The intellectual foundations of the Situationist International were derived primarily from
anti-authoritarian Marxism and the avant-garde
art movements of the early 20th century, particularly
Dada and
Surrealism.
[1] Overall, situationist theory represented an attempt to synthesize this diverse field of theoretical disciplines into a modern and comprehensive critique of mid-20th century
advanced capitalism.
[1] The situationists recognized that
capitalism had changed since Marx's formative writings, but maintained that his analysis of the
capitalist mode of production remained fundamentally correct; they rearticulated and expanded upon several
classical Marxist concepts, such as his
theory of alienation.
[1] In their expanded interpretation of
Marxist theory, the situationists asserted that the misery of
social alienation and
commodity fetishism were no longer limited to the fundamental components of capitalist society, but had now in advanced capitalism spread themselves to every aspect of life and culture.
[1] They resolutely rejected the idea that advanced capitalism's apparent successes—such as technological advancement, increased income, and increased leisure—could ever outweigh the social dysfunction and degradation of everyday life that it simultaneously inflicted.
[1]
Essential to situationist theory was the concept of
the spectacle, a unified critique of
advanced capitalism of which a primary concern was the progressively increasing tendency towards the expression and mediation of
social relations through
objects.
[1] The situationists believed that the shift from individual expression through directly lived experiences, or the first-hand fulfillment of authentic desires, to individual expression by proxy through the exchange or
consumption of
commodities, or passive second-hand alienation, inflicted significant and far-reaching damage to the quality of human life for both individuals and society.
[1] Another important concept of situationist theory was the primary means of counteracting the spectacle; the construction of situations, moments of life deliberately constructed for the purpose of reawakening and pursuing authentic desires, experiencing the feeling of life and adventure, and the liberation of everyday life.
[1][2]
When the Situationist International was first formed, it had a predominantly artistic focus; emphasis was placed on concepts like
unitary urbanism and
psychogeography.
[1] Gradually, however, that focus shifted more towards revolutionary and political theory.
[1] The Situationist International reached the apex of its creative output and influence in 1967 and 1968, with the former marking the publication of the two most significant texts of the situationist movement,
The Society of the Spectacle by
Guy Debord and
The Revolution of Everyday Life by
Raoul Vaneigem. The expressed writing and political theory of the two aforementioned texts, along with other situationist publications, proved greatly influential in shaping the ideas behind the
May 1968 insurrections in France; quotes, phrases, and slogans from situationist texts and publications were ubiquitous on posters and graffiti throughout France during the uprisings.
[1]
Etymology[edit]
The term "situationist" refers to the construction of situations, one of the early central concepts of the Situationist International; the term also refers to any individuals engaged in the construction of situations, or, more narrowly, to members of the Situationist International.
[2] The situation was seen as a tool for the liberation of everyday life, a method of negating the pervasive
alienation that accompanied the
spectacle. The construction of situations was defined in the 1957 founding manifesto of the Situationist International,
Report on the Construction of Situations, as "the concrete construction of momentary ambiances of life and their transformation into a superior
passional quality."
[3] Elsewhere, the situation was defined as "a moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a
unitary ambiance and a game of events."
[2] The situationists argued that
advanced capitalism manufactured false desires; literally in the sense of
ubiquitous advertising and the glorification of accumulated capital, and more broadly in the abstraction and
reification of the more ephemeral experiences of authentic life into
commodities. The experimental direction of situationist activity consisted of setting up temporary environments favorable to the fulfillment of true and authentic human desires in response.
[4]
The Situationist International strongly resisted use of the term "situationism," which Debord called a "meaningless term," adding "[t]here is no such thing as situationism, which would mean a doctrine for interpreting existing conditions."
[2] The situationists maintained a philosophical opposition to all
ideologies, conceiving of them as abstract
superstructures ultimately serving only to justify the
economic base of a given society; accordingly, they rejected "situationism" as an absurd and self-contradictory concept.
[5] In
The Society of the Spectacle, Debord asserted ideology was "the abstract will to universality and the illusion thereof" which was "legitimated in modern society by universal abstraction and by the effective dictatorship of illusion."
[6] However, despite their insistence on this point, the term "situationism" is still occasionally used in reference to the Situationist International.
History[edit]
Origins (1945–1955)[edit]
The situationist movement had its origins as a left wing tendency within
Lettrism,
[7][8] 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
avant-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.
[3] 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".
[9][10][11][12] André Breton prominently came in solidarity of the action in a letter that spawned a large debate in newspaper
Combat.
[13][14]
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 avant-garde artists and political theorists. The schism finally erupted when the future members of the radical
[citation needed] 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."
[15] 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.
[16]
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."
[2][17] 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.
[18] 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)[edit]
During the first four years from its formation, the pivot of the Situationist International was the collaboration between
Guy Debord and
Asger Jorn.
[20]
Artistic period (1958–1962)[edit]
During the first few years of the SI's founding,
avant-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.
[21]
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.
[22] 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;
[23] the accusation that their activities were based on a "systematic misunderstanding of situationist theses";
[22] 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.
[22][24] the betrayal, in the
Spur #7 issue, of a common agreement on the Gruppe SPUR and SI publications.
[sentence fragment][25][26]
The exclusion was a recognition that
Gruppe SPUR's "principles, methods and goals" were significantly in contrast with those of the SI.
[27][28] 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.
[29]
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.
[citation needed] Journalist
Stewart Home, who favored the "Nashists" and considered Debord a "mystic, an idealist, a dogmatist and a liar"
[30] 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'
[31] sought to concentrate solely on theoretical political aims.
[32]
Political period (1963–1968)[edit]
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.
[33]
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.
[1][34] 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.
[34] 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.
[34] 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.
[34]
May events (1968)[edit]
Street poster supporting the
May 1968 uprisings, depicting a woman revolutionary throwing a paving stone. The text, "beauty is in the streets", is a situationist slogan.
The Situationists played a preponderant role in the May 1968 uprisings,
[35] and to some extent their political perspective and ideas fueled such crisis,
[35][36][37] providing a central theoretic foundation.
[38][39][40][41][42][43] 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. The active ideologists (“enragés” and Situationists) behind the revolutionary events in Strasbourg, Nanterre and Paris, numbered only about one or two dozen persons.
[44]
This has now been widely acknowledged as a fact by studies of the period,
[45][46][47][48][49][50] what is still wide open to interpretation is the "how and why" that happened.
[35] 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."
[51]
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.
[52] This was documented in the collection of photographs published in 1968 by
Walter Lewino,
L'immagination au pouvoir.
[54]
Those who followed the "artistic" view of the SI might view the evolution of the SI as producing a more boring or dogmatic organization.
[citation needed] Those following the political view would see the May 1968 uprisings as a logical outcome of the SI's
dialecticalapproach: 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,
[54] 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)[edit]
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),
[55] which (inspired by
Bruno Bauer) purported 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
[56] and under pressure from Italian authorities Sanguinetti left Italy in February 1976, and was denied entry to France.
[citation needed]
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,
[54] the SI was dissolved in 1972.
[57]
Main concepts[edit]
The spectacle and its society[edit]
The
Spectacle is a central notion in the situationist theory, developed by
Guy Debord in his 1967 book,
The Society of the Spectacle. In its limited sense,
spectacle means the
mass media, which are "its most glaring superficial manifestation."
[58] Debord said that the society of the spectacle came to existence in the late 1920s.
[59][60]
The critique of the
spectacle is a development and application of Karl Marx's concept of
fetishism of commodities,
reification and
alienation,
[61] and the way it was reprised by
György Lukács in 1923. In the society of the spectacle, the commodities rule the workers and the
consumers instead of being ruled by them. The consumers are passive subjects that contemplate the reified spectacle.
As early as 1958, in the
situationist manifesto, Debord described
official culture as a "rigged game", where conservative powers forbid subversive ideas to have direct access to the
public discourse. Such ideas get first trivialized and sterilized, and then they are safely
incorporated back within mainstream society, where they can be exploited to add new flavors to old dominant ideas.
[62] This technique of the spectacle is sometimes called
recuperation, and its counter-technique is the
détournement[63]
Détournement[edit]
Main article:
détournement
A
détournement is a technique developed in the 1950s by the
Letterist International,
[7][8] and consist in "turning expressions of the capitalist system against itself,"
[64] like turning slogans and logos against the advertisers or the political status quo.
[65] Détournement was prominently used to set up subversive political pranks, an influential tactic called
situationist prank that was reprised by the
punk movement in the late 1970s
[66] and inspired the
culture jamming movement in the late 1980s.
[64]
Anti-capitalism[edit]
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,
[67] without separation between the two:
art and politics are faced together and in
revolutionary terms.
[68] The SI analyzed the modern world from the point of view of
everyday life.
[69] The core arguments of the Situationist International were an attack on the capitalist degradation of the life of people
[3][70][71] and the fake models advertised by the
mass media,
[3] to which the Situationist responded with alternative life experiences.
[72][3] 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.
[21]
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.
[23] 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[73] and the first
wildcat general strike in history,
[73] 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[edit]
The SI rejected all art that separated itself from politics, the concept of
20th century art that is separated from topical political events.
[3][27] 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.
[3] 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.
[3]
According to this theory, artists and intellectuals that accept such compromises are rewarded by the
art dealers and praised by the dominant culture.
[27] 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.
[27] 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.
[27]
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.
[3]
The construction of situations[edit]
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[edit]
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."
[2] 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[17]
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.
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[edit]
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[edit]
Major works[edit]
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.
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[edit]
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 centralized bureaucracies of
China and the
Soviet Union in the same breath as capitalism.
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,
[21][70] 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.
[citation needed]
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.
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".
[35]
Relationship with anarchism[edit]
The Situationist International was differentiated from both
anarchists and
Marxists. In spite of this, they have frequently been associated with anarchism.
[citation needed] Debord did a critical assessment of the anarchists in his 1967
The Society of the Spectacle.
[97] In the final, 12th issue of the journal, Debord & co. rejected
spontaneism and the "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.
According to situationist
Ken Knabb, Debord pointed out the flaws and merits of both Marxism and anarchism.
[99] He argued that "the split between Marxism and anarchism crippled both sides. The anarchists rightly criticized the authoritarian and narrowly economistic tendencies in Marxism, but they generally did so in an undialectical, moralistic, ahistorical manner... and leaving Marx and a few of the more radical Marxists with a virtual monopoly on coherent dialectical analysis—until the situationists finally brought the libertarian and dialectical aspects back together again."
Relationship with the established left[edit]
The SI poses a challenge to the model of political action of a portion of the left,
[100] the "established Left" and "Left opinion-makers".
[35] The first challenging aspect is the fueling role that the SI had in the upheavals of the political and social movements of the 1960s,
[37][45] upheavals for which much is still at stake and which many foresee as recurring in the 21st century. The second challenging aspect,
[37] is the comparison between the Situationist Marxist theory of the
Society of the Spectacle, which is still very topical 30 years later,
[45][72] and the current status of the theories supported by leftist establishments in the same period, like
Althusserianism,
Maoism,
workerism,
Freudo-Marxism and others.
[45]
The response to this 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".
[37][100]
The core aspect of the revolutionary perspectives, and the political theory, of the Situationist International, has been neglected by some commentators,
[101] 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,
[101] and the accounts on the SI published by the
New Left Review.
[35]
There was no separation between the artistic and the political perspectives.
[68] 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.
[102][103]
Reception[edit]
Criticism[edit]
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.
[104]
Influence[edit]
evoL PsychogeogrAphix 2003
Debord's analysis of the spectacle has been influential among people working on television, particularly in France and Italy;
[105][106] 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.
[105]
In the 1960s and 1970s, anarchists, communists, and other leftists offered various interpretations of Situationist concepts in combination 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.
[107]
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 arguably been greater, if more diffuse. The list of cultural practices which claim a debt to the SI is extensive, 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 SI. These were often second hand, via English pro-Situ groups such as King Mob whose associates includedMalcolm McLaren and Jamie Reid. Factory Records owner Tony Wilson was influenced by Situationist urbanism and Factory Records band The Durutti Column took its name from Andre Bertrand's collage Le Retour de la Colonne Durutti.[108] (Bertrand, in turn, took his title from the eponymous anarchist army during the Spanish Civil War). U.S. punk group The Feederz have been acclaimed as exhibiting a more direct and conscious influence. Formed in the late 1970s, they became known for extensive use of detournement and their intention to provoke their audience through the exposition of Situationist themes.[109] Other musical artists whose lyrics and artwork have referenced Situationist concepts include: The Love Kills Theory, Chumbawamba, Manic Street Preachers, Nation of Ulysses, Huggy Bear, Joan of Arc, The Spectacle, International Noise Conspiracy and Refused. Situationist theory experienced a vogue in the late '90s hardcore punk scene, being referenced by Orchid, His Hero Is Gone, and CrimethInc..
- One can also trace situationist ideas within the development of other avant-garde threads such as Neoism, as well as artists such as 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 have echoed Situationist theories regarding the spectacle of contemporary society.
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