Buildings on Fire: The Situationist International and the Red Army Faction pdf

Author(s): Charity Scribner

Source: Grey Room, No. 26 (Winter, 2007), pp. 30-55

Published by: The MIT Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20442749

In Guy Debord'slate film In girum imus nocte et consumimurigni (1978), acorrespondencebetween the Situationist International (SI) and the Red ArmyFaction (RAF) comes into view. In the middle of the film, the camera rests ontwo photographs: the exterior of the Stuttgart-Stammheim maximum-securityfacility, where the RAF's first generation committed suicide in 1976 and 1977and an earlier press shot of the leftist militants Andreas Baader and GudrunEnsslin on trial in 1968.1 "La plus belle jeunesse meurt en prison," reads thenarrator.' The flower of youth dies in prison. From these two documents of the RAF,Debord looks back over the would-be revolution that rocked Europe in the latesixties and the consequencesit produced. The sequence calculates a melancholysum of what the situationists hoped to effect by "putting an end to art," as Deborddescribed it, by "iannouncing right in the middle of the cathedral that God wasdead," by "plotting to blow up the Eiffel Tower."3This recollection of 1968 prompts the narrator to ask a series of questionswhy certain struggles failed, whether the proletariat still existed, and if so, whatit might be. Images of a lost Paris flicker across the screen-girls at the thresholdsof forgotten caf6s, night shots of the Les Halles markets before their condemnation by Pompidou planners-whileDebord reminds the viewer of the fate of the1968-ers: "Suicide carried off many."14 But then the voice translates the film'sobscure title: we turn in the night, consumed by fire. Debord awakens desire fora turning, a return-out of the ruins, back to the impulses that propelled the SI,the RAF, and other aesthetic and social movements of the time.Debord wasn't alone in linking the RAF to the situationists. Especiallyinrecent years, several cultural historians and artists have associated Debord's"situations" with Baader-Meinhofstrikes, although no study has yet exploredthe relationship between the two groups. Thomas Elsaesser was one of the firstscholars to align the movements.In an essay on the mediation of the RAF intellivision and filM, he identifies the coMMon ground occupied by X artists and situationists and the RAF worked to disrupt the complacencies of liberal democracy,sometimes taking similar approaches. They drew from the arsenals of anarchism and Marxism and tested their powers in the modern cityscapes that postwar planners brought to life. The SI wanted to screen their aesthetic imagination into modern Paris; the RAF took refuge in the high-rises of Frankfurtand Hamburgto plot their terror on the German public. Members of both groups were alert tothe politics of the image. They worked both with and against the popular press and broadcast television. But whereas Debord critiqued the society of the spectacle-the condition in which capital accumulates and "becomes image"-theleaders of the RAF became fodder for the media machine, leaving a legacy heavyon style but light on political analysis.An adequate comparison of the RAF and the SI must discern the correspondences between their conceptual and tactical programs; it must also establish the tension between militarization and the radical thought of "ethical militance"that Emily Apter has recently elaborated.6 To this end, this essay explores how the SI and the RAF's different definitions of autonomy produced divergent modes of resistance. Debord articulated an institutional critique of the cultureindustry and reactivated the modernist critical impulse. The RAF, meanwhile,rejected theoretical reflection in favor of direct action; their intellectualbacklash threatened to inflame fascism.7 The German militants took what theyconsideredto be a concrete and practical approachto revolution, but their attempts to gain autonomy ended, paradoxically, in the spectacle that Debord had already analyzed.