Situationships and Situationism: Isolation à Deux "Habe ich dies zugestanden, brauche ich noch zu sagen, dass ich in Fragen der décadence erfahren bin? Ich kenne sie in- und auswendig." — Nietzsche¹ Can the situationship be considered a collective ambiance or ensemble of impressions? ² Can it entail total participation in the direct, lived moment? ³ Surely a hypothetical situationship could playfully explore the psychogeographic effects ⁴ of the landscape together? Yet, how to better describe the average modern situationship than an arrangement of bodies where "people touch without meeting" ⁵ and are at home nowhere? ⁶ Here, love is strangled out, here this "most common power of life" ⁷ is forgotten in favor of a panting succession of mechanically repeated gestures. ⁸ One refuses labels but the script remains the same. Algorithmic drift within a device, on a platform, lacks the strategic, ludic, and aesthetic elements present in Bernstein's Gilles and Geneviève's strategies of nominal freedom and spontaneity. ⁹ Far from being a situation, ¹⁰ the situationship is a social relation mediated by images ¹¹ where the fearful possibility of directly living love is over-rendered, and thereby rendered nearly impossible; here the act of penetration is mechanically achieved with little to no con-subjective shared interior space; a new internal distance: ¹² the spectacle reunites the separated, its alpha and omega, ¹³ as separated. ¹⁴ As man scrolls and swipes, "the more he contemplates, the less he lives." ¹⁵ Every profile, a personal brand paradoxically devoid of individuality. ¹⁶ Here the individual denounces himself, ¹⁷ playing a role in which the gestures are no longer his own, ¹⁸ becoming an aggregate of white, normalizing lies designed for attention and seduction. ¹⁹ First "being," then having, and now appearing takes precedence. ²⁰ Swiping (and scrolling) as recuperated dérive: ²¹ rapid passage through varied ambiances, ²² the difference being that one acts not in service of cartography, ²³ but in service of "app retention:" the enemy now wields the remnants of a revolutionary tactic and strips it of any possible con-perspectival telos, and what binds the spectators maintains their isolation. ²⁴ Permanent drift has its costs, as Chtcheglov warns from Ville-Évrard, ²⁵ and permanent simulacrum of drift among images — this recuperated dérive without consciously constructed living and loving (e.g. Reddit) — comes to be the antithesis of a situation construite. ²⁶ The situationship is a representation of our Zeitgeist's ever-increasing quantity of consumable, pseudo-cyclical time in erotic form; ²⁷ the body count a sort of commodity account that attempts to present itself as the moments of real life. ²⁸ Repetition sans development: ²⁹ introduction stages, talking stages: falsely individualized moments, ³⁰ each structurally identical while imagining themselves to be unique. Each "climax" a vacation from life, ³¹ doing nothing to transmute real living moments. Here one finds no irreversible time, since nothing has begun, ³² and each weekend tryst becomes one of seemingly infinite homogeneous exchangeable units. ³³ Vulgarized pseudo-festival ³⁴ which defaces its own memory, pure exchange; pure transaction which fits into the general tendency of life becoming an act of "selling one's own labor in order to consume." Every new lie of advertising is an avowal of the previous lie, ³⁵ and infinite interfaces bring an ever-changing fidelity, accelerated by a succession of disappointing adhesions to fallacious products. ³⁶ We are pushed towards universal physio-economic evaluation, hence the -maxxing, hence the loss of singularity. Commitment in any traditional sense becomes irrational if infinite alternatives glide within the gaze, and this over-abundance of visibility can perhaps be applied to all avowals and relationships. If impersonal relationships are the no-man's land of isolation, ³⁷ surely with situationships we sign our own death sentence ³⁸ and condemn ourselves to perpetual isolation. What tends to remain are two non-subjects lacking love's warmth, brought from the most intimate sexual acts to the "common wretchedness" ³⁹ of non-communicative, ghostly silence: ⁴⁰ "love's dialectic freezes; two statues left lying side by side; two objects." ⁴¹ Here we find the spectacle's principle of non-intervention, ⁴² where both parties refuse to fully intercede in the event, where both become the audience of their own affair, and beyond loneliness comes over-crowded spectatorship. Isolation à deux in the face of total isolation: ⁴³ a mutual arrangement and government of involuntary loneliness; and community, despite what Derrida might say, an agglomeration of solitudes, ⁴⁴ deliberately semi-constructed. FOOTNOTES: [1] « Having admitted this, do I need to add that I am experienced in matters of decadence? I know them inside and out. » — Ecce Homo. [2] « Nous devons tenter de construire des situations, c'est-à-dire des ambiances collectives, un ensemble d'impressions déterminant la qualité d'un moment. » — RAP (1957). [3] « La situation est ainsi faite pour être vécue par ses constructeurs. » — PPCS, IS n°1 (1958). [4] « L'étude des effets précis du milieu géographique, consciemment aménagé ou non, agissant directement sur le comportement affectif des individus. » — DEF, IS n°1 (1958). [5] "People touch without meeting; isolation accumulates but is never realized." — TSV, ch. on isolation. [6] "Lovers want to be at home everywhere." — TSV. [7] "...the most common power of life that is in us." — TSV. [8] "...a panting succession of mechanically repeated gestures." — TSV, quantitative Eros. [9] « — Non, je me promène. Principalement, je me promène. » — TCR (1960). [10] « Situation construite : moment de la vie, concrètement et délibérément construit par l'organisation collective d'une ambiance unitaire et d'un jeu d'événements. » — DEF, IS n°1. [11] « Le spectacle n'est pas un ensemble d'images, mais un rapport social entre des personnes, médiatisé par des images. » — SdS §4. [12] "While eliminating geographical distance, this society produces a new internal distance in the form of spectacular separation." — SdS §167. [13] "Separation is the alpha and omega of the spectacle." — SdS §25. [14] "The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate." — SdS §29. [15] « Plus il contemple, moins il vit. » — SdS §30. [16] "...the spectacular representation of a living human being." — SdS §60. [17] « L'individu, paradoxalement, devra se renier en permanence, s'il tient à être un peu considéré dans une telle société. » — COM §XII. [18] "...his own gestures are no longer his own, but those of another who represents them to him." — SdS §30. [19] « L'effacement de la personnalité accompagne fatalement les conditions de l'existence concrètement soumise aux normes spectaculaires... » — COM §XII. [20] "...the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing." — SdS §17. [21] « Détournement... l'intégration de productions actuelles ou passées des arts dans une construction supérieure du milieu. » — DEF, IS n°1. [22] « Dérive : mode de comportement expérimental lié aux conditions de la société urbaine : technique du passage hâtif à travers des ambiances variées. » — DEF, IS n°1. And: « la pratique d'un dépaysement passionnel par le changement hâtif d'ambiances. » — RAP (1957). [23] « ...en même temps qu'un moyen d'étude de la psychogéographie et de la psychologie situationniste. » — RAP (1957). [24] "What binds the spectators together is no more than an irreversible relation at the very center which maintains their isolation." — SdS §29. [25] « La condition qui est actuellement faite à Ivan Chtcheglov peut être ressentie comme une des formes toujours plus différenciées que revêt, avec la modernisation de la société, ce contrôle de la vie qui a mené, en d'autres temps, à la Bastille pour athéisme, par exemple, ou à l'exil politique. » — Debord, editorial note to LDL, IS n°9 (août 1964). [26] As [10]. — DEF, IS n°1. [27] "The general time of human non-development also exists in the complementary form of consumable time which returns as pseudo-cyclical time." — SdS §149. [28] "Here this commodity is explicitly presented as the moment of real life, and the point is to wait for its cyclical return." — SdS §153. [29] "...the general time of human non-development." — SdS §149. [30] "...it must be charged with pseudo-valuations and appear in a sequence of falsely individualized moments." — SdS §150. [31] "The social image of the consumption of time... is exclusively dominated by moments of leisure and vacation." — SdS §153. [32] "Pseudo-cyclical time is actually no more than the consumable disguise of the commodity-time of production." — SdS §150. [33] "...namely exchangeable homogeneous units and the suppression of the qualitative dimension." — SdS §150. [34] "Vulgarized pseudo-festivals..." — SdS §154. [35] "Every new lie of advertising is also an avowal of the previous lie." — SdS §70. [36] « L'existence postule en effet une fidélité toujours changeante, une suite d'adhésions constamment décevantes à des produits fallacieux. » — COM §XII. [37] "Impersonal relationships are the no-man's land of isolation." — TSV, ch. on isolation. [38] "By producing isolation, contemporary social organization signs its own death-sentence." — TSV, ch. on isolation. [39] "People will be together only in a common wretchedness as long as each isolated being refuses to understand that a gesture of liberation... always bears an authentic communication." — TSV, ch. on isolation. [40] "Non-communication is always like the collapse of a revolutionary movement." — TSV. And: "Conversation is almost dead." — COM. [41] "Love's dialectic freezes. Two statues are left lying side by side. Two objects." — TSV, ch. on love. [42] « ...le principe même du spectacle : la non-intervention. » — PPCS, IS n°1. [43] "Isolation à deux cannot prevail against the isolation of all. Pleasure is broken off prematurely and lovers find themselves naked in the world." — TSV. [44] "...an agglomeration of solitudes without illusions." — SdS §70. KEY: SdS - Debord, La société du spectacle (1967), by thesis § COM - Debord, Commentaires sur la société du spectacle (1988), by section RAP- Debord, Rapport sur la construction des situations... (1957) PPCS - « Problèmes préliminaires à la construction d'une situation », IS n°1 (1958) DEF - « Définitions », IS n°1 (1958) DÉR - Debord, « Théorie de la dérive », IS n°2 (1958) CdS - Debord, Critique de la séparation (film, 1961) LDL - Chtcheglov, « Lettres de loin », IS n°9 (1964) TSV - Vaneigem, Traité de savoir-vivre... (1967), by chapter TCR - Bernstein, Tous les chevaux du roi (1960)