Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

28 Jelena Stojanović
in the way they conceived their practice collectively. The LI members
asserted that “What we need now is to take care of collective interests represented
by a collective subjectivity.” 45 At the same time, while continuing
and challenging similar conceptual legacies to both surrealism and Marxism,
they were also deeply inXuenced by the novelty of Lefebvre’s critique
of public disinterestedness. LI members were also, like MIBI, explicitly attacking
the politics and discourse of the cold war, an approach especially evident
in their Wlmmaking. They believed intervening in mass media challenged
ideological “conditioning mechanisms.” Perhaps more importantly such interventions
also helped subvert the “leisure machines” that Lefebvre had deWned
so clearly in his writings.
LI members conceived of their artistic activity as a sophisticated
tactical game. They devised a set of equally ironic collective gestures
(parodico-serious they called them) 46 for carrying out their actions including
“détournement,” “dérive,” “psychogeography,” and “unitary urbanism.”
In every case the evocation of play and the logic of games became tools for
a thoroughgoing social and cultural critique. For example, by “détourning”
the mass media—one of the major “leisure machines” targeted by the group—
they focused their activity not on the representation of news or politics, but
on the way the media trivialized reality, maintaining the status quo through
a “Balance of Power” that was in effect the inculcation of global fear. Hence,
the group’s freely distributed publications such as Potlatch 47 or Internationale
Lettriste exhibit exactly the same trivialization of reality, only in reverse: “shake
in your shoes, bureaucrats,” they exclaimed, while mockingly inverting the
powerful rhetoric of the global superpowers. Hence, their playful experimentation
was deliberately conceived of as a reuse, recycling, or reversing
of modernist productive and progressive ideologies that had in turn produced
and reproduced the cold war discourse.
Always new, however also the same, the LI’s aesthetic and intellectual
approach to mass culture was essentially a form of plagiarism, or
what they called détournement. This was in turn their main aesthetic tactic
and was carried out in three distinct modes, deceptive, simple, and ultra, and
included everything from simple quotidian plagiarism to borrowing clothing
styles and types of behavior. It was in sum an irreverent, even blasphemous,
way of altering private property in order to force it to be collective. 48 At the
same time, détournement suggests an erosion of the imposed and constructed
division between the public and private. As Louis Althusser suggested, this
distinction was “internal to bourgeois law and valid in the subordinate
domains in which bourgeois law exercises its ‘authority.’” 49
This form of grotesque critique with its use of tactical play and
media experimentation probably reached its greatest expression in the actions