I sat down with Dr. Wark in his office at the New School, where he is an Associate Professor of Culture and Media. We discussed the legacy of the Situationists for a new generation of revolutionaries, the resonances and ambiences of Occupy Wall Street, and the role of protest in the absence of politics.
In the preface to The Beach Beneath the Streets, you mentioned being part of radical political and bohemian movements as a youth.
Well, it was a bohemia of no great significance, Sydney. I’m originally from an industrial town with a great labor movement tradition, so I was fortunate to be trained by people in a town with a labor movement who still controlled the waterfront, the steel unions and things like that. I think that was a really good education to do things like covertly hand out literature to steel workers. To later have “occupied” the front lawn of Parliament House in Canberra at the age of 17 was also a wonderful thing. I discovered at the age of 17 the weird way that cops twist your arm when they are trying to move you along; you can’t not move when they’ve got your arm in that weird hold. And of course I immediately got off the steps of the Parliament House because I’m a coward, so I don’t want to oversell this, but even having a minor part in a minor provincial bohemian and political world was a really good preparation for writing about the Situationists.
How long has The Beach Beneath The Streets been percolating? I think the success of the book is that you are able to paint the picture of the Situationist milieu and give the biography of a movement, instead of reducing it to a few key players.
It took a long time to write, and there [were] a couple of abandoned book length manuscripts along the way. I never wanted to do a biography. One was arranged alphabetically like a dictionary, but it just wouldn’t write itself. There is a book length chunk of this thing that just didn’t work, so I had to throw the whole thing away and start all over again. But it’s kind of liberating to do that. It’s been going on for years and in some ways The Beach Beneath the Street is a prequel to some books that I wrote in the early part of this century — A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory. These were détournements of Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, respectively. I wasn’t satisfied with my footnotes to that, so this was a kind of excavation of what I thought was living and dead in the Situationist International.
The ideas that stretch across this period seem to be really congealing in your writing about Occupy Wall Street.
Even before this stuff I was interested, on the one hand, in the concept of the spectacle — which is treated as this evacuation of historical time and complete nullification of any kind of practice. There is a link there from Debord to Jean Baudrillard. On the other hand, no one reads those later chapters of Society of the Spectacle, which are about the total opposite. They are about détournements and possibly a somewhat limited notion of workers’ councils, but nevertheless certain kinds of practice. So I was always interested in moments that punctured the spectacle. In my first book I wrote about Tiananmen Square in 1989 and on the Wall Street crash of 1987. It never occurred to me that the politics of occupation practiced in Tiananmen Square could actually be applied to Wall Street. I wrote this book that’s got the two pieces, and I didn’t put them together. To the credit of David Graeber and a few other people, they figured it out that you can occupy an abstraction by occupying this place called Wall Street that doesn’t exist.
This also passes through May ’68, which was also a dual occupation. It was an occupation of the factories and parts of the Latin Quarter. But the two are never put into communication, and that’s its downfall, in a sense...
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Michael Schapira @'full stop'
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