The Personal is Political. The Political is Personal.

 
TINA

Perhaps the replacement of the revolutionary optimism that characterized Debord's Society of the Spectacle (1967) with the deep pessimism of his later Comments on The Society of the Spectacle (1988) in relation to the possibilities for opposing the spectable can be partly explained by situationism's jettisoning of the unconscious and the SI's subsequent need to envision revolutionary change as only coming about either through a "conscious" opposition to spectuacular society or the latter's implosion.

In the case of the spectacular social system, as a result of its own inability to strategically manage itself, it spirals out of control into dissolution while attempting to create a "spectacle of terrorism" aimed at making a police state seem to be the lesser of two evils. While this scenario sounds very familiar to "post-9/11" ears, from a surrealist perspective, as long as we remain exclusively in the realm of the rational, we are stuck with the political uncertainties of such apocalyptic doomsday prophecies as the only alternative to a purely rational "coming to consciousness."

from "Surrealist Desire, Anarchy and the Poetry of Revolt," by Ron Sokolsky, in the Fall-Winter 2003-04 issue of Anarchy, A Journal of Desire Armed
posted by TiR at 8:38 AM