Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

Internationaleries 19
played a “users game” in which their collective, often ludic activity derided
the specialization and reiWcation of cold war culture. Therefore, references
to Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens 8 abound in their writings and are often
used to frame or redress paraphysical connotations and the remnant of surrealist
desires. 9 More importantly, this signiWes that their “game” was not
conceived as an autonomous activity in the modernist sense. On the contrary,
it was deeply shaped and informed by particular historical circumstances
that would have unique and long-lasting implications for modern European
history. Hence this hybridized, often monstrous logic of the grotesque led
the internationaleries on a quest for “destructive preservation,” yet another of
their oxymoronic claims.
The internationaleries used the grotesque as a critical device in their
experimentations and writings in order to frame the historic “escroquerie” 10
or myth that lay behind an all-pervasive cold war discourse, while simultaneously
attempting to preserve whatever remained of collective subjectivity. 11
Allegedly, it was the American journalist Walter Lipmann who reappropriated
and popularized the term “cold war,” 12 making it an accepted and valid
denominator to this day. Anecdotal or not, this account underscores the
strategic importance that the new mass media would play in waging this
new form of conXict. The cold war (or Third World War) 13 was a conXict
“of big interests” carried out by two superpowers who, while fearing “the
unthinkable” as the press and the media repeated daily, resisted the use of
arms while opting instead to primarily do battle through “psychological warfare”
often carried out through the medium of culture. They not only turned
on its head Clausewitz’s classic deWnition of war as regulation through
bloodshed, but more importantly the United States and U.S.S.R. exploded
his concept of “total warfare” beyond its author’s wildest imagination. 14 The
cold war became synonymous with ideological warfare that, in the Situationists’s
words, was “colonizing” of each and every aspect of daily experience
while simultaneously placing the political economy at the very core of
existence. 15 With the implementation of various economic plans and treaties,
most notably that of the Bretton Woods accords, values such as knowledge,
social relations, and culture were not only instrumentalized and manipulated
for ideological ends, but in an unprecedented way they also grew
dependent upon and became inXected by economics, in particular economic
exchange value. This massive and pervasive presence of political economy,
now present in all aspects of life, necessarily entailed a heavy technobureaucratic
apparatus that completed and complemented the “total warfare.”
In other words it was modernist, but monstrously so. A hyperrationalization
of life that continued reproducing itself 16 and that the internationaleries
referred to variously as “formalism” or more consistently as “functionalism.”