On Clandestine Life
“neither the idiocy of private life nor the uncertain prestige of public life…”
Good morning.
If you’re a citizen of the projective city (and we all are), you always have three or four things going at once. This is why I have never completed a book-length project beyond the dissertation: always doing four things means one never gets around to that one thing (the fox and the hedgehog again I suppose).
Anyway, while I may get bored with longer projects, I save everything and frequently go back to look back at ideas and other fragments. This is one of those fragments. It brings-together several threads that seem disconnected and incompatible (I like doing this):
It begins with a reading of the Prologue to Agamben’s book The Use of Bodies: It focuses on the work of Debord and the Situationists. Agamben makes this provocative remark:
Here there is something like a central contradiction, which the Situationists never succeeded in working out, and at the same time something precious that demands to be taken up again and developed — perhaps the obscure, unavowed awareness that the genuinely political element consists precisely in this incommunicable, almost ridiculous clandestinity of private life (xv).
Debord was the first theorist of virtuality, a half-century before our own hyper-saturated world; what I love about this passage and what follows is the sense of political possibility that remains to us, for what Agamben calls the clandestine, the critical and oppositional and necessarily private.
Private? As a political theorist — and one who has read Hannah Arendt no less — this emphasis on the political power of privacy and “clandestinity” might seem surprising, but there it is. We look back longingly at Debord’s time and milieu precisely because it feels so remote and lost and impossible to us. We who live in an Instagrammed age of oversharing. Debord famously refused to share his image: is such a thing possible now? It feels impossible. The triumph of inescapable virtuality has meant the elevation of a discourse (or jargon) of authenticity. And yet its pursuit has become even more elusive, its attainment perhaps impossible.
The terms of that object/objective are spelled-out in the subtitle of this entry: a life of neither isolated idiocy, nor dependence on public whims (i.e. in our time, the forces of the market). Of necessity, it means starting small, and having a narrow impact: for the SI, it meant early experiments in poetry and typographic arts, the circulation of journals and manifestos, international correspondence and of course most importantly the daily encounter with intellectual frenemies in cafes and bars, a dedication to flâneurie, psychogeography and the like (note: none of it had any connection to universities or stable employment of any kind. Situationist graffiti: NEVER WORK).
In short, a critique of urban life arising organically (and obscurely) from the lived experience of the life itself. This intersects nicely with that famous quote from David Graeber (RIP), which I used to have pinned to my bird account:
Revolutionary action is not a form of self-sacrifice, a grim dedication to doing whatever it takes to achieve a future world of freedom. It is the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free (“On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets,” p. 3).
Of course this “defiant insistence” itself has been colonized, an insight as goes back at least as far as Boltanski and Chiapello’s concept of “artistic critique.” (Think for example of tech corporations, finance/banks, universities, even the police celebrating Pride week/month): in other words, the pursuit of authenticity and even revolt have been since at least the 1970s just another way of shifting units, moving product, accelerating capital flows.
A lot of this has been covered already in works like Lipstick Traces, and other works by Situationists. My sense, pessimistically, is that for most of us the concept of clandestinity is simply a kind of sensibility, an aesthetic awareness akin to nostalgia that occurs at a point in life (individual or collective) when one has become entangled, burdened, in debt, in short when life has become complicated and one’s horizons for resolution or action have dimmed. Debord himself expressed this in his later writings like Panegyric, for example, which Agamben addresses. “Acting as if one is already free” turns out to be a tall order for most of us, and the nagging question of authenticity will always haunt us even as we look back on the secret corners of our lives in clandestinity-in-community with others. What to do about those questions, those memories and that sensibility remains open, as a very complicated project.
Insightful reflections! Your thoughts on clandestinity resonate for me with the concept of “imperceptible politics.” See _Escape Routes _ chapter 6: http://www.elimeyerhoff.com/books/Escape_routes.pdf