t match the numbers of ICE deportation under Biden; Trump’s illusion that he could end the Ukraine on day one of his inauguration was by the end of day (as the saying goes in Russia) so long ago it never happened, etc, etc.
Musk is implementing executive action with DOGE, alleging billions of dollars worth of fraud and waste in seemingly all departments of government. The allegations may be a pack of lies or some of then may be true. Whatever, it would be illegal to act on them without referring them to Congressional budgetary procedures. However, the illegality would need to be called to account by the MAGA-dominated GOP in Congress - which won’t happen. Furthermore, if Musk gets control of OpenAI (known as the ‘next Google’) and ChatGPT, then he and Trump and the freak-show apprentices (whose appointments were waived through by the Democrats in the Congressional confirmation hearings) will be able to define reality to the extent that the rate of illusion goes into overdrive.
[To be concluded next post]