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pages/fulldocs.Theory of the Dérive.md

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+---
+created: 2021-10-29T19:36:58 (UTC +02:00)
+tags: [The Situationist International Text Library,Internationale Situationniste,,Theory of the Dérive,,,Essay,,,]
+source: http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/314
+author: 
+---
+
+# The Situationist International Text Library/Theory of the Dérive
+
+> ## Excerpt
+> One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive [literally:
+“drifting”], a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives
+involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are
+thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.
+
+---
+One of the basic situationist practices is the _dérive_ \[literally: “drifting”\], a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.
+
+In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.
+
+But the dérive includes both this letting-go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities. In this latter regard, ecological science — despite the narrow social space to which it limits itself — provides psychogeography with abundant data.
+
+The ecological analysis of the absolute or relative character of fissures in the urban network, of the role of microclimates, of distinct neighborhoods with no relation to administrative boundaries, and above all of the dominating action of centers of attraction, must be utilized and completed by psychogeographical methods. The objective passional terrain of the dérive must be defined in accordance both with its own logic and with its relations with social morphology.
+
+In his study _Paris et l’agglomération parisienne_ (Bibliothèque de Sociologie Contemporaine, P.U.F., 1952) Chombart de Lauwe notes that “an urban neighborhood is determined not only by geographical and economic factors, but also by the image that its inhabitants and those of other neighborhoods have of it.” In the same work, in order to illustrate “the narrowness of the real Paris in which each individual lives . . . within a geographical area whose radius is extremely small,” he diagrams all the movements made in the space of one year by a student living in the 16th Arrondissement. Her itinerary forms a small triangle with no significant deviations, the three apexes of which are the School of Political Sciences, her residence and that of her piano teacher.
+
+Such data — examples of a modern poetry capable of provoking sharp emotional reactions (in this particular case, outrage at the fact that anyone’s life can be so pathetically limited) — or even Burgess’s theory of Chicago’s social activities as being distributed in distinct concentric zones, will undoubtedly prove useful in developing dérives.
+
+If chance plays an important role in dérives this is because the methodology of psychogeographical observation is still in its infancy. But the action of chance is naturally conservative and in a new setting tends to reduce everything to habit or to an alternation between a limited number of variants. Progress means breaking through fields where chance holds sway by creating new conditions more favorable to our purposes. We can say, then, that the randomness of a dérive is fundamentally different from that of the stroll, but also that the first psychogeographical attractions discovered by dérivers may tend to fixate them around new habitual axes, to which they will constantly be drawn back.
+
+An insufficient awareness of the limitations of chance, and of its inevitably reactionary effects, condemned to a dismal failure the famous aimless wandering attempted in 1923 by four surrealists, beginning from a town chosen by lot: Wandering in open country is naturally depressing, and the interventions of chance are poorer there than anywhere else. But this mindlessness is pushed much further by a certain Pierre Vendryes (in _Médium,_ May 1954), who thinks he can relate this anecdote to various probability experiments, on the ground that they all supposedly involve the same sort of antideterminist liberation. He gives as an example the random distribution of tadpoles in a circular aquarium, adding, significantly, “It is necessary, of course, that such a population be subject to no external guiding influence.” From that perspective, the tadpoles could be considered more spontaneously liberated than the surrealists, since they have the advantage of being “as stripped as possible of intelligence, sociability and sexuality,” and are thus “truly independent from one another.”
+
+At the opposite pole from such imbecilities, the primarily urban character of the dérive, in its element in the great industrially transformed cities — those centers of possibilities and meanings — could be expressed in Marx’s phrase: “Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive.”
+
+One can dérive alone, but all indications are that the most fruitful numerical arrangement consists of several small groups of two or three people who have reached the same level of awareness, since cross-checking these different groups’ impressions makes it possible to arrive at more objective conclusions. It is preferable for the composition of these groups to change from one dérive to another. With more than four or five participants, the specifically dérive character rapidly diminishes, and in any case it is impossible for there to be more than ten or twelve people without the dérive fragmenting into several simultaneous dérives. The practice of such subdivision is in fact of great interest, but the difficulties it entails have so far prevented it from being organized on a sufficient scale.
+
+The average duration of a dérive is one day, considered as the time between two periods of sleep. The starting and ending times have no necessary relation to the solar day, but it should be noted that the last hours of the night are generally unsuitable for dérives.
+
+But this duration is merely a statistical average. For one thing, a dérive rarely occurs in its pure form: it is difficult for the participants to avoid setting aside an hour or two at the beginning or end of the day for taking care of banal tasks; and toward the end of the day fatigue tends to encourage such an abandonment. But more importantly, a dérive often takes place within a deliberately limited period of a few hours, or even fortuitously during fairly brief moments; or it may last for several days without interruption. In spite of the cessations imposed by the need for sleep, certain dérives of a sufficient intensity have been sustained for three or four days, or even longer. It is true that in the case of a series of dérives over a rather long period of time it is almost impossible to determine precisely when the state of mind peculiar to one dérive gives way to that of another. One sequence of dérives was pursued without notable interruption for around two months. Such an experience gives rise to new objective conditions of behavior that bring about the disappearance of a good number of the old ones.[\[1\]](http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/314#)
+
+The influence of weather on dérives, although real, is a significant factor only in the case of prolonged rains, which make them virtually impossible. But storms or other types of precipitation are rather favorable for dérives.
+
+The spatial field of a dérive may be precisely delimited or vague, depending on whether the goal is to study a terrain or to emotionally disorient oneself. It should not be forgotten that these two aspects of dérives overlap in so many ways that it is impossible to isolate one of them in a pure state. But the use of taxis, for example, can provide a clear enough dividing line: If in the course of a dérive one takes a taxi, either to get to a specific destination or simply to move, say, twenty minutes to the west, one is concerned primarily with a personal trip outside one’s usual surroundings. If, on the other hand, one sticks to the direct exploration of a particular terrain, one is concentrating primarily on research for a psychogeographical urbanism.
+
+In every case the spatial field depends first of all on the point of departure — the residence of the solo dériver or the meeting place selected by a group. The maximum area of this spatial field does not extend beyond the entirety of a large city and its suburbs. At its minimum it can be limited to a small self-contained ambiance: a single neighborhood or even a single block of houses if it’s interesting enough (the extreme case being a static-dérive of an entire day within the Saint-Lazare train station).
+
+The exploration of a fixed spatial field entails establishing bases and calculating directions of penetration. It is here that the study of maps comes in — ordinary ones as well as ecological and psychogeographical ones — along with their correction and improvement. It should go without saying that we are not at all interested in any mere exoticism that may arise from the fact that one is exploring a neighborhood for the first time. Besides its unimportance, this aspect of the problem is completely subjective and soon fades away.
+
+In the “possible rendezvous,” on the other hand, the element of exploration is minimal in comparison with that of behavioral disorientation. The subject is invited to come alone to a certain place at a specified time. He is freed from the bothersome obligations of the ordinary rendezvous since there is no one to wait for. But since this “possible rendezvous” has brought him without warning to a place he may or may not know, he observes the surroundings. It may be that the same spot has been specified for a “possible rendezvous” for someone else whose identity he has no way of knowing. Since he may never even have seen the other person before, he will be encouraged to start up conversations with various passersby. He may meet no one, or he may even by chance meet the person who has arranged the “possible rendezvous.” In any case, particularly if the time and place have been well chosen, his use of time will take an unexpected turn. He may even telephone someone else who doesn’t know where the first “possible rendezvous” has taken him, in order to ask for another one to be specified. One can see the virtually unlimited resources of this pastime.
+
+Our loose lifestyle and even certain amusements considered dubious that have always been enjoyed among our entourage — slipping by night into houses undergoing demolition, hitchhiking nonstop and without destination through Paris during a transportation strike in the name of adding to the confusion, wandering in subterranean catacombs forbidden to the public, etc. — are expressions of a more general sensibility which is no different from that of the dérive. Written descriptions can be no more than passwords to this great game.
+
+The lessons drawn from dérives enable us to draw up the first surveys of the psychogeographical articulations of a modern city. Beyond the discovery of unities of ambiance, of their main components and their spatial localization, one comes to perceive their principal axes of passage, their exits and their defenses. One arrives at the central hypothesis of the existence of psychogeographical pivotal points. One measures the distances that actually separate two regions of a city, distances that may have little relation with the physical distance between them. With the aid of old maps, aerial photographs and experimental dérives, one can draw up hitherto lacking maps of influences, maps whose inevitable imprecision at this early stage is no worse than that of the first navigational charts. The only difference is that it is no longer a matter of precisely delineating stable continents, but of changing architecture and urbanism.
+
+Today the different unities of atmosphere and of dwellings are not precisely marked off, but are surrounded by more or less extended and indistinct bordering regions. The most general change that dérive experience leads to proposing is the constant diminution of these border regions, up to the point of their complete suppression.
+
+Within architecture itself, the taste for dériving tends to promote all sorts of new forms of labyrinths made possible by modern techniques of construction. Thus in March 1955 the press reported the construction in New York of a building in which one can see the first signs of an opportunity to dérive inside an apartment:
+
+> “The apartments of the helicoidal building will be shaped like slices of cake. One will be able to enlarge or reduce them by shifting movable partitions. The half-floor gradations avoid limiting the number of rooms, since the tenant can request the use of the adjacent section on either upper or lower levels. With this setup three four-room apartments can be transformed into one twelve-room apartment in less than six hours.”
+
+(To be continued.)

pages/fulldocs.We Go Round and Round in the Night and Are Consumed by Fire.md

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+---
+created: 2021-10-29T19:36:25 (UTC +02:00)
+tags: [The Situationist International Text Library,CTHEORY,,We Go Round and Round in the Night and Are Consumed by Fire,,,Film Review,,,]
+source: http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/87
+author: 
+---
+
+# The Situationist International Text Library/We Go Round and Round in the Night and Are Consumed by Fire
+
+> ## Excerpt
+> Guy Debord, In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimurm Igni: a Film. London: Pelagian Press, 1991.
+
+---
+Guy Debord, _In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimurm Igni: a Film_. London: Pelagian Press, 1991.
+
+Permit yourself to drift from what you are reading at this very moment into another situation, another way of acting within the historical and psychic geographies in which the event of your own reading is here and now taking place; here and now taking the place of other ways of making passionate and energetic connections between us. Imagine a situation that, in all likelihood, you've never been in. Imagine that you are sitting in a movie theater with me watching the sixth and final film of Guy Debord. Imagine, that as you and I gaze upon the screen of flickering electronic images our eyes meet those of another cinema audience. The other audience is staring fixedly in a perfect reverse shot at the screened image that you and I are becoming. Who are you? What or who are you becoming? What about me? What are our material relations to each other, to ourselves, and to others in history? What historical epoch is it that we are both within and ceaselessly remaking in some ways, but not other ways? When you think of the comfort and/or the anxious disdain you are feeling, sitting here with me in this theater, what other images cross the flesh of your mind? What if you're not happy with these images? What if you sense, perhaps beyond words, that this situation which I am asking you to imagine is but a filmic preface to a more complex, dangerous, and seductive situation - a situation demanding the pleasures and also the risks of revolting historical actions?
+
+Loosen up. Have a drink. A devilish voice layers itself upon the images we are watching, as we pass together through a rather brief moment of time. It is the voice of Guy Debord. The voice declares: "I will make no concession to the public in this film... This public, so completely deprived of freedom, and which has put up with everything, deserves less than any other to be spared. The manipulators of advertising, with the traditional cynicism of those who know that people are inclined to justify insults which they do not avenge, calmly announce today that 'when you love life, you go to the cinema'."
+
+Now the images before our eyes are changing. First we find ourselves surveying a large complex of standardized houses. Neatly separated houses. Neatly boring, neatly standardized houses for a standardizing culture: the architectural packaging of an intensely commodified culture. Then we observe a modern employee in her bath, with her young son. Something appears missing in this picture - something that haunts the cinematic framing of this very movie. Tracking shot towards a bed adorning the same room. Cut to a long line of people waiting patiently outside the entrance of a cinema. Perhaps they are waiting to watch the very film that you and I this very moment are watching. Perhaps, in order to watch this film, these patiently waiting in line people are calmly, and in an excessively civilized fashion, handing over their national/transnational New World Citizen ID cards to be scanned by a remote Prop 187 culture data input module. Waiting in line. Waiting on line. What's the difference? One thing is for sure - these people are waiting; endlessly, patiently waiting. This is life. This is cinema.
+
+Debord's words continue: "But this life and this cinema are equally paltry; and that is why you could actually exchange one for the other with indifference." Long tracking shot. Newt Gingrich, portable PC under one arm. He's chasing OJ Simpson with a camcorder. Background images of Bosnia, then Chechnya. Cut to image of Beacon Street in Brookline, Massachusetts, the United States of America. Image of a white Euro-American man with a hunting rifle in his hand. God the Father is in this man's mind. The man approaches a women's health center and abortion clinic. Cut to a long shot of Mexico City; pesos piled higher than banks. Then to images of Montreal. Photo likenesses of the faces of the editors of this very journal flash across the screen. Then to Hollywood. Rats running everywhere. Then to Washington, D.C. where the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers are testifying on how best to police Haiti. Then flash screen to Tokyo. City center images of huge data boards with moving figurations. A barely clad white woman with brown, deep brown, skin appears. She dives into the blue, deep blue, hyper-blue waters off the side a Caribbean cruise ship. This ship is named Carnival. The waters are so blue, deep blue, hyper-blue, that you can't see the blood. See the history. Newt appears again. He corners OJ and gives him a freshly inked copy of the GATT agreement. Both men smile enigmatically. They join a long line of people waiting patiently outside the entrance of a cinema. Waiting; endlessly, patiently waiting. No. This can't be the right film. I must be getting ahead of myself. Still, I'm no futurist. "But what does it matter?," cautions Guy. "The Future is in the Past. Shipwreckers have their name writ only in water... The existing images only serve the existing lies."
+
+Guy Debord was born in France in 1931. He lived, by most accounts, with great intensity until the Fall of 1994. Then he took his own life. Never one to behold the times in which he lived with anything but contempt, Debord, author of Society of the Spectacle, was also a radical Lettrist film maker. [\[1\]](http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/87#) In 1957, he participated as a founding member of the Situationist International, an adventuresome political ensemble of (mostly male) activists, avant-garde artists, writers, theorists, and revolting practitioners of a hybrid of Marxian, anarchist, and festively inspired approaches to cultural and economic rebellion. Legendary for the provocative and organizational energies they lent to the Parisian revolts of May 1968, the Situationists attempted to both strategically theorize and inspire disgust for the increasingly commodified character of everyday social life. As proclaimed in a diverse array of pamphlets, journal articles, "detourned" comic strips, visual and performative political interventions, and incendiary street activism, for Situationists, life lived under the sign of commodified spectacle was life separated from life, life enslaved by the cybernetic imperatives of image-driven forms of advanced capitalist power. Concerned that even its own subversive appeal would be spectacularly packaged by the French media as if nothing but marketable icons of consumable revolutionary praxis, the Situationist International ended its organizational identity in 1972.
+
+In the following year, Debord returned to radical filmmaking. After a hiatus of nearly twelve years, he produced a cinemagraphic version of Society of the Spectacle, a feature-length montage of appropriated film, magazine, and newspaper imagery, mixed with a sound track composed of materials from Debord's book and other "found" texts. This demanding "theory film" was followed, in 1975, by the short Refutations of all judgements, for or against, which have been brought to date on the film Society of the Spectacle. This represented an unprecedented cinematic response to criticisms of Debord's previous film. In 1978 Debord directed In Girum Imis Nocte Et Consumimur Igni, the movie you and I are currently watching. Look out for the flames.
+
+In March of 1984, Debord's close friend, publisher, and political ally, Gerard Lebovici, the owner and editor of Editions Champ Libre (a primary publisher of Situationist and other left-oriented texts) was assassinated in Paris. Debord believed the murder bore traces of covert neo-fascist death squads in operation within the French state. Conservative French media, however, insinuated that Debord was somehow behind this hideous crime. Outraged, Guy vowed to never to again allow any of his six films to be shown in France. Shortly thereafter, he left the country for an extended period of voluntary exile in Italy. The film we are today viewing has not been screened in public since that time.
+
+Like the filmic version of Society of the Spectacle, In Girum Imis Nocte Et Consumimur Igni (which translates as "We Go Round and Round in the Night and Are Consumed by Fire") is a montage of mostly appropriated or detourned imagery, in which a complex "voice-over" is mixed with autobiographical images and a highly personalized history of Debord's involvement with Lettrists and the Situationist International. In the Pelagian Press edition of the script, the text from the film's voice-over is paired with a running subtext, describing the images and appropriated film dialogue that constitute core aspects of the film itself. Imagine viewing a relaxed gathering of some modern employees at home, dining on processed food, while playing "Monopoly." Over and above this banal scene, we hear Debord's voice stating: "Akin to 'peonage'... they are no longer left even the momentary handling of this money around which their entire activity revolves. Obviously they can only spend it, not getting enough of it to accumulate. But ultimately they find that they are obliged to consume on credit; and the credit they are allowed is docked from their pay, from which they will always have to free themselves by working even more." But what about those denied even the cursed blessings of this most self-enslaving form of post-monetary economic exchange? Cut to a wide-angled pan of a long and dreary line of sullen faced little orphans. This makes reading the printed materials - not unlike Debord's now largely unseen film itself - a complex and multilayered "collage" reading/viewing experience. At the center of the book version of In Girum lies twenty-four engaging film stills, each with excerpts from the accompanying voice-over.
+
+If you, like me, sense that we are today living in a society of unprecedented technological hierarchy, where a sickening array of the virtually commodified pleasures substitute for the contradictory actualities of our historical moment - and who does not sense this to some degree, if in different psychic and material ways and often only in nightmares? - then questions raised by the short, but intensely lived, history of the Situationist International (SI) may remind you that you and I are not alone in this theater. In recent years, several studies of the theories and activities of the SI have appeared in English; the most comprehensive, as well as theoretically and politically engaging, to date, being Sadie Plant's The Most Radical Alternative: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age. [\[2\]](http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/87#) But In Girum is Debord's own attempt at a highly personalized filmic account of both the historical epoch in which he found himself struggling and of his relations to others, with whom, for a time, he joined forces in struggle.
+
+In phrasing, tonality, and style, Debord's words may strike readers as somewhat masculinist, arrogant, and aggressive. Debord is not unaware of how his militant approach to both theory and film may affect his reader/viewers. Near the beginning of the script he contends, "Several excellent reasons justify such conduct to my mind and I shall give them." From here, he launches into an historically informed analysis of and assault upon the "agents of the various service occupations" from which the normative cinema audience, once populated by members of the industrial working class, "is nowadays almost entirely recruited." Nevertheless, with its war-like evocation of himself as a model for heroic revolutionary praxis, Debord's prose may, at points, appear self aggrandizing. Thus, we are informed, with some justification, that, for a long time, Debord himself was "the only one to offend" the mass cinema audience, by refusing to provide it with the commodified images "to which it has become accustomed." Moreover, when discussing the relationship between desperate times and fiery revolutionary stirrings, Debord comments that even the coldness of the present era "has dampened nothing,... of the passions of which I have furnished such fine and sad examples."
+
+The life and times of Guy Debord are clearly foregrounded in Debord's film script. But, lest you imagine that this cinematic restaging of Situationist passions is little but a narcissistic gesture on the part of its author/artist, it is important to note that In Girum represents a deliberate examination of "an important subject" - the actual material relations between one's everyday life and the contradictory historical contexts in which the game of life is itself played. Debord argues, that critical theorists and artists have traditionally refused or covered over this aspect of their practice. The reason, he suggests, is that they, structually powerless as most are, fear judgements of complicity with conditions not entirely of one's making. "That is why those who expound various thoughts about revolutions to us ordinarily abstain from letting us know how they have lived their lives."
+
+When Debord breaks silence on this issue, it is not simply to recount the path of his own autobiographical wanderings. It is also to resituate autobiographical reflections within the psychic and geographical relations in which such reflections are themselves made possible. For Debord, in large part, this means the psychic geography of the left bank of Paris during the fifties and sixties - a seductive labyrinth of urban relations where "the negative held court" and the allure of "charming hooligans", "proud young women", and "dingy dives" operated as a defense against the full onslaught of commodified ahistoricality. Here, the "chemistry of substitution" and the "modern commodity had not yet come to show all that can be done to a street." This, after all, was a neighborhood "which had, ten times, barricaded its streets and routed its kings. But this "Paris no longer exists." Where once this locale had given birth to a revolting "science of situations" and "people quite sincerely ready to set the world on fire just to give it more brilliance," by 1978, Debord observes that it had already been perilously infected by the "fatal illness" of spectacular commodification; an illness that is this very moment "carrying off all the major cities" of boundary shatterring nation states the globe over. In part, In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni is a mournful, but not nostalgic, memorial for a rapidly passing urban geography of resistance to full capitalization of everything, and for the lives and the passions this historically situated geography once upon a time engendered.
+
+In distinguishing his socially situated approach to autobiography from that of his more conventional peers, Debord cuts into his own life with the first two verses of Arisoto's Orlando Furioso, pleading: "I, not being the same as all these, can only tell, in my turn, 'of the ladies, the knights, the arms, the loves, the conversations and the courageous deeds' of a unique epoch. Others are able to orient and measure the course of their past according to their promotion in a career, the acquisition of various kinds of goods, or, sometimes, the accumulation of scientific or aesthetic works responding to a social demand. Not having known of any determination of this sort, I merely see again, in the passage of this disorderly time, elements which actually constituted it for me - or rather the words and faces which resemble them: days and nights, towns and living people, and, at the heart of all this, an incessant war." Cut to filmic shot of a map of Europe. Cut to a photograph of Debord at age nineteen. Cut to a general map of Paris, at the end of the last century; then to a map of Cuba on the desk of U.S. Senator Jesse Helms.
+
+For Guy Debord, capitalism is no mere economic condition. It is a state of war - an incessant and fiery attack upon even the imagined possibility of reciprocally structured relations of social equality, autonomous and justice. This attack is championed by an evermore spectacular and militarized array of media gods and goddess - those commodified stars of advanced capitalist image manipulation, whom we "contemplate through the keyhole of a smutty familiarity" and whose hegemonic function it is to seduce those they enslave within a endless labyrinth of commodified market desires. "Separated from each other by the general loss of any language adequate to describe the facts" of this war and separated, as well, by rituals of "incessant competition," the restless "whip... of conspicuous consumption," and habits fixed by "groundless envy," even those who feel themselves benefiting by this war "cannot remain in contact with anything which is not a commodity." For Debord this is what distinguishes the fiery warfare of spectacularized capital from earlier forms of exploitative conquest. "Never before has a system of tyranny maintained its familiars, its experts and its court jesters so badly. Overburdened servants of the void, the void rewards them with coinage in its own image. In other words, it is the first time that the poor have believed that they form part of an economic elite, in spite of evidence to the contrary."
+
+But if the imperial expanse of capital signifies fiery warfare against reciprocally situated historical relations, for Debord, only an equally fiery strategy of counter-warfare might again open the future to undreamt possibilities for reciprocal social action that the "disastrous wreckage" and "ungovernable waste land" of contemporary culture always only appears to have banished forever. Thus, along with introducing its reader/viewers to the strategic and sometimes "outlaw" subversions of the Lettrists and Situationists with whom its author/filmmaker associated "without regrets," In Girum pays homage, as well, to questions of military strategy set forth by theorists, such as Clausewitz, Gracian, and Sun Tse. On screen, Custer, alone remains standing. Yellow hair to the vengeful winds of history, he throws away his empty revolvers and picks up his sabre. Like other cruel tyrants throughout the ages, he awaits the fatal judgement of those whom he would forcefully impoverish and genocide.
+
+Guy Debord's In Girum Imis Nocte Et Consumimur Igni is a provocative scripting of an admittedly "difficult" film. It can be read with pleasure and strategic profit by persons who are cultivating critical eyes for revolting openings within history, with ears tuned to the desperate murmur of those sickened by capital in its most complexly deployed and contemporary forms. Yet, like the historically situated political and cinemagraphic interventions of Debord himself, readers will find no timeless program for critical theory and practice within this text. This will prove one of its enduring strengths. As Debord insists: "Theories are made only to die in the war of time: they are stronger or weaker units which must be engaged at the right moment in the combat and, whatever their merits or insufficiencies, one can surely only use the ones which are there in useful time. Just as theories have to be replaced because of their decisive victories, even more than their partial defeats produce wear-and-tear, similarly no living epoch started off from a theory; it was first a game, a conflict, a journey. Guy Debord's final film (and, perhaps, his life as well) ends with a sub-title: TO BE BEGUN AGAIN FROM THE BEGINNING.