Category: Autodidact

Greer on Wagner and the After Times We Live In | Page 2 | Phora Nova

Greer is chipping away at his ‘Situationism’ theme, and finally (in the last month) has gotten to his point.  I was wondering if he would do the ‘big reveal’ — that Marxism (and indeed Liberalism and Fascism) are sorts of POLITICL ALCHEMY.  Alchemy being the materialist twin of Astrology — as above, so below.

Indeed he is going there — there are must read, must discuss.

In particular, after sketching the ‘Beatniks’ (parents of what we now call Redditors[1]), and 60s era Marxist follies, he gets serious about why the Situationists in the 60s *failed* to follow the pre-ww2 insights of the Surrealists — where Evola and Marxism meet, you might say.  He says, explicitly, that they do not want to, into Occultism, i.e. the sort of dabbling Greer is into, which I think, though I have not read those works of his extensively, amounts to a fairly straightforward Neo-Platonism with a practice along New Dawn lines.  I would add, perhaps the Situationists, the Inner Party of the Marxists, are reserving that for ‘inner adepts’, in the grand Straussian style…

I have reprinted the final paragraphs of the first piece for us to see ‘where this is going’.

[1]:

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https://tunisbayclub.com/index.php?threads/reddit-man-anthropology.3167/#post-32289

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Situationism: Where Domination Ends – Ecosophia

Situationism: The Road from Raswashingsputin – Ecosophia

That transmutation runs all through Vaneigem’s book, and through Situationism as a whole. When Marx wrote of alienation, for example, he had in mind the removal of control over the means of production from the laboring classes by a succession of governing classes. When Vaneigem and his fellow Situationists wrote about the same theme, they refocused the discussion on the concrete personal experience of alienation, of the inner state of the individual who feels cut off from his or her own sources of meaning, value, and power. Look closely at every other central concept of the avant-garde Marxism of the time as it appears in Situationist literature, and you’ll find the same alchemy at work.

That was the great achievement of the Situationists, but it also endangered their status as loyal beta-Marxists serving the bureaucratic system against which they claimed to rebel. Recognize the subjective dimension of alienation and you open the door to responses that can actually affect the situation: responses that have the potential to move past the point at which domination falters and freedom comes within reach of the individual. Once these responses are understood and the necessary skills have been developed, the bureaucratic system has no effective defenses against them. The downside of this subjective approach is that these steps can only be taken by the individual for himself or herself. Nothing is more futile, or more certain to end in exploitation and defeat, than waiting for someone else to do it for you.

Furthermore, there are sharp limits to how much help you can give anyone, even if they want to follow your lead. Situationism, interestingly enough, included several of the core methods that can be used to assist that process. In future posts here, I’ll talk about the crafting of situations, the art of the derivé, and the practical tactics of détournement, which provide a good solid toolkit both for the individual pursuing autonomy and for the experienced practitioner hoping to show the way to novices. Even so, the original impetus and the follow-through both have to come from the individual. Thus the movement toward freedom can never really be a mass movement. It can only be a movement of individuals in opposition to the mass.

I’m pretty sure the Situationists themselves were aware of this. The way that certain patterns of Marxist rhetoric repeat in their writings like so many nervous tics suggests, at least to me, a sustained effort to back away from the implications of core Situationist concepts, and hide from the challenge of individual liberation behind the old failed dream of mass revolution followed by sentimental fantasies of utopia. More revealing still, though, is the extraordinarily ambivalent attitude the Situationists displayed toward the Surrealists, who in many ways were their most important predecessors. While some of the core Situationist writings acknowledged their debt to Surrealism, those same writings also rejected Surrealism root and branch.

That rejection was no accident. Some of the Surrealists, in their own ways, reached some of the same insights before the Second World War that the Situationists grasped after that war, but many of the leading figures in the earlier movement followed those insights into territory where the Situationists would not follow. For a significant number of them, their quest for the place where domination ends led them to occultism. We’ll follow them there in due time.

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My reaction:  well said, though I don’t think Marx is a foil for ‘Political Alchemy’ nor is Lenin, of Occult Materialism or dare we say DIALECTICAL Materialism.  They were both practitioners of the highest order.