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174The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, No. 68 (2024), pp. 174–181
The XXXIII Olympiad in France was a sporting event and media
blockbuster followed all over the world in the summer of 2024. It
will also be remembered as the occasion for the large-scale local
deployment of a technology with much more discreet images: algo-
rithmic video surveillance in the streets of Paris, using automatic
detection and real-time analysis of urban behaviour by means of
artificial intelligence. In this context, which combined iconic image
making and the latest cybernetic technologies, spectacle and sur-
veillance, a critical reflection on the effects of robotics and automa-
tion on everyday life seems more important than ever.
A crucial origin of this topic in critical theory is to be found in the
writings of the Situationist International (hereafter SI), founded in
1957 and dissolved in 1972. Cybernetics as a target of Guy Debord
and his comrades since the early 1950s is central to Dominique
Routhier’s pioneering book, which focuses on post-war France but
covers a wider geographical and historical territory. Routhier
proceeds to unveil the background of this “cybernetic hypothesis,”
as he names it by quoting the title of one major essay written by the
post-Situationist collective Tiqqun at the turn of the 21st century.
1
Choosing an art historical methodology rather than the partisan per-
spective fostered by the SI rhetoric itself, Routhier, while remaining
politically engaged, proposes a well-documented inquiry divided in
four parts. Chapter 3, devoted to Guy Debord and Asger Jorn’s art
book project entitled Fin de Copenhague, has been previously pub-
lished in a former issue of The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics.2
REVIEW
CYBERNETICS EVERYWHERE
DOMINIQUE ROUTHIER
WITH AND AGAINST: THE SITUATIONIST
INTERNATIONAL IN THE AGE OF AUTOMATION
LONDON/NEW YORK: VERSO, 2023. 258 PAGES
ISBN: 978-1-80429-255-6
175 Review
The introduction of the book presents the origins of cybernetics and
the background of its importation into France by important intellec-
tual figures of the structuralist movement, such as Claude Levi-
Strauss and Jacques Lacan. Dominique Routhier is quick to point out
that the “father” of this symbiotic project combining behavioural
sciences and information theory, Norbert Wiener (1894-1964),
experimented with his approach through military collaboration
during the Second World War, especially in order to produce
high-performance anti-aircraft weapons capable of anticipating the
reactions of pilots under fire (p. 19-20). We also learn that “automa-
tion,” as it was then called in French, was the subject of a seminal
book by Friedrich Pollock, an important thinker of the Frankfurt
School, whose English and French translations both appeared in
1957.
3
The left-wing critique of cybernetics has therefore different
birthplaces. The singularity of the SI within this intellectual
movement is rooted in its specific position as an artistic avant-garde.
The introduction and the first chapter of With and Against then
focus on a key event in the emergence of a neo-avant-garde in France
during the 1950s, at the beginning of the Algerian war and at a time
of political instability. In September 1956, a year before the forma-
tion of the SI, the first Festival of Avant-Garde Art was held in
Marseille, in the symbolic setting of La Cité radieuse designed by
the architect Le Corbusier. Among the artworks presented at this
occasion was the cybernetic sculpture CYSP1 by Nicolas Schöffer.
The stakes are symbolic insofar as the French state was overseeing
the exhibited neo-avant-garde works as the cutting edge of both
technological and architectural progress—far from the revolution-
ary ideals of the radical movements that emerged after the First
World War, such as Dadaism and Surrealism. This is why the event
became the target of an “ordre de boycott” (boycott order), a title
given to a leaflet signed by members of the former collective Lettrist
International (LI), a document whose intellectual, critical and aes-
thetic trajectory the first chapter retraces in great detail. For the
Situationists, Dominique Routhier argues, CYSP1 signalled “a
virtual premonition of the future post-organic or inhuman order of
things” (p. 12).
The second chapter goes one step further, taking as its point of
departure not the vanguard event of 1956 but its host site, Le
Corbusier’s Cité radieuse, which was at the centre of the SI’s debates
on the challenges of urbanism. The housing crisis that hit France in
the mid-1950s, a consequence of the Second World War among other
176
things, led to a return to favour of certain architectural projects
already imagined by Le Corbusier in the 1930s. In this urban
planning, the Situationists saw a new form of “haussmannisation”
(p.102), named after the baron Haussmann who had transformed
Paris a century before, as much to modernise the city as to repress
easily any kind of street insurrection. “In this epoch more and more
placed, in all domains, under the sign of repression, there is one par-
ticularly repugnant man, clearly more of a cop than the average,”4
wrote the LI members with their characteristic contempt. These
urban projects were also part of an ever-growing US soft power,
which was wielded in France through the arts, making culture a
“nouveau théâtre d’opération” (new theatre of operations), as the
Situationists would put it in a leaflet in 1958. Such military meta-
phors help to grasp the stakes of this activism while war was simul-
taneously a concrete veiled fact in Algeria.
Chapter 3 focuses on another aspect of the problem of cybernetics
and the attempt to find the appropriate aesthetic form to denounce
it. It considers the book Fin de Copenhague by Guy Debord and
Asger Jorn, which, more precisely, should be seen as an “anti-book,”
as Debord himself identified it (p.130). Routhier’s analysis is largely
based on a comparison between Asger Jorn’s plastic and critical
thinking and the aesthetics of Russian Constructivism from the
1920s. A compared analysis of past and present workers’ bodies
offers a striking illustration of the future augured by the rise of
cybernetics, making the worker no longer the heroic embodiment of
production in the years following the October Revolution, but “an
overseer or manager who has only temporarily stepped into the
sphere of the self-acting (automatic) machinery” (p. 149). Therefore,
what Dominique Routhier sums up a few pages later as “The
Ideology of ‘Full Automation’” (p. 154-159) is also the new prospects
of management, which is part of the same government of behaviour
and affects right to the heart of everyday life, with the results we are
all experiencing today.
Finally, following the chronological narrative adopted by With and
Against, Chapter 4 focuses more specifically on the critique of
cybernetics during “May 1968” in France. In the case of the
Situationists, an episode of this stretched sequence, much longer
than a month, already occurred in January of the same year. At that
time, a poster entitled “En attendant la cybernétique, les flics”
(Waiting for cybernetics, the cops) was put up at the University of
Nanterre near Paris, following a police intervention on the campus
Maxime Boidy
178
authorised by the rector Pierre Grappin, soon nicknamed “Grappin-
la-matraque” (Grappin-the-truncheon; see Figure 1). Cybernetics “as
a new form of post-sovereign, impersonal, and abstract social dom-
ination” (p. 181) is all the more evocative here through the large body
of Grappin overhanging tiny figures, which has been a classic motif
and arrangement in the political iconography of power in the West
since the Middle Ages.5
In this chapter, Routhier also considers a longer genealogy. He goes
back to what has been called the “Strasbourg scandal” of 1966, a
well-known episode in which local Situationists distributed a huge
number of copies of a critical pamphlet titled De la misère en milieu
étudiant (On the Poverty of Student Life), printed with funds from a
student association.
6
Routhier situates this event in the context of
another, less well-known action, the disruption by means of rotten
tomatoes of a public speech by Abraham Moles, then a teacher at
the University of Strasbourg and a major French proponent of cyber-
netics. Moles is an objective enemy of the critics of automation
because of his academic career, which includes the promotion of
this paradigm from across the Atlantic, always with American soft
power in action. He is an adversary all the more hated by the
Situationists because he addressed them directly in a letter mocking
their revolutionary project.7 This is the background of this ambush
called “Operation Robot,” prepared with almost military care.
Chapter 4 interestingly mentions other artistic and political adver-
saries, including two successive directors of the Hochschule für
Gestaltung (HfG – School of Design) in Ulm, Max Bense and Tomás
Maldonado, both of whom promoted the “aesthetics of information”
in the 1950s and 1960s. “We would like to be able to hope that empir-
ical sociology, cultural anthropology, descriptive semiotics, hered-
itary psychology, the psychology of individual and social behaviour,
perception theory etc., could at some time join together in a system-
atic study of the most subtle aspects of consumption,” declared
Maldonado in 1958 (quoted on p. 201). His words synthesize the
academic components and political rationality of cybernetics in one
single formula: the capitalist Gesamtkunstwerk of human sciences.
This point is worth noting insofar as the human and social sciences,
as well as the academy in general, increasingly became the target of
the Situationist critique due to their complicity with state power and
social control.8
Maxime Boidy
179
The SI members developed their social critic and revolutionary
program “with and against” the human sciences, and the same is true
for cybernetics and automation. This is the reason why Routhier’s
inquiry bears the right title and manages to gather all the historical
elements expected, taken from personal archivist inquiry and the
most recent publications (a selection of Debord’s archives published
in French during the last years appears in conclusion). “With and
against,” it should be underlined, is also the catchphrase summariz-
ing at best the situation of the reader. The author of this review may
well have watched the aforementioned Olympic Games on TV (bas-
ketball, why not?…) and he may well have used some artificial intel-
ligence tools to correct or rephrase some excerpts of his criticism.
To say it clearly, our digital everyday life, our ordinary practices and
behaviours, now more than ever, require a small-scale scrutiny in
order to get the reality and effectivity of contemporary power rela-
tionships. Today there is no such thing as an exteriority from cyber-
netics. We all live in what Debord, at the end of his life, called the
“integrated spectacle,” but not without weapons against it. A
path-breaking study like Dominique Routhier’s book, looking dif-
ferently at our history as well as that of the SI is one of them.
In this way, many historical and theoretical aspects remain open to
enquiry at different levels. As is well known, the Surrealists had
already shown great enthusiasm for technical automatons before the
Second World War (p.3-4). For André Breton and his group, auto-
mation was understood in a broader sense: as a creative and liberat-
ing process by means of writing and dreaming. It would have been
interesting to look at this more dialectical notion of automatic
behaviour, stretched between liberation and alienation, since the SI
was highly suspicious of these surrealist techniques and hopes. “The
cause of surrealism’s ideological failure was its belief that the uncon-
scious was the finally discovered ultimate force of life,” contends
Debord in his famous Report on the Construction of Situations, one
of the founding documents of the SI published in 1957: “We now
know that the unconscious imagination is poor, that automatic
writing is monotonous, and that the whole ostentatious genre of
would-be ʻstrangeʻ and ʻshockingʻ surrealistic creations has ceased
to be very surprising.”
9
In this light, automation is not only the name
of a new technology and discourse of social control in the 1950’s, but
also the keyword of a former “avant-garde” failure that happened at
the end of the 1920s, precisely at the moment when Debord identi-
fies the origins of the society of the spectacle.10
Review
180Maxime Boidy
The later historical connections between critical theories of auto-
mation and the visual arts would be another aspect worth consider-
ing further. For example, one interesting step takes place in the US
at the beginning of the 1970s, shortly after the SI choose to split. At
this point artists like Ian Burn, who had been part of the collective
Art & Language, developed a radical understanding of conceptual
art as a “deskilling” of artistic practice by the influence of theory
and abstract conceptions of art production. The diagnosis of a
“deskilling” was here taken from Marxist social scientist Harry
Braverman’s book Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974).11 “Automation
changed the forms but not the content of alienation”, rightly notes
Dominique Routhier in With and Against (p.161). Such a comment
would fit perfectly with this “deskilling hypothesis,” which, like the
deconstruction of automation, is rooted in the Marxist critique of
alienation brought up to date. In a curious intellectual trajectory, it
should be noted that two decades later it had a great influence on
some critical writings Routhier mobilizes in his book (p.94-95): the
theorists of the famous art journal October notably adapted the
“deskilling hypothesis” to the US academic field in order to think its
institutional reconfigurations in the early 1990s.12
Coming back to the SI, there is one last aspect that Routhier’s book
does not fail to highlight, without, however, drawing out all its impli-
cations. This is the military question, which, as I have already men-
tioned, is at the origins of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic paradigm.
Routhier notes that among the recent publications drawn from Guy
Debord’s archives, donated to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France
ten years ago, is an entire volume of strategic notes, extracted from
numerous readings of military thinkers.13 Debord also contributed
a great deal to the republication of works on military theory by the
publisher Champ libre, set up by his friend Gérard Lebovici, which
included classic treatises by Carl von Clausewitz or Charles Ardant
du Picq. If military calculation and behaviour prediction on the bat-
tlefield are at the roots of cybernetics, Debord’s interest in strategy
could be seen as more than just a trivial passion. It may well be the
concrete intellectual counterpart to the new hold of cybernetics, a
way of countering the spectacle in terms of content and form, in
support of a long-term history of extra-academic knowledge forged
in the École de guerre, at West Point or elsewhere14. This hypothe-
sis remains open, as does the possibility of rethinking through these
lenses the entire history of the artistic “avant-garde,” a military
notion if ever there was one.
— Maxime Boidy
181
1 Tiqqun, “L’Hypothèse Cybernétique,” Tiqqun 2 (2001) :
40–83. Fo r an English translation, see “ The Cybernetic
Hypothesis,” Anarchist Library, https://www.
theanarchistlibrary.org/.
2 Dominique Routhier, “Full Automation In Its Infancy : The
Situationist Avant-Garde Book Fin De Copenhague,” The
Nordic Journa l of Aesthetics 29, no.60 (2020): 48–71.
3 Friedrich Po llock, Automation: A Study o f Its Economic
and Social Consequences, trans. W. O. H enderson and W.
H. Chalon er (New York: Frederick A . Praeger, 1957).
4 Internationale Let triste, “Les Grat te-ciels par la racine,”
Potlatch. Bull etin d’information de l’Internationale
Lettriste 5 (1954), translated by Tom McDon ough as
“Skys crapers by the Roots,” in The Situationists and the
City, ed. Tom McDonou gh (London: Verso, 2009), 44.
5 Dario Gamboni, “Composing the Body Politic: Composite
Images and Political Representation, 1651-2004,” in
Making Things P ublic. Atmospheres of De mocracy, eds.
Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Karlsruhe/Cambridge:
ZKM Cente r for Art and Media/ MIT Press, 2005),
162–195.
6 De la misère en mil ieu étudiant considérée s ous ses
aspects économique, politique, psychologique, sexuel et
notamment intel lectuel et de quelques moyen s pour y
remédier, Strasbourg, Publicati ons de l’UNEF, 1966;
translated into English as “On the Poverty of Stu dent
Life,” Libcom.org (2005) https://libcom.org/article/
poverty-student-life.
7 Guy Debord, “Correspondance avec un cybernéticien,”
Internationale Situationiste 9 (August 1964): 44 –48;
English translation by Anthony Hayes “ Correspondenc e
with a Cybe rnetician,” Notes from the S inister Quarter
(2013), https://thesinisterquarter.wordpress.com/. For
an inquiry parallel to thi s fourth chapter, see Mar tin
Nadeau, “L’IS et la critique de la cybernétique autour des
événements d e Mai 1968,” Inter: art ac tuel 129 (2018):
4 4 – 47.
8 See Lauren t Jeanpierre, “La ʻdialectique de la raisonʼ
situationniste. Guy D ebord face à l’essor de s sciences
de l’homme,” in Lire Debord, eds. Emmanuel Gu y and
Laurenc e Le Bras (Montreuil: L’Échappée, 2016),
401–414. This collective book, i ncluding some of
Debord’s unpublished manuscripts, is the result of an
international conference held in Paris in 2013 at the
occasio n of the transfer of Debo rd’s archives at the Paris
BNF (National Library).
9 Guy Debord , “Report on the Construction of Situations
and on the Inte rnational Situationi st Tendency ’s
Conditio ns of Organization an d Action,” trans. Ken
Knabb, in Situationist International: Anthology, ed. Ken
Knabb (B erkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006),
28–29.
10 About this periodization, see Jonathan Crary,
“Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory,” October 50
(1989): 97–107.
11 Harry Br averman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The
Degradation of Wo rk in the Twentieth Centu ry (Ne w York :
Monthly Rev iew Press, 1974); Ian Burn , “The 1960s:
Crisis and Aftermath (Or The Memo irs of an Ex-
Conceptual Artist),” Art & Text 1, no1 (1981): 49–65.
12 For more elements about this connection, see my essay
“‘I hate Visual Culture.’ The Controversial Ris e of Visual
Studies and The Disciplinary P olitics of the Visible,”
trans. Julie Patarin-Jossec and Susan Hansen, Visual
Studies 35, no4 (2020): 310–318.
13 Guy Debor d, Stratégie (Paris: Éditions L’Échappée,
2018). The book has be en published in a spec ific
collection entitled “La librai rie de Guy Debord” (G uy
Debord’s Bookstore).
14 Emmanuel Guy, Le Jeu de la guerre de Guy Debo rd.
L’émancipation comme projet (Paris : Éditions B42,
2020).
NOTES
Review