There is a very informative and interesting book on the Situationist International, published by October, which was until recently for sale at a very reasonable price at a certain second hand bookstore off the Tottenham Court Road. It contains, among stills from Debord’s films, and snapshots from the magic psychogeographical triangle in Paris where Debord spent (in an almost Bataillian sense) his days, several perceptive essays.Anyway, and to the point, there’s a nice essay by Agamben on repetition and stoppage in Debord’s films. The definition of repetition is particularly useful:
“.. repetition is not the return of the identical; it is not the same as such that returns. The force and grace of repetition, the novelty it brings us, is the return as the possibility of what was. Repetition restores the possibility of what was, renders it possible anew.”
It is this definition of repetition – not the antiquarian reproduction, the fossilised facsimile of the past, but the repetition of the ‘possiblity’ which was ‘in front of’ the now dead facsimile, which informs, for example, Zizek’s ideas about repeating Lenin. To give a concrete example: to repeat Shakespeare certainly doesn’t mean to rebuild the Globe. This is the facsimile, the external husk. If we repeat this mere externality we in fact betray the original impulse, which was the very opposite of such comfortable antiquarian revivalism. Repeating W.S. means to rediscover the possibilities that Shakespeare made visible in the 1590’s: a new form of cultural production (there had been no public theatres prior to 1576), outside the bounds of Society (literally, the playhouses were only permitted to build only in the ‘liberties’ outside the city walls), in an indeterminate zone of activities which were frowned upon and regarded as potentially subversive; a form of cultural production which challenged and confounded received categories, and so on…
Of course, this would be a Shakespeare that few would recognise, and that would appal many. So it is that authentic repetitions pass incognito, because the customary costume has been discarded so as to allow the original possibility to stand nude. And this nudity typically scandalises.
But if this sense of ‘repetition’ applies to radical impulses and possibilities, it also includes, for example, imperialism. We might expect to see it tricked out in its familiar costume, just as we expect ‘Shakespeare’ to be surrounded by the quaint Globe and performed in charming Elizabethan dress. Meanwhile, imperialism as a possibility can continue incognito, the same possiblities and patterns repeated, often unconsciously, by its willing footsoldiers, happy in the belief that they're doing something else entirely - bringing civilisation to the barbarians or whatever its modern equivalent might be..