Tomorrow I'll become an idiot

I'm writing from hospital. That's just the way things have happened. I like this peace and quiet in a sequestered world, because I hope to remember. On the first day, the trip is a complete failure. That is the fault of a sister who says she has something nice for me and rolls an elegant, pinhead-sized ball between her fingers. I'd have to pay a heap of money for something like that down at the main railway station. I lose interest in everything except the warm, tingly feeling running through my body from below. But I give too free rein to my enthusiasm in front of the sister, and I don't get any pill the next day. Under observation, the trip into the past can no longer be delayed.
The first destination is 17 years ago. It was summer; the first issue of the magazine springer was published with an excerpt from Guy Debord's memoirs, »Panegyric«.1 The Situationist International (S.I.) was just being rediscovered at the time, and Hamburg was the nucleus of the comeback, which is why I, as local correspondent for this magazine, felt responsible for the consequences of the excavations. All in all, my articles can be counted on the fingers of one hand, but no other topic caused me as much trouble as this one. My symbolic execution with a gestural shot in the forehead for my »irresponsible« review of the SI exhibition in the »20er Haus« in Vienna made a lasting impression on me.2 Over the past 20 years, no other theorem in art has been taken up in as many forms as the writings of the S.I. and in particular Guy Debord's »The Society of the Spectacle«, published in 1967. This fascination probably has a lot to do with the book's uncompromising nature and with its visionary foresight regarding the development of capitalism. With great precision and a kind of language that is difficult to refute in its unwieldy presumption, the text has outlived numerous reinterpretations: as a manual for advertising experts searching for alienated consumers, strange interpretations of art or the great misunderstanding regarding the communication guerilla. Alongside its seductive power, which seems to be above any attempts to pick up where it left off, the book embodies the yearning to being able to make a difference in a world experienced as being eventless – probably partly because the text is surrounded by the aura of having triggered the uprising in Paris in May, 1968.
A day in hospital begins before the sun comes up. I hear the sisters making noise in the corridor. One of them is singing »Es gibt kein Leben auf dem Mond, auch wenn er strahlt«. I feel for the radio in the dark. The news doesn't interest me, I wait for the press comments on Deutschlandfunk. It is one of the few media formats where I think that almost nothing has changed since my childhood. Hearing the calming voices, I drift into the realm of modern passivity. The hospital objectifies me as viewer. Here, where no one wants anything to happen, all desires become strangers to me. I am now a patient enjoying his boredom in highly-controlled surroundings.

While I am applying Debord's theory of the spectacle paragraph for paragraph to my existence in hospital and believe myself to be in the perfect model, the door opens. A woman doctor comes into the room. Her white uniform is largely unbuttoned, and under it she is wearing a T-shirt upon which is written “Occupy!”. While she is taking my pulse, I see that her shirt comes from the +J collection of UNQLO, the latest collection from last autumn, which Jil Sander designed for the Japanese company. The doctor says my blood pressure is okay. I find that her détournement has worked, the aggressive marker pen eats the letters into the glowing Jil-white of the cotton so that a nasty little green edge emerges. This negative aura seems to be a reference to the green of an older series of T-shirts from the Maison Martin Margiela that was achieved by spraying the material with aggressive toilet cleaner. But why »Occupy!«? As if it could save the situation, I wonder whether the doctor had adapted the T-shirt herself or bought it already customized. But I don't dare pose the question. She goes without a word. I hide under the blanket and, with a torch, read in Debord about the dissatisfaction that has become a commodity. Debord seems to me altogether to be clearer than ever. Only the bit about détournement seems to have been outstripped by the spectacle, right down to the hospital.
The makers of the Occupy! campaign saw things differently last summer. The editors of the magazine »Adbusters« didn't want to just talk any more; instead, something had to happen. Concrete action was to take the place of the big sleep. The activists, veterans from last century, saw themselves as »students of the Situationists«. One of them, called Kalle Lasn, explains the SI method of détournement, which is what Occupy Wall Street is supposed to be, as a sort of judo hold performed by the destitute or a »feedback loop that destroys itself«. On 17 September, the martial-art cyberneticians mailed their appeal to occupy Wall Street to 90,000 friends, and the loop took its course. What was produced was a self-explanatory brand that also supplied a perfect franchise model. People gathered in the park, or, more precisely, on a cemented area measuring some 3,000m2, giving the whole thing a physical presence. The action's ripple effect was increased by an identification figure, well introduced by Warner Bros, whose anarchic Hollywood charm could be donned by everyone as a mask that could be ordered at Amazon, almost as if it were a matter of telling the joke – »you only have to wear the T-shirt« – in grand style. The first video clips of the action made a fresh impression amid the opaque anonymous murmuring emanating from the social networks. The web message from the occupiers of Zuccotti Park in New York's financial district was soon accompanied by an undertone suggesting that their existence was being suppressed by the big media outlets. In the artificial vibration of our short-lived machines, suppression and its shadow, conspiracy, soon receive as much attention as sex.
In retrospect, I wonder what news value there was in the fact that a group of people was staying in a park and hinting at the possibility of occupying transport routes. Wall Street was not crippled, nor was the New York stock exchange occupied, let alone the flow of money interrupted. In a certain regard, the news was created only by the claim that it was being suppressed, which in terms of media strategy would not have been a bad move, were it not for the fact that the further perpetuation of this beloved legitimating myth of the social networks, along with the astonishing fairy tale about their revolutionary potential, was combined with the strange wish to get on television. Even though Gil Scott-Heron wrote his song »The Revolution Will Not Be Televised« for the black population of the USA as well, which statistically, at 1.6 per cent, barely took part in Occupy,3 its content would seem valid for everyone else as well. If anything like a revolution were to happen some time, it could hardly be broadcast on YouTube, as it would have to take place in a manner invisible to the passivity machine, and this machine will probably fight to the last moment against this blind spot. Anyway, the claim that social networks in the hands of some of the highest-profile corporations in the world bring about »true democracy«, let alone revolution, was the biggest campaign to pull the wool over people's eyes last year. The communication machines are not reinterpreted or used for anything other than their original purpose either, as communication is going on. In view of this large-scale campaign, the question of why no summer has so far followed the »Arab Spring« seems justified. If it really had been a revolution, it would scarcely have been celebrated by the political class, which, after the neutralisation of the political sphere, is only able to recognise the opening up of new markets. And the transfer of Tahrir Square to the situation in the US that was aspired to by »Adbusters« in the end only functioned at the level of the slogan, even though an »American Spring« would certainly open up new markets.

Before Occupy went on television, it was more attractive to be involved with the movement in the social-network format, which still to some degree gives people the feeling of discovering something for themselves. In these surroundings, where there is little to understand because everything seems like a misunderstanding, it was generously overlooked that Judith Butler seemed not to believe her own manifesto and had to read it off her smartphone. Slavoj Žižek, on the other hand, perkily performed what he always performs, this time through the human microphone. But you really need quite a lot of chutzpah to pander to the listeners' narcissism by maintaining that it was possible to recognise here, two years after the financial crisis, that the »system« had lost its »legitimation«. Surprised, I wondered when the »system« ever did have any legitimation: when the »War against Terror« was declared, when the Wall came down, in the Vietnam War, or when exactly? But the resonating chamber, re-designated as a medium, revelled in the portentous presence of its historic moment.
Going from a virtual movement to occupying the public sphere and bringing it to a halt may seem at first to be a logical step, but produces a much too perfect picture. Protest cannot be a picture in a reality where every horizon is stuck full of pictures. When Occupy came to Hamburg, unconnected couples gathered whose fear of losing their savings was written all over their faces. No one from my circle of acquaintances could really get enthusiastic about this Occupy offshoot. Only my mother, who otherwise thinks demonstrations are horrible, liked the clean and orderly way the occupiers' camp was set up in front of the HSH Bank. Occupy's target group seems to be a middle class that sees itself as mistreated and is somehow angry, but doesn't want any real change to the way things are, instead clinging to a past it remembers as being more worth living in.
In the USA, Occupy effusively evokes the old American spirit with well-meaning and often all too human tongue. In Europe, the emotional currents agreed on the tradition of the French Résistance, until even the dummies in the Park fashion store in Vienna's Mondscheingasse held the book by Stéphane Hessel »Engagiert euch!« (»Get Involved!«) - which matched the black of the boutique display window – in their hands. The slogan »We are the 99 percent« not only gives the unease a negotiable basis, but has something inclusive in its borderless populism that allows all differences to disappear in a fog. The number 99 produces the cognitive guiding effect of commensuration, which transforms qualitative distinctions into their quantitative perception. Everyone is somehow dissatisfied and wants democracy, even if this latter has long since become a zombie, but one that still leaves enough winners standing.
Even the financing of Occupy confirms the assumption that class-specific interests are at stake here. The typical donor to Occupy has an annual income of between 50,000 and 100,00 dollars.4 Why does the upper middle class like Occupy? Perhaps because reassurance seldom looked this good? Occupy also likes to see itself as part of a bourgeois protest that is based on the »values of those who carry society« - so as not to be confused with »frustrated homeless people«, as the Occupy chronicler Mark Greif explains.5

This frantic clinging to a bourgeois existence that has
become uncertain or »precarious« is becoming apparent in other economies of the movement as well. Everywhere where political activism or ostentatiously public outrage is currently tried out on the islands of prosperity, the books by the – as is always emphasised – clever minds behind it are published a few months later. In performance capitalism, everyone has something to show, and in uncertain times, the symbolic capital must be skimmed off more quickly, as it is exposed to an extremely high rate of inflation. In the bubble of attention created by Occupy, these books then drift into the stores. Most of the more interesting texts in the anthologies or magazines are by women, while the books were mostly written by men. It is also the female authors such as Onnesha Roychoudhuri, Marina Sitrin and Astra Taylor who try to develop a different use of language, while the gentlemen seem more concerned with their individual ability to connect up. Even though the movement constantly flirts with a radical questioning of the status quo, most of the texts focus on reform and repair. Democracy should again become »authentic, direct and participatory«, money should be distributed somewhat more fairly, banks should be reformed and »our« economy should be made »more productive and healthier« once more (Joseph E. Stiglitz). In the book »Occupy! Die ersten Wochen in New York« (»Occupy! The First Weeks in New York«), the editors – a group of activist authors associated with the magazine n+1 that published the pamphlet »Occupy! An OWS-Inspired Gazette« – put forward a number of astounding proposals instead of an epilogue. Two pages can be quickly filled with demands for free bikes, 24-hour childcare facilities and bans on cars that use more than six litres. Radical highlights are taxes on the rich and the nationalisation of banks. All laudable suggestions that form a queue in front of complaints management, before being listened to in a more or less friendly manner and brashly channelled. Here, something that poses as critical actually stabilises the existing state of affairs by creating an illusion of democratic negotiation that blurs perception of the way the situation is in fact controlled by economic imperatives. In this post-political, uniform world, whose present totality was prognosticated by Debord almost 50 years ago, criticism has long since lost its impact. And it is barely possible any more even to create a picture of the plight we are in. The intention of a slogan such as tumblr's »We are the 99%«, which purports to depict this misery, is soon turned into a compatible commodity. In such a pornographic environment of total visibility, the only thing that makes an impact is that which attacks the imagination as something remaining invisibly, while the systematically traumatised retina jettisons the barrage of visual horrors into the long river of indifference.

In their ability to connect, Occupy's obliging populism and its ready inclination to communicate verbally and visually nothing more at all to do with the S.I., which was always focused on the negation of all values, radical and seductive denial, rebellion and revolution. But it also seems wrong to poke fun at the mildness of today's movements of rebellion – of which Occupy is just one example – and to bow down before the holy cow of the past. It would also be silly and cynical to claim to be outside of this universal climate of angst, lassitude and rash pragmatism. The subdued radicality of current counter-movements reveals the brutal devastation wreaked by the unbridled expansion of the capitalist machine over the past few years on people and their capabilities of seeing, thinking, walking upright or developing a language. Whether that which has been buried can be laid open again is one of the questions that is hard to answer at the present time. Or is it no longer a matter of salvaging something from the ruins, but, rather, of taking our leave of them? Shouldn't an interruption that does not immediately dissolve again in the rhetorical ornaments of communication function differently than anything we know, making its intention completely unrecognisable? Does the vague historical oblivion of the present day perhaps hold a possibility for interruption? Wouldn't it be best to blot Debord, Marx and all the other remaining values – or whatever we should call them – from memory? To throw overboard all the ballast and knowledge so that I am placed in reality as a weightless idiot who understands nothing and who doesn't even want to be understood? A stupid, apathetic, small monster without memory, at best rotund, that responds to all offers of communication with speechlessness and nonsense, not even pushing the buttons he is provided with, but shooting away unpredictably and at random in eccentric circles.
Someone knocks at the door. Without waiting for a reply, the night sister opens the door and tells me I have to go home tomorrow; there is no more room for negotiation. While I pack my bag, the glittering lights outside the window form an unknown galaxy. It seems a little sad to go now, I liked it in hospital. But I have a plan – tomorrow I'll become an idiot.