Situationist International

The Situationist International (SI) was an internationalist European revolutionary group founded in 1957, and which reached its peak of influence in the general strike of May 1968 in France.

With their ideas rooted in Marxism and the 20th century European artistic avant-gardes, they advocated experiences of life alternative to those admitted by advanced capitalism, for the fulfillment of human desires. For this purpose they suggested and experimented with the "construction of situations," namely the setting up of environments favorable for the fulfillment of such desires. Using methods drawn from the arts, they developed a series of experimental fields of study, including unitary urbanism and psychogeography.

Their theoretical work peaked with the highly influential book The Society of the Spectacle in which Guy Debord argued that the spectacle is a fake reality which masks capitalist degradation of human life. To overthrow this system, the SI supported the May '68 revolts, and asked the workers to occupy the factories and to run them through workers' councils.

After publishing in the last issue of its magazine, an analysis of the May '68 revolts and the strategies that will need to be adopted in future revolutions,^[2] the SI was dissolved in 1972.^[3]

Etymology

The appellation "situationist" refers to one who engages in the construction of "situations" or specifically a member of the Situationist International.^[4] In adjectival form, the term means relating to the theory or practical activity of constructing "situations."^[4] Situationist theorist Guy Debord defines the term "situation" as "a moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and a game of events."^[4] According to Debord, the Situationist International is so named because the construction of situations is the central idea of their theory, a process he describes as "the concrete construction of momentary ambiances of life and their transformation into a superior passional quality."^[5] In other words, any method of making one or more individuals critically analyze their everyday life, and to recognize and pursue their true desires in their lives. The experimental direction of situationist activity consists of setting up temporary environments that are favorable to the fulfillment of such desires.^[6]

The Situationist International strongly resisted use of the term "Situationism," which Debord called a "meaningless term . . . [t]here is no such thing as situationism, which would mean a doctrine for interpreting existing conditions."^[4] Situationists considered themselves highly opposed to all ideology, and the suffix "-ism" would to them improperly classify their body of theory as an ideology.^[7] In The Society of the Spectacle, Debord asserted ideology is "the abstract will to universality and the illusion thereof," which is "legitimated in modern society by universal abstraction and by the effective dictatorship of illusion."^[8]

The concept of the "situation" may originate in Sartre's concept of a Theatre of Situations.^[9][10] What Sartre calls a situation in a theatrical play, is what breaks the spectator's passivity towards the spectacle.^[11][12][13]

History

Origins (1945-1955)

Situationist theory first emerged as a smaller tendency within Lettrism, an artistic and literary movement led by the Romanian-born French poet and visual artist Isidore Isou, originating in 1940s Paris. The group was heavily influenced by the preceding avante-garde movements of Dadaism and Surrealism, seeking to apply critical theories based on these concepts to all areas of art and culture, most notably in poetry, film, painting and political theory.^[5] Among some of the concepts and artistic innovations developed by the Lettrists were the lettrie, a poem reflecting pure form yet devoid of all semantic content, new syntheses of writing and visual art identified as metagraphics and hypergraphics, as well as new creative techniques in filmmaking. Future situationist Guy Debord, who was at that time a significant figure in the Lettrist movement, helped develop these new film techniques, using them in his Lettrist film Howls for Sade (1952) as well as later in his situationist film Society of the Spectacle (1972).

By 1950, a much younger and more left-wing part of the Lettrist movement began to emerge. This group kept very active in perpetrating public outrages such as the Notre-Dame Affair, wherein at the Easter High Mass at Notre Dame de Paris, in front of ten thousand people and broadcast on national TV, their member and former Dominican Michel Mourre posed as a monk, "stood in front of the altar and read a pamphlet proclaiming that God was dead".^{[14][15][16][17]} André Breton prominently came in solidarity of the action in a letter that spawned a large debate in newspaper Combat.^[18][19]

In 1952, this left wing of the Lettrist movement, which included Debord, broke off from Isou's group and formed the Letterist International, a new Paris-based collective of avante-garde artists and political theorists. The schism finally erupted when the future members of the radical Lettrists disrupted a Charlie Chaplin press conference for Limelight at the Hôtel Ritz Paris. They distributed a polemic entitled "No More Flat Feet!", which concluded: "The footlights have melted the make-up of the supposedly brilliant mime. All we can see now is a lugubrious and mercenary old man. Go home Mister Chaplin."^[20] Isou was upset with this, his own attitude being that Chaplin deserved respect as one of the great creators of the cinematic art. The breakaway group felt that his work was no longer relevant, while having appreciated it "in its own time," and asserted their belief "that the most urgent expression of freedom is the destruction of idols, especially when they claim to represent freedom," in this case, filmmaker Charlie Chaplin.^[21]

During this period of the Letterist International, many of the important concepts and ideas that would later be integral in situationist theory were developed. Individuals in the group collaboratively constructed the new field of psychogeography, which they defined as "the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment (whether consciously organized or not) on the emotions and behavior of individuals."^[4][22] Debord further expanded this concept of psychogeography with his theory of the dérive, an unplanned tour through an urban landscape directed entirely by the feelings evoked in the individual by their surroundings, serving as the primary means for mapping and investigating the psychogeography of these different areas.^[23] During this period the Letterist International also developed the situationist tactic of détournement, which by reworking or re-contextualizing an existing work of art or literature sought to radically shift its meaning to one with revolutionary significance.

Formation (1956-1957)

In 1956, members of the Letterist International made contact with several different artistic collectives at the First World Congress of Free Artists in Alba, Italy,^[24] finding significant common ground politically and philosophically. In July 1957, the Situationist International was established with the fusion of several of these extremely small avant-garde artistic tendencies: the Lettrist International, the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus (an off-shoot of COBRA), and the London Psychogeographical Association. Later, the Situationist International drew ideas from other groups such as Socialisme ou Barbarie.

The most prominent member of the group, Guy Debord, generally became considered the organization's de facto leader and most distinguished theorist. Other members included theorist Raoul Vaneigem, the Dutch painter Constant Nieuwenhuys, the Italo-Scottish writer Alexander Trocchi, the English artist Ralph Rumney (sole member of the London Psychogeographical Association, Rumney suffered expulsion relatively soon after the formation), the Danish artist Asger Jorn (who after parting with the SI also founded the Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism), the architect and veteran of the Hungarian Uprising Attila Kotanyi, and the French writer Michele Bernstein. Debord and Bernstein later married.

During the first four years from its formation, the pivot of the Situationist International was the collaboration between Guy Debord and Asger Jorn.^[25]

In June 1957, Debord wrote the manifesto of the Situationist International, titled Report on the Construction of Situations. This manifesto plans a systematic rereading of Karl Marx's Das Kapital and advocates a cultural revolution in western countries.^[5]

Artistic Period (1958-1962)

During the first few years of the SI's founding, avante-garde artistic groups began collaborating with the SI and joining the organization. Gruppe SPUR, a German artistic collective, collaborated with the Situationist International on projects beginning in 1959, continuing until the group officially joined the SI in 1961. The role of the artists in the SI was of great significance, particularly Asger Jorn, Constant Nieuwenhuys and Pinot Gallizio.^[26]

Asger Jorn, who invented Situgraphy and Situlogy, had the social role of catalyst and team leader among the members of the SI between 1957 and 1961. Jorn’s role in the situationist movement (as in COBRA) was that of a catalyst and team leader. Guy Debord on his own lacked the personal warmth and persuasiveness to draw people of different nationalities and talents into an active working partnership. As a prototype Marxist intellectual Debord needed an ally who could patch up the petty egoisms and squabbles of the members. When Jorn's leadership was withdrawn in 1961, many simmering quarrels among different sections of the SI flared up, leading to multiple exclusions.

The first major split was the exclusion of Gruppe SPUR, the German section, from the SI on February 10, 1962.^[27] Many different disagreements led to the fracture, for example; while at the Fourth SI Conference in London in December, 1960, in a discussion about the political nature of the SI, the Gruppe SPUR members disagreed with the core situationist stance of counting on a revolutionary proletariat;^[28] the accusation that their activities were based on a "systematic misunderstanding of situationist theses";^[27] the understanding that at least one Gruppe SPUR member, sculptor Lothar Fischer, and possibly the rest of the group, were not actually understanding and/or agreeing with the situationist ideas, but were just using the SI to achieve success in the art market.^[27][29] the betrayal, in the Spur #7 issue, of a common agreement on the Gruppe SPUR and SI pubblications.^[30][31]

The exclusion was a recognition that Gruppe SPUR's "principles, methods and goals" were significantly in contrast with those of the SI.^[32][33] This split however was not a declaration of hostilities, as in other cases of SI exclusions. A few months after the exclusion, in the context of judicial prosecution against the group by the German state, Debord expressed his esteem to Gruppe SPUR, calling it the only significant artist group in Germany since World War II, and regarding it at the level of the avant-gardes in other countries.^[34]

The next significant split was in 1962, wherein the "Nashists," the Scandinavian section of the SI lead by Jørgen Nash, were excluded from the organization for lacking the theoretical rigor demanded by the Franco-Belgian section of SI led by Guy Debord. This excluded group would later declare themselves the 2nd Situationist International, basing their organization out of Sweden. Journalist Stewart Home, who favored the "Nashists" and considered Debord a "mystic, an idealist, a dogmatist and a liar"^[35] wrote that while the 2nd Situationist International sought to challenge the separation of art and politics from everyday life, Debord and the so-called 'specto-situationists'^[36] sought to concentrate solely on theoretical political aims.^[37]

Political Period (1963-1968)

By this point the Situationist International consisted almost exclusively of the Franco-Belgian section, led by Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, with some exceptions, such as Danish artist and author Asger Jorn. These members possessed much more of a tendency towards political theory over the more artistic aspects of the SI. The shift in the intellectual priorities within the SI resulted in more focus on the theoretical, such as the theory of the spectacle and Marxist critical analysis, spending much less time on the more artistic and tangible concepts like unitary urbanism, détournement, and situgraphy.^[38]

During this period the SI began having more and more influence on local university students in France. Taking advantage of the apathy of their colleagues, five "Pro-situs", situationist-influenced students, infiltrated the University of Strasbourg's student union in November 1966 and began scandalising the authorities.^[39][40] Their first action was to form an "anarchist appreciation society" called The Society for the Rehabilitation for Karl Marx and Ravachol; next they appropriated union funds to flypost "Return of the Durruti Column", Andre Bertrand's détourned comic strip.^[40] They then invited the situationists to contribute a critique of the University of Strasbourg, and On the Poverty of Student Life, written by Tunisian situationist Mustapha/Omar Khayati was the result.^[40] The students promptly proceeded to print 10,000 copies of the pamphlet using university funds and distributed them during a ceremony marking the beginning of the academic year. This provoked an immediate outcry in the local, national and international media.^[40]

May Events (1968)

The Situationists played a preponderant role in the May 1968 uprisings,^[41] and to some extent their political perspective and ideas fueled such crisis,^[41][42][43] providing a central theoretic foundation.^{[44][45][46][47][48][49]} While the SI's member count had been steadily falling for the preceding several years, the ones that remained were able to fill revolutionary roles for which they had patiently anticipated and prepared for. The active ideologists (“enragés” and Situationists) behind the revolutionary events in Strasbourg, Nanterre and Paris, numbered only about one or two dozen persons.^[50]

This has now been widely acknowledged as a fact by studies of the period,^{[51][52][53][54][55][56]} what is still wide open to interpretation is the "how and why" that happened.^[41] Charles de Gaulle, in the aftermath televised speech of June 7, acknowledged that "This explosion was provoked by groups in revolt against modern consumer and technical society, whether it be the communism of the East or the capitalism of the West."^[57]

They also made up the majority in the Occupation Committee of the Sorbonne.^[41] An important event leading up to May 1968 was the scandal in Strasbourg in December 1966.^[58] The Union Nationale des Étudiants de France declared itself in favor of the SI's theses, and managed to use public funds to publish Mustapha Khayati's pamphlet On the Poverty of Student Life.^[59] Thousands of copies of the pamphlet were printed and circulated and helped to make the Situationists well known throughout the nonstalinist left.

Quotations from two key situationist books, Debord's The Society of the Spectacle (1967) and Khayati's On the Poverty of Student Life (1966), were written on the walls of Paris and several provincial cities.^[58] This was documented in the collection of photographs published in 1968 by Walter Lewino, L'immagination au pouvoir.^[2]

Those who followed the "artistic" view of the SI might view the evolution of the SI as producing a more boring or dogmatic organization. Those following the political view would see the May 1968 uprisings as a logical outcome of the SI's dialectical approach: while savaging present day society, they sought a revolutionary society which would embody the positive tendencies of capitalist development. The "realization and suppression of art" is simply the most developed of the many dialectical supersessions which the SI sought over the years. For the Situationist International of 1968, the world triumph of workers councils would bring about all these supersessions.

Though the SI were a very small group, they were expert self-propagandists, and their slogans appeared daubed on walls throughout Paris at the time of the revolt. SI member René Viénet's 1968 book Enragés and Situationists in the Occupations Movement, France, May '68 gives an account of the involvement of the SI with the student group of Enragés and the occupation of the Sorbonne.

The occupations of 1968 started at the University of Nanterre and spread to the Sorbonne. The police tried to take back the Sorbonne and a riot ensued. Following this a general strike was declared with up to 10 million workers participating. The SI originally participated in the Sorbonne occupations and defended barricades in the riots. The SI distributed calls for the occupation of factories and the formation of workers’ councils,^[2] but, disillusioned with the students, left the university to set up The Council For The Maintenance Of The Occupations (CMDO) which distributed the SI’s demands on a much wider scale. After the end of the movement, the CMDO disbanded.

Aftermath (1968-1972)

By 1972, Gianfranco Sanguinetti and Guy Debord were the only two remaining members of the SI. Working with Debord, in August 1975, Sanguinetti wrote a pamphlet titled Rapporto veridico sulle ultime opportunità di salvare il capitalismo in Italia (English: The Real Report on the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy),^[60] which (inspired by Bruno Bauer) proported to be the cynical writing of "Censor", a powerful industrialist. The pamphlet argued that the ruling class of Italy supported the Piazza Fontana bombing and other covert, false flag mass slaughter for the higher goal of defending the capitalist status quo from communist influence. The pamphlet was mailed to 520 of Italy's most powerful individuals. It was received as genuine and powerful politicians, industrialists and journalists praised its content. After reprinting the tract as a small book, Sanguinetti revealed himself to be the true author. In the outcry that ensued ^[61] and under pressure from Italian authorities Sanguinetti left Italy in February 1976, and was denied entry to France.

After publishing in the last issue of the magazine an analysis of the May 1968 revolts, and the strategies that will need to be adopted in future revolutions,^[2] the SI was dissolved in 1972.^[3]

Main Concepts

The Spectacle and Spectacular Society

The situationist theory of the spectacle is a development and application of the Marxist concepts of commodification, reification and alienation.^[62] In the opening of Das Kapital, Marx makes the observation that within the capitalist mode of production we evaluate materials not by what purpose they serve or what they're actually useful for, but we instead recognize them based on their value in the market.^[63] In capitalist society, virtually identical products often have vastly different values simply because one has a more recognizable or prestigious brand name. The value of a commodity is abstract and not tied to its actual characteristics. Much in the same way capitalism commodifies the material world, the situationists assert that advanced capitalism commodifies experience and perception.^[62]

The spectacle is the unified, ever-increasing mass of image-objects and commodified experience detached from every aspect of life, fused in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished.^[62] Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation.^[62] The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself.^[62] The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.^[62]

We live in a spectacular society, that is, our whole life is surrounded by an immense accumulation of spectacles. Things that were once directly lived are now lived by proxy. Once an experience is taken out of the real world it becomes a commodity. As a commodity the spectacular is developed to the detriment of the real. It becomes a substitute for experience.

—Images and Everyday Life, ^[64]

Recuperation

To survive, the spectacle must maintain social control and effectively handle all threats to the social order. Recuperation, a concept first proposed by Guy Debord,^[65] is the process by which the spectacle intercepts socially and politically radical ideas and images, commodifies them, and safely incorporates them back within mainstream society.^[65] More broadly, it may refer to the appropriation or co-opting of any subversive works or ideas by mainstream media. It is the opposite of détournement, in which conventional ideas and images are commodified with radical intentions.^[65]

Anti-Capitalism

The Situationist International, in the 15 years from its formation in 1957 and its dissolution in 1972, is characterized by a Marxist and surrealist perspective on aesthetics and politics,^[66] without separation between the two: art and politics are faced together and in revolutionary terms.^[67] The SI analyzed the modern world from the point of view of everyday life.^[68] The core arguments of the Situationist International were an attack on the capitalist degradation of the life of people^[5][69][70] and the fake models advertised by the mass media,^[5] to which the Situationist responded with alternative life experiences.^[71][5] The alternative life experiences explored by the Situationists were the construction of situations, unitary urbanism, psychogeography, and the union of play, freedom and critical thinking.^[26]

A major stance of the SI was to count on the force of a revolutionary proletariat. This stance was reaffirmed very clearly in a discussion on “To what extent is the SI a political movement?”, during the Fourth SI Conference in London.^[28] The SI remarked that this is a core Situationist principle, and that those that don't understand it and agree with it, are not Situationist. Reactionary forces always try to hinder the still topical power of the working class. It was not by chance that May '68, whose main feature was the largest general strike that ever stopped the economy of an advanced industrial country^[72] and the first wildcat general strike in history,^[72] was instead depicted by most media outlets as "student protests". That was precisely to mystify the still very topical role of a revolutionary proletariat.

Art and Politics

The SI rejected all art that separated itself from politics, the concept of 20th century art that is separated from topical political events.^[5][32] The SI believed that the notion of artistic expression being separated from politics and current events is one proliferated by reactionary considerations to render artwork that expresses comprehensive critiques of society impotent.^[5] They recognized there was a precise mechanism followed by reactionaries to defuse the role of subversive artists and intellectuals, that is, to reframe them as separated from the most topical events, and divert from them the taste for the new that may dangerously appeal the masses; after such separation, such artworks are sterilized, banalized, degraded, and can be safely integrated into the official culture and the public discourse, where they can add new flavors to old dominant ideas and play the role of a gear wheel in the mechanism of the society of the spectacle.^[5]

According to this theory, artists and intellectuals that accept such compromises are rewarded by the art dealers and praised by the dominant culture.^[32] The SI received many offers to sponsor “creations” that would just have a "situationist" label but a diluted political content, that would have brought things back to order and the SI back into the old fold of artistic praxis. The majority of SI continued to refuse such offers and any involvement on the conventional avant-garde artistic plane.^[32] This principle was affirmed since the founding of the SI in 1957, but the qualitative step of resolving all the contradictions of having situationists that make concessions to the cultural market, was made with the exclusion of Gruppe SPUR in 1962.^[32]

The SI noted how reactionary forces forbid subversive ideas from artists and intellectuals to reach the public discourse, and how they attack the artworks that express comprehensive critique of society, by saying that art should not involve itself into politics.^[5]

Détournement

Détournement is the integration of past or present artistic production into a superior construction of a milieu. In this sense there can be no situationist painting or music, but only a situationist use of these means. In a more primitive sense, détournement with the old cultural spheres is a method of propaganda, a method that testifies to the wearing out and loss of importance of those spheres.

The Construction of Situations

The first edition of Internationale Situationniste defines the constructed situation as "a moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and a game of events."

As the SI embraced dialectical Marxism, the situation came to refer less to a specific avant-garde practice than to the dialectical unification of art and life more generally. Beyond this theoretical definition, the situation as a practical manifestation thus slipped between a series of proposals. The SI thus were first led to distinguish the situation from the mere artistic practice of the happening, and later identified it in historical events such as the Paris Commune in which it exhibited itself as the revolutionary moment.

Psychogeography

The first edition of Internationale Situationniste defined psychogeography as "the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment (whether consciously organized or not) on the emotions and behavior of individuals."^[4] The term was first recognized in 1955 by Guy Debord while still with the Letterist International:

"The word psychogeography, suggested by an illiterate Kabyle as a general term for the phenomena a few of us were investigating around the summer of 1953, is not too inappropriate. It does not contradict the materialist perspective of the conditioning of life and thought by objective nature. Geography, for example, deals with the determinant action of general natural forces, such as soil composition or climatic conditions, on the economic structures of a society, and thus on the corresponding conception that such a society can have of the world. Psychogeography could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals. The charmingly vague adjective psychogeographical can be applied to the findings arrived at by this type of investigation, to their influence on human feelings, and more generally to any situation or conduct that seems to reflect the same spirit of discovery."
- Guy Debord, Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography^[22]

Dérive

By definition, psychogeography combines subjective and objective knowledge and studies. Debord struggled to stipulate the finer points of this theoretical paradox, ultimately producing "Theory of the Dérive" in 1958, a document which essentially serves as an instruction manual for the psychogeographic procedure, executed through the act of dérive ("drift").

In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there… But the dérive includes both this letting go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities.

—^[74]

In the SI's 6th issue, Raoul Vaneigem writes in a manifesto of unitary urbanism, "All space is occupied by the enemy. We are living under a permanent curfew. Not just the cops – the geometry".^[75] Dérive, as a previously conceptualized tactic in the French military, was "a calculated action determined by the absence of a greater locus", and "a maneuver within the enemy's field of vision".^[76] To the SI, whose interest was inhabiting space, the dérive brought appeal in this sense of taking the "fight" to the streets and truly indulging in a determined operation. The dérive was a course of preparation, reconnaissance, a means of shaping situationist psychology among urban explorers for the eventuality of the situationist city.

Work, Leisure, and Play

The situationists observed that the worker of advanced capitalism still only functions with the goal of survival. In a world where technological efficiency has increased production exponentially, by tenfold, the workers of society still dedicate the whole of their lives to survival, by way of production. The purpose for which advanced capitalism is organized isn't luxury, happiness, or freedom, but production. The production of commodities is an end to itself; and production by way of survival.

The theorists of the Situationist International regarded the current paradigm of work in advanced capitalist society as increasingly absurd. As technology progresses, and work becomes exponentially efficient, the work itself becomes exponentially more trivial. The spectacle’s social function is the concrete manufacture of alienation. Economic expansion consists primarily of the expansion of this particular sector of industrial production. The “growth” generated by an economy developing for its own sake can be nothing other than a growth of the very alienation that was at its origin.

Political Theory

Major Works

Twelve issues of the main French edition of journal Internationale Situationniste were published, each issue edited by a different individual or group, including: Guy Debord, Mohamed Dahoiu, Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, Maurice Wyckaert, Constant Nieuwenhuys, Asger Jorn, Helmut Sturm, Attila Kotanyi, Jørgen Nash, Uwe Lausen, Raoul Vaneigem, Michèle Bernstein, Jeppesen Victor Martin, Jan Stijbosch, Alexander Trocchi, Théo Frey, Mustapha Khayati, Donald Nicholson-Smith, René Riesel, and René Viénet.

• Translations of all twelve issues can be found here.
• Situationist International Online Archive

Classic Situationist texts include: On the Poverty of Student Life, Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, and The Revolution of Everyday Life by Raoul Vaneigem.

The first English-language collection of SI writings, although poorly and freely translated, was Leaving The 20th century edited by Christopher Gray. The Situationist International Anthology edited and translated by Ken Knabb, collected numerous SI documents which had previously never been seen in English.^[77]

Relationship with Marxism

Rooted firmly in the Marxist tradition, the Situationist International criticized Trotskyists, Marxism-Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism from a position they believed to be further left and more properly Marxist. The situationists possessed a strong anti-authoritarian current, commonly deriding the undemocratic pseudo-Marxist bureaucracies of China and the Soviet Union in the same breath as capitalism.

Debord's work The Society of the Spectacle (1967) established situationist analysis as Marxist critical theory. The Society of the Spectacle is widely recognized as the main and most influential Situationist essay.^[78]

The concept of revolution created by the Situationist International was anti-capitalist,^[79][80][81] Marxist, Young Hegelian,^[41] and from the very beginning in the 50s, remarkably differently from the established Left, anti-Stalinist and against all repressive regimes.^[82]

Debord starts his 1967 work with a revisited version of the first sentence with which Marx began his critique of classical political economy, Das Kapital.^[83][84] In a later essay, Debord will argue that his work was the most important social critique since Marx's work. Drawing from Marx, which argued that under a capitalist society the wealth is degraded to an immense accumulation of commodities, Debord argues that in advanced capitalism, life is reduced to an immense accumulation of spectacles, a triumph of mere appearance where "all that once was directly lived has become mere representation".^[85][86] The spectacle, which according to Debord is the core feature of the advanced capitalist societies,^[87] has its "most glaring superficial manifestation" in the advertising-mass media-marketing complex.^[88]

Elaborating on Marx's argument that under capitalism our lives and our environment are continually depleted, Debord adds that the Spectacle is the system by which capitalism tries to hide such depletion. Debord added that, further than the impoverishment in the quality of life,^[26][69] our psychic functions are altered, we get a degradation of mind and also a degradation of knowledge.^[89] In the spectacular society, knowledge is not used anymore to question, analyze, or resolve contradictions, but to assuage reality. Such argument on the Spectacle as a mask^[90] of a degrading reality has been elaborated by many Situationist artists, producing détournements of advertising where instead of a shiny life the crude reality was represented.

Situationist theorists advocated methods of operation that included democratic workers' councils and workers' self-management,^{[91][92][93][94]} interested in empowering the individual, in contrast to the perceived corrupt bureaucratic states of the Eastern bloc. Their anti-authoritarian interpretation of Marxist theory can be identified with the broader council communist and libertarian Marxist movements, themselves more broadly termed as left communism.

The last issue (1972) of the Situationist International journal, featured an editorial analyzing the events of May 1968. The editorial, written by Guy Debord, was titled The Beginning of an Era,^[95] probably as a detournement reference of Nachalo (The Beginning), a Russian Marxist monthly magazine.

According to Greil Marcus, some found similarities between the Situationists and the Yippies.^[96]

Former situationists Clark and Nicholson-Smith (British section), argued that the portion of the moderate Left that is the "established Left", and its "Left opinion-makers", usually addressed contemptuously the SI as 'hopelessly young-Hegelian'.^[41]

Relationship with Anarchism

The Situationist International was differentiated from the anarchists, although they have frequently been associated with them, and belongs instead to the Marxist tradition. Debord did a critical assessment of the anarchists in his 1967 The Society of the Spectacle.^[97] In the final issue of the journal they rejected spontaneism and "mystics of nonorganization," labeling them as a form of "sub-anarchism":^[98]

The only people who will be excluded from this debate are... those who in the name of some sub-anarchist spontaneism proclaim their opposition to any form of organization, and who only reproduce the defects and confusion of the old movement — mystics of nonorganization, workers discouraged by having been mixed up with Trotskyist sects too long, students imprisoned in their impoverishment who are incapable of escaping from bolshevik organizational schemas. The situationists are obviously partisans of organization — the existence of the situationist organization testifies to that. Those who announce their agreement with our theses while crediting the SI with a vague spontaneism simply don’t know how to read.

Relationship with the Established Left

The S.I. poses a challenge to the model of political action of a portion of the Left,^[99] the "established Left" and "Left opinion-makers".^[41] The first challenging aspect is the fueling role that the S.I. had in the up-heavals of the political and social movements of the sixties,^[43][51] up-heavals for which much is still at stake and which many foresee as recurring in the 21st century. The second challenging aspect,^[43] is the comparison between the Situationists marxist theory of the Society of the Spectacle, which is still very topical thirty years later,^[51][71] and the current status of the theories supported by the 'established Left' in the same period, like Althusserianism, Maoism, workerism, Freudo-Marxism and others.^[51]

The response of a portion of the Left to such challenge, has been an attempt to silence and misinterpret, to "turn the SI safely into an art movement, and thereby to minimize its role in the political and social movements of the sixties."^[43][99]

The core aspect of the revolutionary perspectives, and the political theory, of the Situationist International, has been neglected by some commentators,^[100] which either limited themselves to an apolitical reading of the situationist avant-garde art works, or dismissed the Situationist political theory. Examples of this are Simon Sadler's The Situationist City,^[100] and the accounts on the S.I. published by the New Left Review.^[41]

The concept of revolution created by the Situationist International was anti-capitalist,^[79][80][81] Marxist, Young Hegelian,^[41] and from the very beginning in the 50s, remarkably differently from the established Left, anti-Stalinist and against all repressive regimes.^[82] The S.I. called in May 1968 for the formation of Workers councils,^[2] and someone has argued that they were aligned with council communism.

There was no separation between the artistic and the political perspectives.^[67] For instance, Asger Jorn never believed in a conception of the Situationist ideas as exclusively artistic and separated from political involvement. He was at the root and at the core of the Situationist International project, fully sharing the revolutionary intentions with Debord.^[101][102]

Reception

Criticism

Critics of the Situationists frequently assert that their ideas are not in fact complex and difficult to understand, but are at best simple ideas expressed in deliberately difficult language, and at worst actually nonsensical. For example, anarchist Chaz Bufe asserts in Listen Anarchist! that "obscure situationist jargon" is a major problem in the anarchist movement.^[103]

Influence

Situationist ideas have continued to echo through many aspects of culture and politics in Europe and the USA. Even in their own time, with limited translations of their dense theoretical texts, combined with their very successful self-mythologisation, the term "situationist" was often used to refer to any rebel or outsider, rather than to a body of surrealist-inspired Marxist critical theory. As such, the terms "Situationist," "spectacle," and "detournement" have often been decontextualised and recuperated. Debord's analysis of the spectacle has been very influential among people working on television, particularly in France and Italy;^[104][105] in Italy, TV programs produced by situationist intellectuals, like Antonio Ricci's Striscia la notizia, or Carlo Freccero's programming schedule for Italia 1 in the early 1990s.^[104]

In the 1960s and 1970s, anarchists, communists, and other leftists, offered various interpretations and combinations of Situationist concepts with a variety of other perspectives. Examples of these groups include: in Amsterdam, the Provos; in the UK, King Mob, the producers of Heatwave magazine (who later briefly joined the SI), and the Angry Brigade. In the US, groups like Black Mask (later Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers), The Weathermen, and the Rebel Worker group also explicitly employed their ideas.^[106]

Anarchist theorists such as Fredy Perlman, Bob Black, Hakim Bey, and John Zerzan, have developed the SI's ideas in various directions away from Marxism. These theorists were predominantly associated with the magazines Fifth Estate, Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, and Green Anarchy. During the early 1980s, English anarchist Larry Law produced the Spectacular Times pocket-books series, which aimed to make Situationist ideas more easily assimilated into the anarchist movement. Later anarchist theorists such as the CrimethInc. collective also claim Situationist influence.^[106]

Situationist urban theory, defined initially by the members of the Lettrist International as "Unitary Urbanism," was extensively developed through the behavioural and performance structures of The Workshop for Non-Linear Architecture during the 1990s. The re-emergence of the London Psychogeographical Association also inspired many new pscyhogeographical groups including Manchester Area Psychogeographic. The LPA and the Neoist Alliance along with the Luther Blissett Project came together to form a New Lettrist International with a specifically Communist perspective. Around this time, Unpopular Books and the LPA released some key texts including new translations of Asger Jorn's work.

Around this time also, groups such as Reclaim the Streets and Adbusters have, respectively, seen themselves as "creating situations" or practicing detournement on advertisements.

In cultural terms, the SI's influence has been even greater, if more diffuse. The list of cultural practices which claim a debt to the SI is almost limitless, but there are some prominent examples:

• Situationist ideas exerted a strong influence on the design language of the punk rock phenomenon of the 1970s. To a significant extent this came about due to the adoption of the style and aesthetics and sometimes slogans employed by the Situationists (though these latter were often second hand, via English pro-Situs such as King Mob and Jamie Reid). In the late 1970s, Factory Records owner Tony Wilson was known to have been influenced by these ideas. One Factory Records band influenced by the SI was The Durutti Column, which took its name from Andre Bertrand's collage Le Retour de la Colonne Durutti.^[107] Bertrand, in turn, took his title from the anarchist group of the same name of the Spanish Civil War. In 1978, the U.S. group the Feederz was formed and exhibited a more direct and conscious influence. They became known for their extensive use of the Situationist tactic of 'detournement' and for their lack of hesitation to provoke their audience in expounding Situationist themes.^[108] Other musical artists have included buzzwords from the SI's critical theory in their lyrics, such as the Manic Street Preachers, the Nation of Ulysses, Joan of Arc, and Refused. Situationist theory experienced a vogue in the late '90s hardcore punk scene, being referenced by Orchid, His Hero Is Gone, and CrimethInc..
• Situationist practices allegedly continue to influence underground street artists such as Banksy, gHOSTbOY, Borf, NeverWork, and Mudwig, whose artistic interventions and subversive practice can be seen on advertising hoardings, street signs, and walls throughout Europe and the United States.
• One can also trace situationist ideas within the development of other avant-garde threads such as Neoism, Seahorse Liberation Army, Nation of Ulysses, Libre Society, and Mark Divo.
• Some hacker related e-zines, which, like samizdat, were distributed via email and FTP over early Internet links and BBS quoted and developed ideas coming from SI. A few of them were N0 Way, N0 Route, UHF, in France; and early Phrack, cDc in the US. More recently, writers such as Thomas de Zengotita in "Mediated" wrote something which holds the spirit of the Situationists, describing the society of the "roaring zeroes" (i.e. 2000-).

See also

• Adbusters
• Anti-art
• Art and politics
• On the Poverty of Student Life
• Report on the Construction of Situations

Notes

References

Further reading

• Balsebre, Gianluigi. Della critica radicale. Bibliografia ragionata sull'Internazionale situazionista. Con documenti inediti in italiano Grafton edizioni, Bologna, 1995.
• Ford, Simon. The Situationist International: A User's Guide (Black Dog, London, 2004) ISBN 978-1-904772-05-7
• Sadler, Simon. The Situationist City. MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1998. ISBN 978-0-262-69225-0
• Vachon, Marc. L’arpenteur de la ville: L’utopie situationniste et Patrick Straram. Les Éditions Triptyque, Montreal, 2003 ISBN 978-2-89031-476-4.
• Wark, McKenzie. 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International (Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2008) ISBN 978-1-56898-789-7
• Wark, McKenzie. The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International Verso, New York, 2011) ISBN 978-1844677207
• The Situationist international (1957-1972) In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni. JRP Ringier, Zurich, 2007 ISBN 978-3-905770-14-8

External links

• Situationist International Online
• The Situationist International Text Library