It's Crazy How Many Things Don't Exist, on Immediatism podcast

By request, Immediatism offers eleven new episodes continuing the theme of the Situationist International. Part of the project here is to make key concepts like "detournement" available to listeners who may be unfamiliar, hence the original texts from the Situationist International Anthology. Another goal was to offer a sample of the response gotten by the SI, and for this purpose (and because it was one of the texts requested by a listener!) Jean-Pierre Voyer's There Is No Society of the Spectacle was chosen from the book It's Crazy How Many Things Don't Exist. As a follow up to these, and again by request, is a current article critiquing industrial capitalist society from a beginning place of analyzing concrete -- the building material with which we are surrounded; the author Anselm Jappe has authored two books on Guy Debord and The Society of the Spectacle, along with his latest book Concrete: Capitalism's Weapon of Mass Construction (2020.)

From the book Situationist International Anthology:
Poverty of Student Life 1
https://immediatism.com/archives/podcast/695-on-the-poverty-of-student-l...
Poverty of Student Life 2
https://immediatism.com/archives/podcast/696-on-the-poverty-of-student-l...
Poverty of Student Life 3
https://immediatism.com/archives/podcast/697-on-the-poverty-of-student-l...
Constructing a Situation
https://immediatism.com/archives/podcast/698-constructing-a-situation-by...
Theory of the Derive (Debord)
https://immediatism.com/archives/podcast/699-theory-of-the-derive-by-guy...
User's Guide to Detournement (Debord)
https://immediatism.com/archives/podcast/700-users-guide-to-detournement...
Detournement as Negation & Prelude
https://immediatism.com/archives/podcast/701-detournement-as-negation-an...
Avant Garde of Presence
https://immediatism.com/archives/podcast/702-the-avant-garde-of-presence...

From the book It's Crazy How Many Things Don't Exist:
There Is No Society of the Spectacle 1
https://immediatism.com/archives/podcast/703-there-is-no-society-of-the-...
There Is No Society of the Spectacle 2
https://immediatism.com/archives/podcast/704-there-is-no-society-of-the-...

Anselm Jappe article:
Can We Cure Our Addiction to Concrete?
https://immediatism.com/?s=jappe

Continue to provide feedback and requests to Cory@Immediatism.com and your comment may be used in a future episode.

There are 15 Comments

Killer robots with advanced AIs, tho. How discourse on 50 years old theories, based on their historical context and what led to it, will protect us against this development? Just wondering...

The problem with stuff like this is that it focuses on the more exotic, tangential features of what the Situationist were about, and not on using them as a point of departure for a class-against-class, real world collective action politics for our times. The derive stuff, for example, is just art-student-type stuff.

there’s this real world collective action politics for our times that i really like, called “mass extinction events”

That part is up to you to accomplish. The purpose of the podcast is to make certain texts available to either those who can't see to read, for instance, TheAnarchistLibrary.org, or who don't have time to read. There are parameters to any project, and those are both the intentions for and limits to this project.

Cory, the point is that you are "making available" texts that come before 1968, which was a turning point in the SI's development. The texts that come between 1968 and 1972 are far more relevant to today that the ones that come between 1957 and 1967.

make a request, as cory regularly suggests. what would you like cory to read? or do you just like to whine that someone hasn't met your desires before you even speak them?

In two different intros, the first of the series, and the first of the SI Anthology episodes (I think it probably was), I invited anyone who wanted to to suggest which texts to read from the anthology. And it's always okay to suggest things in addition to what I'm reading, as the requester of the cement article did. If you feel strongly about which texts I'm choosing, you can keep up with the podcast by simply opening the Recent Episodes homepage once a week and see what's going on, or just listen to the intros if you don't have time for the texts. But you are apparently coming from outside the "listenership" and griping that I didn't do the texts you would have preferred. Remember that many of my listeners are NOT anarchists and they need the basics -- so I chose texts that would introduce concepts like what a constructed situation is, what detournement is, and so on.

Mass extinction events are what happens if people don't engage in class-against-class, real world collective action politics.

Lack of class struggle and real-world collective actions is the very reason why the Black Plague happened, and yet thermonuclear war has been averted several times due to their active presence in the 20th century, as the troops operating the silos were literally under the direct pressure of protesters outside that held them at gun-point, I think.

sweet! so more plagues then! housing will be super accessible cuz ... you know

Cory, 17:21:

My suggestion is to focus on the post-1964 docs.

I finished that series and have moved on already. I appreciate your input but I'm done with the SI for now. It's not like the category is full -- you've pointed out that later texts are wanted. But I maintain that the sixteen texts I did (over two @news posts) were targeted to give people some introduction to the SI, not to "cover" the SI as a topic. Now, I can revisit the SI at a later date, perhaps in a year or two, and further flesh out that category of episodes, but for now I'm done. I've got a stack of pre-existing requests on other topics, which came in before your request. Sixteen episodes from the SI, out of 700 episodes in two years, is a reasonable amount of representation for the SI, among all the other topics that are pressing.

For context, @news is the very last place I post episodes. Sometimes they are a few days old by the time I have a group to post here. So, to keep on top of what I'm doing and kind of get requests in *during* a series generated by someone else's past request, it works best to monitor the immediatism.com site itself. I hope this is helpful.

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