Situationist
Encyclopedia
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-garde
s, 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, the SI was dissolved in 1972.
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." 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." 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.
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." Situationists considered themselves highly opposed to all ideology
, and the suffix "-ism" would to them improperly classify their body of theory as an ideology. 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."
The concept of the "situation" may originate in Sartre's concept of a Theatre of Situations. What Sartre calls a situation
in a theatrical play, is what breaks the spectator's passivity towards the spectacle.
, 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. 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". André Breton
prominently came in solidarity of the action in a letter that spawned a large debate in newspaper Combat
.
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." 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.
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." 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. 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.
, 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
.
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.
, 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.
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. 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; the accusation that their activities were based on a "systematic misunderstanding of situationist theses"; 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
. the betrayal, in the Spur #7 issue, of a common agreement on the Gruppe SPUR and SI pubblications.
The exclusion was a recognition that Gruppe SPUR
's "principles, methods and goals" were significantly in contrast with those of the SI. 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-garde
s in other countries.
The next significant split was in 1962, wherein the "Nashists," the Scandinavia
n 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" 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' sought to concentrate solely on theoretical political aims.
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.
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. 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. They then invited the situationists to contribute a critique of the University of Strasbourg, and On the Poverty of Student Life
, written by Tunisia
n situationist Mustapha/Omar Khayati was the result. 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.
This has now been widely acknowledged as a fact by studies of the period, what is still wide open to interpretation is the "how and why" that happened. 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."
They also made up the majority in the Occupation Committee of the Sorbonne
. An important event leading up to May 1968 was the scandal in Strasbourg in December 1966. 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
. 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. This was documented in the collection of photographs published in 1968 by Walter Lewino, L'immagination au pouvoir.
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 dialectic
al 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, 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.
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 (The Real Report on the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy), 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 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, the SI was dissolved in 1972.
concepts of commodification
, reification
and alienation
. 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. 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.
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. Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation. The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.
and effectively handle all threats to the social order
. Recuperation
, a concept first proposed by Guy Debord
, 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. 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.
and politics, without separation between the two: art
and politics are faced together and in revolutionary
terms. The SI analyzed the modern world from the point of view of everyday life
. The core arguments of the Situationist International were an attack on the capitalist degradation of the life of people and the fake models advertised by the mass media
, to which the Situationist responded with alternative life experiences.
Answer: "Come suggeriva Debord: con pratiche di vita alternative." 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.Nel Rapporto di Debord si legge inoltre una durissima critica allo sfruttamento capitalistico delle masse anche nel tempo libero attraverso l'industria del divertimento che abbrutisce la gente con sottoprodotti dell'ideologia mistificata della borghesia.
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. 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
and the first wildcat general strike
in history, was instead depicted by most media outlets as "student protests". That was precisely to mystify the still very topical role of a revolutionary proletariat.
that is separated from topical political events. 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. 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.
According to this theory, artists and intellectuals that accept such compromises are rewarded by the art dealer
s and praised by the dominant culture. 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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
as "the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment (whether consciously organized or not) on the emotions and behavior of individuals." The term was first recognized in 1955 by Guy Debord while still with the Letterist International:
("drift").
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". 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". 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.
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.
, 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
.
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.
, 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.
The concept of revolution created by the Situationist International was anti-capitalist, Marxist, Young Hegelian, and from the very beginning in the 50s, remarkably differently from the established Left, anti-Stalinist
and against all repressive regimes.
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
. 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". The spectacle, which according to Debord is the core feature of the advanced capitalist societies, has its "most glaring superficial manifestation" in the advertising
-mass media
-marketing
complex.
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
, our psychic functions are altered, we get a degradation of mind and also a degradation of knowledge
. In the spectacular society, knowledge is not used anymore to question, analyze, or resolve contradiction
s, but to assuage reality. Such argument on the Spectacle as a mask of a degrading reality has been elaborated by many Situationist artists, producing détournement
s 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, 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 title The Beginning of an Era, 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.
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'.
. In the final issue of the journal they rejected spontaneism and "mystics of nonorganization," labeling them as a form of "sub-anarchism":
, workerism
, Freudo-Marxism
and others.
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."
The core aspect of the revolutionary perspectives, and the political theory, of the Situationist International, has been neglected by some commentators, 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, and the accounts on the S.I. published by the New Left Review
.
The concept of revolution created by the Situationist International was anti-capitalist, Marxist, Young Hegelian, and from the very beginning in the 50s, remarkably differently from the established Left, anti-Stalinist
and against all repressive regimes. The S.I. called in May 1968 for the formation of Workers councils, and someone has argued that they were aligned with council communism
.
There was no separation between the artistic and the political perspectives. 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.
asserts in Listen Anarchist! that "obscure situationist jargon" is a major problem in the anarchist movement.
, or Carlo Freccero's programming schedule for Italia 1
in the early 1990s.
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.
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.
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:
Internationalism (politics)
Internationalism is a political movement which advocates a greater economic and political cooperation among nations for the theoretical benefit of all...
European revolutionary
Social revolution
The term social revolution may have different connotations depending on the speaker.In the Trotskyist movement, the term "social revolution" refers to an upheaval in which existing property relations are smashed...
group founded in 1957, and which reached its peak of influence in the general strike
General strike
A general strike is a strike action by a critical mass of the labour force in a city, region, or country. While a general strike can be for political goals, economic goals, or both, it tends to gain its momentum from the ideological or class sympathies of the participants...
of May 1968 in France.
With their ideas rooted in Marxism
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
and the 20th century European artistic avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
s, they advocated experiences of life alternative to those admitted by advanced capitalism
Advanced capitalism
In political philosophy, advanced capitalism is the situation that pertains in a society in which the capitalist model has been integrated and developed deeply and extensively and for a prolonged period of time...
, 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
Unitary Urbanism
Unitary urbanism was the critique of status quo urbanism employed by the Lettrist International and then further developed by the Situationist International between approximately 1953 and 1960....
and psychogeography
Psychogeography
Psychogeography was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals." Another definition is "a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for...
.
Their theoretical work peaked with the highly influential book The Society of the Spectacle
The Society of the Spectacle
The Society of the Spectacle is a work of philosophy and critical theory by Guy Debord. It was first published in 1967 in France.-Book structure:...
in which Guy Debord
Guy Debord
Guy Ernest Debord was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International . He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.-Early Life:Guy Debord was born in Paris in 1931...
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
Council for Maintaining the Occupations
The Council for Maintaining the Occupations , or CMDO, was a revolutionary committee formed during the May 1968 events in France originating in the Sorbonne. The council favored the continuation of wildcat general strikes and factory occupations across France, maintaining them through directly...
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, the SI was dissolved in 1972.
Etymology
The appellation "situationist" refers to one who engages in the construction of "situations" or specifically a member of the Situationist International. In adjectival form, the term means relating to the theory or practical activity of constructing "situations." Situationist theorist Guy DebordGuy Debord
Guy Ernest Debord was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International . He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.-Early Life:Guy Debord was born in Paris in 1931...
defines the term "situation" as "a moment of life
Life
Life is a characteristic that distinguishes objects that have signaling and self-sustaining processes from those that do not, either because such functions have ceased , or else because they lack such functions and are classified as inanimate...
concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and a game of events." 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
Transformation
-Mathematics:* Transformation * Transformation * Integral transform* Data transformation * Transformation matrix-Natural science:* Phase transformation, a physical transition from one medium to another...
into a superior passional quality." In other words, any method of making one or more individuals critically analyze their everyday life
Everyday Life
Everyday Life is the first solo album made by Life MC of the British Hip Hop group Phi Life Cypher....
, and to recognize and pursue their true desires
Desire (emotion)
Desire is a sense of longing for a person or object or hoping for an outcome. Desire is the fire that sets action aflame. The same sense is expressed by emotions such as "craving" or "hankering". When a person desires something or someone, their sense of longing is excited by the enjoyment or the...
in their lives. The experimental direction of situationist activity consists of setting up temporary environments that are favorable to the fulfillment of such desires.
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." Situationists considered themselves highly opposed to all ideology
Ideology
An ideology is a set of ideas that constitutes one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things , as in common sense and several philosophical tendencies , or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to...
, and the suffix "-ism" would to them improperly classify their body of theory as an ideology. In The Society of the Spectacle
The Society of the Spectacle
The Society of the Spectacle is a work of philosophy and critical theory by Guy Debord. It was first published in 1967 in France.-Book structure:...
, 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."
The concept of the "situation" may originate in Sartre's concept of a Theatre of Situations. What Sartre calls a situation
Situation (Sartre)
One of the first times in which Jean-Paul Sartre discussed the concept of Situation was in his 1943 Being and Nothingness, where he famously said that...
in a theatrical play, is what breaks the spectator's passivity towards the spectacle.
Origins (1945-1955)
Situationist theory first emerged as a smaller tendency within LettrismLettrism
Lettrism is a French avant-garde movement, established in Paris in the mid-1940s by Romanian immigrant Isidore Isou. In a body of work totaling hundreds of volumes, Isou and the Lettrists have applied their theories to all areas of art and culture, most notably in poetry, film, painting and...
, an artistic and literary movement led by the Romanian-born French poet and visual artist Isidore Isou
Isidore Isou
Isidore Isou , born Ioan-Isidor Goldstein, was a Romanian-born French poet, film critic and visual artist...
, originating in 1940s Paris. The group was heavily influenced by the preceding avante-garde movements of Dadaism and Surrealism
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
, seeking to apply critical theories based on these concepts to all areas of art and culture, most notably in poetry
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
, film
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
, painting
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
and political theory. Among some of the concepts and artistic innovations developed by the Lettrists were the lettrie, a poem
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
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
Filmmaking
Filmmaking is the process of making a film, from an initial story, idea, or commission, through scriptwriting, casting, shooting, directing, editing, and screening the finished product before an audience that may result in a theatrical release or television program...
. Future situationist Guy Debord
Guy Debord
Guy Ernest Debord was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International . He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.-Early Life:Guy Debord was born in Paris in 1931...
, 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
Notre-Dame Affair
The Notre-Dame Affair was an action performed by Michel Mourre, Serge Berna, Ghislain Desnoyers de Marbaix, and Jean Rullier, members of the radical wing of the Lettrist movement, on Easter Sunday, 9 April 1950, at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, while the mass was aired live on national TV...
, wherein at the Easter
Easter
Easter is the central feast in the Christian liturgical year. According to the Canonical gospels, Jesus rose from the dead on the third day after his crucifixion. His resurrection is celebrated on Easter Day or Easter Sunday...
High Mass at Notre Dame de Paris
Notre Dame de Paris
Notre Dame de Paris , also known as Notre Dame Cathedral, is a Gothic, Roman Catholic cathedral on the eastern half of the Île de la Cité in the fourth arrondissement of Paris, France. It is the cathedral of the Catholic Archdiocese of Paris: that is, it is the church that contains the cathedra of...
, in front of ten thousand people and broadcast on national TV, their member and former Dominican Michel Mourre posed as a monk
Monk
A monk is a person who practices religious asceticism, living either alone or with any number of monks, while always maintaining some degree of physical separation from those not sharing the same purpose...
, "stood in front of the altar and read a pamphlet proclaiming that God was dead". André Breton
André Breton
André Breton was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism"....
prominently came in solidarity of the action in a letter that spawned a large debate in newspaper Combat
Combat (newspaper)
Combat was a French newspaper created during the Second World War. Originally a clandestine newspaper of the Resistance, it was headed by Albert Ollivier, Jean Bloch-Michel, Georges Altschuler and, most of all, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, André Malraux, Emmanuel Mounier, and then Raymond Aron...
.
In 1952, this left wing of the Lettrist
Lettrism
Lettrism is a French avant-garde movement, established in Paris in the mid-1940s by Romanian immigrant Isidore Isou. In a body of work totaling hundreds of volumes, Isou and the Lettrists have applied their theories to all areas of art and culture, most notably in poetry, film, painting and...
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
Charlie Chaplin
Sir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin, KBE was an English comic actor, film director and composer best known for his work during the silent film era. He became the most famous film star in the world before the end of World War I...
press conference for Limelight at the Hôtel Ritz Paris
Hôtel Ritz Paris
The Hôtel Ritz is a grand palatial hotel in the heart of Paris, the 1st arrondissement. It overlooks the octagonal border of the Place Vendôme at number 15...
. They distributed a polemic
Polemic
A polemic is a variety of arguments or controversies made against one opinion, doctrine, or person. Other variations of argument are debate and discussion...
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." 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.
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
Psychogeography
Psychogeography was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals." Another definition is "a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for...
, which they defined as "the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment
Geography
Geography is the science that studies the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of Earth. A literal translation would be "to describe or write about the Earth". The first person to use the word "geography" was Eratosthenes...
(whether consciously organized or not) on the emotions and behavior of individuals." Debord further expanded this concept of psychogeography with his theory of the dérive
Dérive
In psychogeography, a dérive is an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, where an individual travels where the subtle aesthetic contours of the surrounding architecture and geography subconsciously direct them with the ultimate goal of encountering an entirely new and authentic...
, an unplanned tour through an urban
City
A city is a relatively large and permanent settlement. Although there is no agreement on how a city is distinguished from a town within general English language meanings, many cities have a particular administrative, legal, or historical status based on local law.For example, in the U.S...
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. During this period the Letterist International also developed the situationist tactic of détournement
Detournement
A détournement is a technique developed in the 1950s by the Letterist International, and consist in "turning expressions of the capitalist system against itself." Détournement was prominently used to set up subversive political pranks, an influential tactic called situationist prank that was...
, 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, ItalyItaly
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
, 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
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
artistic tendencies: the Lettrist International
Lettrist International
The Letterist International was a Paris-based collective of radical artists and theorists between 1952 and 1957. It was created by Guy Debord as a schism from Isidore Isou's Letterist group...
, the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus
International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus
The International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus was a small European avant-garde artistic tendency that arose out of the breakup of COBRA, and was initiated by contact between former COBRA member Asger Jorn and Enrico Baj and Sergio Dangelo of the Nuclear Art Movement.-Timeline:*December 1953:...
(an off-shoot of COBRA
COBRA (avant-garde movement)
COBRA was a European avant-garde movement active from 1948 to 1951. The name was coined in 1948 by Christian Dotremont from the initials of the members' home cities: Copenhagen , Brussels , Amsterdam .-History:...
), and the London Psychogeographical Association
London Psychogeographical Association
The London Psychogeographical Association is an organisation devoted to psychogeography. The LPA is perhaps best understood in the context of psychogeographical praxis.-London Psychogeographical Institute:...
. Later, the Situationist International drew ideas from other groups such as Socialisme ou Barbarie
Socialisme ou Barbarie
Socialisme ou Barbarie was a French-based radical libertarian socialist group of the post-World War II period . It existed from 1948 until 1965...
.
The most prominent member of the group, Guy Debord
Guy Debord
Guy Ernest Debord was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International . He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.-Early Life:Guy Debord was born in Paris in 1931...
, generally became considered the organization's de facto
De facto
De facto is a Latin expression that means "concerning fact." In law, it often means "in practice but not necessarily ordained by law" or "in practice or actuality, but not officially established." It is commonly used in contrast to de jure when referring to matters of law, governance, or...
leader and most distinguished theorist. Other members included theorist Raoul Vaneigem
Raoul Vaneigem
Raoul Vaneigem is a Belgian writer and philosopher. He was born in Lessines . After studying romance philology at the Free University of Brussels from 1952 to 1956, he participated in the Situationist International from 1961 to 1970...
, the Dutch painter Constant Nieuwenhuys
Constant Nieuwenhuys
Constant Anton Nieuwenhuys was a Dutch painter, and one of the foremost innovators of Unitary Urbanism. In 1941, he became deeply interested in the work of Paul Cézanne, Cubism and German Expressionism....
, the Italo-Scottish writer Alexander Trocchi
Alexander Trocchi
Alexander Whitelaw Robertson Trocchi was a Scottish novelist.-Early career:Trocchi was born in Glasgow to a Scottish mother and Italian father. After working as a seaman on the Murmansk convoys, he attended University of Glasgow. On graduation he obtained a traveling grant that enabled him to...
, the English artist Ralph Rumney
Ralph Rumney
Ralph Rumney was an English artist, born in Newcastle Upon Tyne.In 1957 lifelong conscientious objector Rumney was one of the co-founders of the London Psychogeographical Association. This organization was, along with COBRA and the Lettrist International, involved in the formation of the...
(sole member of the London Psychogeographical Association, Rumney suffered expulsion relatively soon after the formation), the Danish artist Asger Jorn
Asger Jorn
Asger Oluf Jorn was a Danish painter, sculptor, ceramic artist, and author. He was a founding member of the avant-garde movement COBRA and the Situationist International...
(who after parting with the SI also founded the Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism
Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism
The Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism is a non-profit cultural institute based in Denmark.It was founded in 1961 by the Danish artist Asger Jorn, Peter Glob and Werner Jacobsen from the National Museum of Denmark and Holger Arbman of the University of Lund, Sweden, after Jorn left...
), the architect and veteran of the Hungarian Uprising Attila Kotanyi
Attila Kotányi
Attila Kotányi was a poet, philosopher, writer and architect-urbanist.In his early years in Budapest, Attila Kotányi belonged to the intellectual circle of philosopher Lajos Szabó and Béla Hamvas...
, and the French writer Michele Bernstein
Michèle Bernstein
Michèle Bernstein is a French novelist and critic, most usually remembered as a member of the Situationist International from its foundation in 1957 until 1967, and as the wife of its most prominent member, Guy Debord.-Early years:...
. 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
Guy Debord
Guy Ernest Debord was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International . He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.-Early Life:Guy Debord was born in Paris in 1931...
and Asger Jorn
Asger Jorn
Asger Oluf Jorn was a Danish painter, sculptor, ceramic artist, and author. He was a founding member of the avant-garde movement COBRA and the Situationist International...
.
In June 1957, Debord wrote the manifesto
Manifesto
A manifesto is a public declaration of principles and intentions, often political in nature. Manifestos relating to religious belief are generally referred to as creeds. Manifestos may also be life stance-related.-Etymology:...
of the Situationist International, titled Report on the Construction of Situations
Report on the Construction of Situations
The pamphlet Report on the Construction of Situations is the founding Manifesto of the Situationist International revolutionary organization...
. This manifesto plans a systematic rereading of Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
's Das Kapital
Das Kapital
Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, and how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production.- Themes :In Capital: Critique of...
and advocates a cultural revolution in western countries.
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 SPURGruppe SPUR
Gruppe SPUR was an artistic collaboration formed by the German painters Heimrad Prem, Helmut Sturm and Hans-Peter Zimmer and the sculptor Lothar Fischer in 1957...
, a German
Germans
The Germans are a Germanic ethnic group native to Central Europe. The English term Germans has referred to the German-speaking population of the Holy Roman Empire since the Late Middle Ages....
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
Asger Jorn
Asger Oluf Jorn was a Danish painter, sculptor, ceramic artist, and author. He was a founding member of the avant-garde movement COBRA and the Situationist International...
, Constant Nieuwenhuys
Constant Nieuwenhuys
Constant Anton Nieuwenhuys was a Dutch painter, and one of the foremost innovators of Unitary Urbanism. In 1941, he became deeply interested in the work of Paul Cézanne, Cubism and German Expressionism....
and Pinot Gallizio.
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
COBRA (avant-garde movement)
COBRA was a European avant-garde movement active from 1948 to 1951. The name was coined in 1948 by Christian Dotremont from the initials of the members' home cities: Copenhagen , Brussels , Amsterdam .-History:...
) was that of a catalyst and team leader. Guy Debord
Guy Debord
Guy Ernest Debord was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International . He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.-Early Life:Guy Debord was born in Paris in 1931...
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
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
intellectual
Intellectual
An intellectual is a person who uses intelligence and critical or analytical reasoning in either a professional or a personal capacity.- Terminology and endeavours :"Intellectual" can denote four types of persons:...
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. 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; the accusation that their activities were based on a "systematic misunderstanding of situationist theses"; the understanding that at least one Gruppe SPUR member, sculptor Lothar Fischer
Lothar Fischer
Lothar Fischer was a German sculptor.He was born in Germersheim, Palatinate. Between 1952 and 1958 he studied under Professor Heinrich Kirchner at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich...
, 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
Economics of the arts and literature
Economics of the arts and literature or cultural economics is a branch of economics that studies the economics of creation, distribution, and the consumption of works of art and literature. For a long time the arts were confined to visual and performing arts in the Anglo-Saxon tradition...
. the betrayal, in the Spur #7 issue, of a common agreement on the Gruppe SPUR and SI pubblications.
The exclusion was a recognition that Gruppe SPUR
Gruppe SPUR
Gruppe SPUR was an artistic collaboration formed by the German painters Heimrad Prem, Helmut Sturm and Hans-Peter Zimmer and the sculptor Lothar Fischer in 1957...
's "principles, methods and goals" were significantly in contrast with those of the SI. 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
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
since World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, and regarding it at the level of the avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
s in other countries.
The next significant split was in 1962, wherein the "Nashists," the Scandinavia
Scandinavia
Scandinavia is a cultural, historical and ethno-linguistic region in northern Europe that includes the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, characterized by their common ethno-cultural heritage and language. Modern Norway and Sweden proper are situated on the Scandinavian Peninsula,...
n section of the SI lead by Jørgen Nash
Jørgen Nash
Jørgen Nash was a Danish artist, writer and central proponent of situationism. He was born in Vejrum, Jutland, Denmark, baptized Jørgen Axel Jørgensen, the brother of Asger Jorn. He later changed his family name from Jørgensen to Nash. He was married three times and has six children...
, were excluded from the organization for lacking the theoretical rigor demanded by the Franco
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
-Belgian
Belgium
Belgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many...
section of SI led by Guy Debord. This excluded group would later declare themselves the 2nd Situationist International, basing their organization out of Sweden
Sweden
Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....
. Journalist Stewart Home
Stewart Home
Stewart Home is an English artist, filmmaker, writer, pamphleteer, art historian, and activist. He is best known for his novels such as the non-narrative 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess , his re-imagining of the 1960s in Tainted Love , and earlier parodistic pulp fictions Pure Mania, Red...
, who favored the "Nashists" and considered Debord a "mystic, an idealist, a dogmatist and a liar" 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' sought to concentrate solely on theoretical political aims.
Political Period (1963-1968)
Guy Debord
Guy Ernest Debord was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International . He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.-Early Life:Guy Debord was born in Paris in 1931...
and Raoul Vaneigem
Raoul Vaneigem
Raoul Vaneigem is a Belgian writer and philosopher. He was born in Lessines . After studying romance philology at the Free University of Brussels from 1952 to 1956, he participated in the Situationist International from 1961 to 1970...
, with some exceptions, such as Danish artist and author Asger Jorn
Asger Jorn
Asger Oluf Jorn was a Danish painter, sculptor, ceramic artist, and author. He was a founding member of the avant-garde movement COBRA and the Situationist International...
. 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
Spectacle (Situationism)
The spectacle is a central notion in the Situationist theory developed by Guy Debord. Guy Debord's 1967 book, The Society of the Spectacle, attempted to provide the Situationist International with a Marxian critical theory...
and Marxist
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
critical analysis, spending much less time on the more artistic and tangible concepts like unitary urbanism
Unitary Urbanism
Unitary urbanism was the critique of status quo urbanism employed by the Lettrist International and then further developed by the Situationist International between approximately 1953 and 1960....
, détournement
Detournement
A détournement is a technique developed in the 1950s by the Letterist International, and consist in "turning expressions of the capitalist system against itself." Détournement was prominently used to set up subversive political pranks, an influential tactic called situationist prank that was...
, and situgraphy.
During this period the SI began having more and more influence on local university students in France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
. Taking advantage of the apathy of their colleagues, five "Pro-situs", situationist-influenced students, infiltrated the University of Strasbourg
University of Strasbourg
The University of Strasbourg in Strasbourg, Alsace, France, is the largest university in France, with about 43,000 students and over 4,000 researchers....
's student union
Student activity center
A student activity center is a type of building found on university campuses. In the United States, such a building is more often called a student union, student commons, or student center...
in November 1966 and began scandalising the authorities. Their first action was to form an "anarchist
Social anarchism
Social anarchism is a term originally used in 1971 by Giovanni Baldelli as the title of his book where he discusses the organization of an ethical society from an anarchist point of view...
appreciation society" called The Society for the Rehabilitation for Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
and Ravachol
Ravachol
François Claudius Koenigstein, known as Ravachol, , was a French anarchist. He was born 14 October 1859 at Saint-Chamond and died guillotined 11 July 1892 at Montbrison.-Biography:...
; next they appropriated union funds to flypost
Flyposting
Flyposting is a guerilla marketing tactic through the act of placing advertising posters or flyers in legal or illegal places. In the United States, these posters are known as bandit signs, snipe signs, or street spam. Posters are adhered to construction site barricades, building facades, in...
"Return of the Durruti Column", Andre Bertrand
André Bertrand
André Bertrand is a French attorney expert in the area of intellectual property.He holds a PhD from the University of Paris and an LLM from UC Berkeley , from which he graduated in 1978....
's détourned
Detournement
A détournement is a technique developed in the 1950s by the Letterist International, and consist in "turning expressions of the capitalist system against itself." Détournement was prominently used to set up subversive political pranks, an influential tactic called situationist prank that was...
comic strip. They then invited the situationists to contribute a critique of the University of Strasbourg, and On the Poverty of Student Life
On the Poverty of Student Life
On the Poverty of Student Life: A Consideration of Its Economic, Political, Sexual, Psychological and Notably Intellectual Aspects and of a Few Ways to Cure it is a pamphlet first published by students of the University of Strasbourg and the Situationist International in 1966...
, written by Tunisia
Tunisia
Tunisia , officially the Tunisian RepublicThe long name of Tunisia in other languages used in the country is: , is the northernmost country in Africa. It is a Maghreb country and is bordered by Algeria to the west, Libya to the southeast, and the Mediterranean Sea to the north and east. Its area...
n situationist Mustapha/Omar Khayati was the result. 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.
May Events (1968)
The Situationists played a preponderant role in the May 1968 uprisings, and to some extent their political perspective and ideas fueled such crisis, providing a central theoretic foundation. 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.This has now been widely acknowledged as a fact by studies of the period, what is still wide open to interpretation is the "how and why" that happened. Charles de Gaulle
Charles de Gaulle
Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle was a French general and statesman who led the Free French Forces during World War II. He later founded the French Fifth Republic in 1958 and served as its first President from 1959 to 1969....
, 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."
They also made up the majority in the Occupation Committee of the Sorbonne
Occupation Committee of the Sorbonne
The Occupation Committee of the Sorbonne was a radical student group that occupied the Sorbonne during the May 1968 social unrest in France....
. An important event leading up to May 1968 was the scandal in Strasbourg in December 1966. The Union Nationale des Étudiants de France
Union nationale des étudiants de france
The National Union of Students of France is the main national students' union in 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
On the Poverty of Student Life
On the Poverty of Student Life: A Consideration of Its Economic, Political, Sexual, Psychological and Notably Intellectual Aspects and of a Few Ways to Cure it is a pamphlet first published by students of the University of Strasbourg and the Situationist International in 1966...
. 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
The Society of the Spectacle
The Society of the Spectacle is a work of philosophy and critical theory by Guy Debord. It was first published in 1967 in France.-Book structure:...
(1967) and Khayati's On the Poverty of Student Life (1966), were written on the walls of Paris and several provincial cities. This was documented in the collection of photographs published in 1968 by Walter Lewino, L'immagination au pouvoir.
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 dialectic
Dialectic
Dialectic is a method of argument for resolving disagreement that has been central to Indic and European philosophy since antiquity. The word dialectic originated in Ancient Greece, and was made popular by Plato in the Socratic dialogues...
al 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
René Viénet
René Viénet is a French sinologist who is famous as a situationist writer and filmmaker. Viénet used the situationist technique of détournement — the diversion of already existing cultural elements to new subversive purposes.- Career :...
'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
Enragés
Les Enragés were a loose amalgam of radicals active during the French Revolution. Politically they stood to the left of the Jacobins. Represented by Jacques Roux, Théophile Leclerc, Jean Varlet and others, they believed that liberty for all meant more than mere constitutional rights...
and the occupation of the Sorbonne
Sorbonne
The Sorbonne is an edifice of the Latin Quarter, in Paris, France, which has been the historical house of the former University of Paris...
.
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
Occupation of factories
Occupation of factories is a method of the workers' movement used to prevent lock outs. They may sometimes lead to "recovered factories," in which the workers self-manage the factories.They have been used in many strike actions, including:...
and the formation of workers’ councils, 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 SanguinettiGianfranco Sanguinetti
Gianfranco Sanguinetti was a writer and member of the Situationist International , a political art movement.Sanguinetti was deported from France in 1971 and settled in Italy....
and Guy Debord
Guy Debord
Guy Ernest Debord was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International . He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.-Early Life:Guy Debord was born in Paris in 1931...
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 (The Real Report on the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy), which (inspired by Bruno Bauer
Bruno Bauer
Bruno Bauer was a German philosopher and historian. As a student of GWF Hegel, Bauer was a radical Rationalist in philosophy, politics and Biblical criticism...
) 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
Piazza Fontana bombing
The Piazza Fontana Bombing was a terrorist attack that occurred on December 12, 1969 at 16:37, when a bomb exploded at the headquarters of Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura in Piazza Fontana in Milan, Italy, killing 17 people and wounding 88...
and other covert, false flag
False flag
False flag operations are covert operations designed to deceive the public in such a way that the operations appear as though they are being carried out by other entities. The name is derived from the military concept of flying false colors; that is flying the flag of a country other than one's own...
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 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, the SI was dissolved in 1972.
The Spectacle and Spectacular Society
The situationist theory of the spectacle is a development and application of the MarxistMarxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
concepts of commodification
Commodification
Commodification is the transformation of goods, ideas, or other entities that may not normally be regarded as goods into a commodity....
, reification
Reification (Marxism)
Reification or Versachlichung, literally "objectification" or regarding something as a separate business matter) is the consideration of an abstraction, relation or object as if they had human or living existence and abilities, when in reality they do not...
and alienation
Marx's theory of alienation
Marx's theory of alienation , as expressed in the writings of the young Karl Marx , refers to the separation of things that naturally belong together, or to put antagonism between things that are properly in harmony...
. In the opening of Das Kapital
Das Kapital
Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, and how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production.- Themes :In Capital: Critique of...
, Marx makes the observation that within the capitalist
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
mode of production
Mode of production
In the writings of Karl Marx and the Marxist theory of historical materialism, a mode of production is a specific combination of:...
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. In capitalist society, virtually identical products often have vastly different values simply because one has a more recognizable or prestigious brand name
Brand
The American Marketing Association defines a brand as a "Name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller's good or service as distinct from those of other sellers."...
. The value of a commodity
Commodity
In economics, a commodity is the generic term for any marketable item produced to satisfy wants or needs. Economic commodities comprise goods and services....
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
Advanced capitalism
In political philosophy, advanced capitalism is the situation that pertains in a society in which the capitalist model has been integrated and developed deeply and extensively and for a prolonged period of time...
commodifies experience and perception.
The spectacle is the unified, ever-increasing mass of image-objects and commodified
Commodification
Commodification is the transformation of goods, ideas, or other entities that may not normally be regarded as goods into a commodity....
experience detached from every aspect of life, fused in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation. The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.
Recuperation
To survive, the spectacle must maintain social controlSocial control
Social control refers generally to societal and political mechanisms or processes that regulate individual and group behavior, leading to conformity and compliance to the rules of a given society, state, or social group. Many mechanisms of social control are cross-cultural, if only in the control...
and effectively handle all threats to the social order
Social order
Social order is a concept used in sociology, history and other social sciences. It refers to a set of linked social structures, social institutions and social practices which conserve, maintain and enforce "normal" ways of relating and behaving....
. Recuperation
Recuperation (sociology)
Recuperation, in the sociological sense, is the process by which politically radical ideas and images are commodified and incorporated within a mainstream society and, thus, become interpreted through a more socially acceptable or conventional perspective. More broadly, it may refer to the...
, a concept first proposed by Guy Debord
Guy Debord
Guy Ernest Debord was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International . He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.-Early Life:Guy Debord was born in Paris in 1931...
, is the process by which the spectacle intercepts socially and politically radical
Political radicalism
The term political radicalism denotes political principles focused on altering social structures through revolutionary means and changing value systems in fundamental ways...
ideas and images, commodifies
Commodification
Commodification is the transformation of goods, ideas, or other entities that may not normally be regarded as goods into a commodity....
them, and safely incorporates them back within mainstream society. More broadly, it may refer to the appropriation
Cultural appropriation
Cultural appropriation is the adoption of some specific elements of one culture by a different cultural group. It describes acculturation or assimilation, but can imply a negative view towards acculturation from a minority culture by a dominant culture. It can include the introduction of forms of...
or co-opting of any subversive works or ideas by mainstream media. It is the opposite of détournement
Detournement
A détournement is a technique developed in the 1950s by the Letterist International, and consist in "turning expressions of the capitalist system against itself." Détournement was prominently used to set up subversive political pranks, an influential tactic called situationist prank that was...
, in which conventional ideas and images are commodified
Commodification
Commodification is the transformation of goods, ideas, or other entities that may not normally be regarded as goods into a commodity....
with radical intentions.
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 aestheticsAesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...
and politics, without separation between the two: art
Art
Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....
and politics are faced together and in revolutionary
Revolutionary
A revolutionary is a person who either actively participates in, or advocates revolution. Also, when used as an adjective, the term revolutionary refers to something that has a major, sudden impact on society or on some aspect of human endeavor.-Definition:...
terms. The SI analyzed the modern world from the point of view of everyday life
Everyday Life
Everyday Life is the first solo album made by Life MC of the British Hip Hop group Phi Life Cypher....
. The core arguments of the Situationist International were an attack on the capitalist degradation of the life of people and the fake models advertised by the mass media
Mass media
Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...
, to which the Situationist responded with alternative life experiences.
Answer: "Come suggeriva Debord: con pratiche di vita alternative." The alternative life experiences explored by the Situationists were the construction of situations, unitary urbanism
Unitary Urbanism
Unitary urbanism was the critique of status quo urbanism employed by the Lettrist International and then further developed by the Situationist International between approximately 1953 and 1960....
, psychogeography
Psychogeography
Psychogeography was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals." Another definition is "a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for...
, and the union of play, freedom and critical thinking.Nel Rapporto di Debord si legge inoltre una durissima critica allo sfruttamento capitalistico delle masse anche nel tempo libero attraverso l'industria del divertimento che abbrutisce la gente con sottoprodotti dell'ideologia mistificata della borghesia.
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. 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
General strike
A general strike is a strike action by a critical mass of the labour force in a city, region, or country. While a general strike can be for political goals, economic goals, or both, it tends to gain its momentum from the ideological or class sympathies of the participants...
that ever stopped the economy of an advanced industrial country
Developed country
A developed country is a country that has a high level of development according to some criteria. Which criteria, and which countries are classified as being developed, is a contentious issue...
and the first wildcat general strike
Wildcat strike action
A wildcat strike action, often referred to as a wildcat strike, is a strike action taken by workers without the authorization of their trade union officials. This is sometimes termed unofficial industrial action...
in history, 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 art20th century art
20th-century art and what it became known as — modern art — really began with modernism in the late 19th century. Nineteenth-century movements of Post Impressionism and Art Nouveau led to the first twentieth-century art movements of Fauvism in France and Die Brücke in Germany. Fauvism in Paris...
that is separated from topical political events. 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. 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
Official culture
Official culture is the culture that receives social legitimation or institutional support in a given society. Official culture is usually identified with bourgeoisie 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.
According to this theory, artists and intellectuals that accept such compromises are rewarded by the art dealer
Art dealer
An art dealer is a person or company that buys and sells works of art. Art dealers' professional associations serve to set high standards for accreditation or membership and to support art exhibitions and shows.-Role:...
s and praised by the dominant culture. 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. 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
Gruppe SPUR
Gruppe SPUR was an artistic collaboration formed by the German painters Heimrad Prem, Helmut Sturm and Hans-Peter Zimmer and the sculptor Lothar Fischer in 1957...
in 1962.
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.
Détournement
DétournementDetournement
A détournement is a technique developed in the 1950s by the Letterist International, and consist in "turning expressions of the capitalist system against itself." Détournement was prominently used to set up subversive political pranks, an influential tactic called situationist prank that was...
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
Happening
A happening is a performance, event or situation meant to be considered art, usually as performance art. Happenings take place anywhere , are often multi-disciplinary, with a nonlinear narrative and the active participation of the audience...
, and later identified it in historical events such as the Paris Commune
Paris Commune
The Paris Commune was a government that briefly ruled Paris from March 18 to May 28, 1871. It existed before the split between anarchists and Marxists had taken place, and it is hailed by both groups as the first assumption of power by the working class during the Industrial Revolution...
in which it exhibited itself as the revolutionary moment.
Psychogeography
The first edition of Internationale Situationniste defined psychogeographyPsychogeography
Psychogeography was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals." Another definition is "a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for...
as "the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment (whether consciously organized or not) on the emotions and behavior of individuals." 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
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 dériveDérive
In psychogeography, a dérive is an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, where an individual travels where the subtle aesthetic contours of the surrounding architecture and geography subconsciously direct them with the ultimate goal of encountering an entirely new and authentic...
("drift").
In the SI's 6th issue, Raoul Vaneigem
Raoul Vaneigem
Raoul Vaneigem is a Belgian writer and philosopher. He was born in Lessines . After studying romance philology at the Free University of Brussels from 1952 to 1956, he participated in the Situationist International from 1961 to 1970...
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". 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". 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.
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 DebordGuy Debord
Guy Ernest Debord was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International . He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.-Early Life:Guy Debord was born in Paris in 1931...
, Mohamed Dahoiu, Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, Maurice Wyckaert
Maurice Wyckaert
Maurice Wyckaert was a Belgian artist, born in 1923, in the city of Brussels. He is a neo-expressionistic, lyrical abstract painter, gouache designer and printmaker. Enjoyed his education at the Academy of Brussels and in Sint-Joost-ten-Node and the Vrije Atelier of Sint-Lambrechts-Woluwe...
, Constant Nieuwenhuys
Constant Nieuwenhuys
Constant Anton Nieuwenhuys was a Dutch painter, and one of the foremost innovators of Unitary Urbanism. In 1941, he became deeply interested in the work of Paul Cézanne, Cubism and German Expressionism....
, Asger Jorn
Asger Jorn
Asger Oluf Jorn was a Danish painter, sculptor, ceramic artist, and author. He was a founding member of the avant-garde movement COBRA and the Situationist International...
, Helmut Sturm
Helmut Sturm
Helmut Sturm was a German painter.He was born in Furth im Wald. From 1952 to 1958 he studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich. After this he joined Heimrad Prem, Lothar Fischer and Hans-Peter Zimmer in founding Gruppe SPUR, which in 1959 entered the Situationist International...
, Attila Kotanyi
Attila Kotányi
Attila Kotányi was a poet, philosopher, writer and architect-urbanist.In his early years in Budapest, Attila Kotányi belonged to the intellectual circle of philosopher Lajos Szabó and Béla Hamvas...
, Jørgen Nash
Jørgen Nash
Jørgen Nash was a Danish artist, writer and central proponent of situationism. He was born in Vejrum, Jutland, Denmark, baptized Jørgen Axel Jørgensen, the brother of Asger Jorn. He later changed his family name from Jørgensen to Nash. He was married three times and has six children...
, Uwe Lausen, Raoul Vaneigem
Raoul Vaneigem
Raoul Vaneigem is a Belgian writer and philosopher. He was born in Lessines . After studying romance philology at the Free University of Brussels from 1952 to 1956, he participated in the Situationist International from 1961 to 1970...
, Michèle Bernstein
Michèle Bernstein
Michèle Bernstein is a French novelist and critic, most usually remembered as a member of the Situationist International from its foundation in 1957 until 1967, and as the wife of its most prominent member, Guy Debord.-Early years:...
, Jeppesen Victor Martin, Jan Stijbosch, Alexander Trocchi
Alexander Trocchi
Alexander Whitelaw Robertson Trocchi was a Scottish novelist.-Early career:Trocchi was born in Glasgow to a Scottish mother and Italian father. After working as a seaman on the Murmansk convoys, he attended University of Glasgow. On graduation he obtained a traveling grant that enabled him to...
, Théo Frey, Mustapha Khayati, Donald Nicholson-Smith
Donald Nicholson-Smith
Donald Nicholson-Smith is a translator and freelance editor, interested in literature, art, psychoanalysis, social criticism, theory, history, crime fiction, and cinema.. Born in Manchester, England, he was an early translator of Situationist material into English. He joined the English section of...
, René Riesel, and René Viénet
René Viénet
René Viénet is a French sinologist who is famous as a situationist writer and filmmaker. Viénet used the situationist technique of détournement — the diversion of already existing cultural elements to new subversive purposes.- Career :...
.
Classic Situationist texts include: On the Poverty of Student Life
On the Poverty of Student Life
On the Poverty of Student Life: A Consideration of Its Economic, Political, Sexual, Psychological and Notably Intellectual Aspects and of a Few Ways to Cure it is a pamphlet first published by students of the University of Strasbourg and the Situationist International in 1966...
, Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, and The Revolution of Everyday Life
The Revolution of Everyday Life
The Revolution of Everyday Life is a 1967 book by Raoul Vaneigem, Belgian author, philosopher and former member of the Situationist International . In French the title of the work was more elaborate: Traité du savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations, or Treatise on Living for the Younger...
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
Ken Knabb
Ken Knabb is an American writer, translator, and theorist, best known for his translations of Guy Debord and the Situationist International.-Early life:...
, collected numerous SI documents which had previously never been seen in English.
Relationship with Marxism
Rooted firmly in the Marxist tradition, the Situationist International criticized Trotskyists, Marxism-LeninismMarxism-Leninism
Marxism–Leninism is a communist ideology, officially based upon the theories of Marxism and Vladimir Lenin, that promotes the development and creation of a international communist society through the leadership of a vanguard party over a revolutionary socialist state that represents a dictatorship...
, Stalinism
Stalinism
Stalinism refers to the ideology that Joseph Stalin conceived and implemented in the Soviet Union, and is generally considered a branch of Marxist–Leninist ideology but considered by some historians to be a significant deviation from this philosophy...
and Maoism
Maoism
Maoism, also known as the Mao Zedong Thought , is claimed by Maoists as an anti-Revisionist form of Marxist communist theory, derived from the teachings of the Chinese political leader Mao Zedong . Developed during the 1950s and 1960s, it was widely applied as the political and military guiding...
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
People's Republic of China
China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...
and the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
in the same breath as capitalism.
Debord's work The Society of the Spectacle
The Society of the Spectacle
The Society of the Spectacle is a work of philosophy and critical theory by Guy Debord. It was first published in 1967 in France.-Book structure:...
(1967) established situationist analysis as Marxist critical theory. The Society of the Spectacle is widely recognized as the main and most influential Situationist essay.
Anti-Stalinist left
The anti-Stalinist left is an element of left-wing politics that is critical of Joseph Stalin's policies and the political system that developed in the Soviet Union under his rule...
and against all repressive regimes.
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
Das Kapital
Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, and how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production.- Themes :In Capital: Critique of...
. 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
Wealth
Wealth is the abundance of valuable resources or material possessions. The word wealth is derived from the old English wela, which is from an Indo-European word stem...
is degraded to an immense accumulation of commodities, Debord argues that in advanced capitalism
Advanced capitalism
In political philosophy, advanced capitalism is the situation that pertains in a society in which the capitalist model has been integrated and developed deeply and extensively and for a prolonged period of time...
, 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". The spectacle, which according to Debord is the core feature of the advanced capitalist societies, has its "most glaring superficial manifestation" in the advertising
Advertising
Advertising is a form of communication used to persuade an audience to take some action with respect to products, ideas, or services. Most commonly, the desired result is to drive consumer behavior with respect to a commercial offering, although political and ideological advertising is also common...
-mass media
Mass media
Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...
-marketing
Marketing
Marketing is the process used to determine what products or services may be of interest to customers, and the strategy to use in sales, communications and business development. It generates the strategy that underlies sales techniques, business communication, and business developments...
complex.
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
Quality of life
The term quality of life is used to evaluate the general well-being of individuals and societies. The term is used in a wide range of contexts, including the fields of international development, healthcare, and politics. Quality of life should not be confused with the concept of standard of...
, our psychic functions are altered, we get a degradation of mind and also a degradation of knowledge
Knowledge
Knowledge is a familiarity with someone or something unknown, which can include information, facts, descriptions, or skills acquired through experience or education. It can refer to the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject...
. In the spectacular society, knowledge is not used anymore to question, analyze, or resolve contradiction
Contradiction
In classical logic, a contradiction consists of a logical incompatibility between two or more propositions. It occurs when the propositions, taken together, yield two conclusions which form the logical, usually opposite inversions of each other...
s, but to assuage reality. Such argument on the Spectacle as a mask of a degrading reality has been elaborated by many Situationist artists, producing détournement
Detournement
A détournement is a technique developed in the 1950s by the Letterist International, and consist in "turning expressions of the capitalist system against itself." Détournement was prominently used to set up subversive political pranks, an influential tactic called situationist prank that was...
s 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, interested in empowering the individual, in contrast to the perceived corrupt bureaucratic states of the Eastern bloc
Eastern bloc
The term Eastern Bloc or Communist Bloc refers to the former communist states of Eastern and Central Europe, generally the Soviet Union and the countries of the Warsaw Pact...
. Their anti-authoritarian interpretation of Marxist theory can be identified with the broader council communist
Council communism
Council communism is a current of libertarian Marxism that emerged out of the November Revolution in the 1920s, characterized by its opposition to state capitalism/state socialism as well as its advocacy of workers' councils as the basis for workers' democracy.Originally affiliated with the...
and libertarian Marxist
Libertarian Marxism
Libertarian Marxism refers to a broad scope of economic and political philosophies that emphasize the anti-authoritarian aspects of Marxism. Early currents of libertarian Marxism, known as left communism, emerged in opposition to Marxism–Leninism and its derivatives, such as Stalinism, Maoism, and...
movements, themselves more broadly termed as left communism
Left communism
Left communism is the range of communist viewpoints held by the communist left, which criticizes the political ideas of the Bolsheviks at certain periods, from a position that is asserted to be more authentically Marxist and proletarian than the views of Leninism held by the Communist International...
.
The last issue (1972) of the Situationist International journal, featured an editorial analyzing the events of May 1968. The editorial, written by Guy Debord
Guy Debord
Guy Ernest Debord was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International . He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.-Early Life:Guy Debord was born in Paris in 1931...
, was title The Beginning of an Era, probably as a detournement
Detournement
A détournement is a technique developed in the 1950s by the Letterist International, and consist in "turning expressions of the capitalist system against itself." Détournement was prominently used to set up subversive political pranks, an influential tactic called situationist prank that was...
reference of Nachalo
Nachalo
Nachalo was a Russian Marxist monthly magazine published in Saint Petersburg, Russia, in 1899.-Origins:When Novoye Slovo, the flagship magazine of the Saint Petersburg-based Legal Marxists, was suppressed by the Czarist government in December 1897, their leaders began planning a new magazine...
(The Beginning), a Russian Marxist monthly magazine.
According to Greil Marcus
Greil Marcus
Greil Marcus is an American author, music journalist and cultural critic. He is notable for producing scholarly and literary essays that place rock music in a much broader framework of culture and politics than is customary in pop music journalism.-Life and career:Marcus was born in San Francisco...
, some found similarities between the Situationists and the Yippies.
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'.
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 SpectacleThe Society of the Spectacle
The Society of the Spectacle is a work of philosophy and critical theory by Guy Debord. It was first published in 1967 in France.-Book structure:...
. In the final issue of the journal they rejected spontaneism and "mystics of nonorganization," labeling them as a form of "sub-anarchism":
Relationship with the Established Left
The S.I. poses a challenge to the model of political action of a portion of the Left, the "established Left" and "Left opinion-makers". 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, up-heavals for which much is still at stake and which many foresee as recurring in the 21st century. The second challenging aspect, is the comparison between the Situationists marxist theory of the Society of the Spectacle, which is still very topical thirty years later, and the current status of the theories supported by the 'established Left' in the same period, like Althusserianism, MaoismMaoism
Maoism, also known as the Mao Zedong Thought , is claimed by Maoists as an anti-Revisionist form of Marxist communist theory, derived from the teachings of the Chinese political leader Mao Zedong . Developed during the 1950s and 1960s, it was widely applied as the political and military guiding...
, workerism
Workerism
Workerism is a name given to different trends in left-wing political discourse, especially anarchism and Marxism. In one sense, it describes a political position concerning the political importance and centrality of the working class. Because this was of particular significance in the Italian...
, Freudo-Marxism
Freudo-Marxism
Freudo-Marxism is a loose designation of several twentieth-century critical theory schools of thought that sought to synthesize the philosophy and political economy of Karl Marx with the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud....
and others.
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
Art movement
An art movement is a tendency or style in art with a specific common philosophy or goal, followed by a group of artists during a restricted period of time, or, at least, with the heyday of the movement defined within a number of years...
, and thereby to minimize its role in the political and social movements of the sixties."
The core aspect of the revolutionary perspectives, and the political theory, of the Situationist International, has been neglected by some commentators, which either limited themselves to an apolitical reading of the situationist avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
art works, or dismissed the Situationist political theory. Examples of this are Simon Sadler
Simon Sadler
Simon Sadler is Professor of Architectural and Urban History in the Art History Program at the University of California, Davis. Formerly a Lecturer in Architectural History at the University of Nottingham...
's The Situationist City, and the accounts on the S.I. published by the New Left Review
New Left Review
New Left Review is a 160-page journal, published every two months from London, devoted to world politics, economy and culture. Often compared to the French-language Les Temps modernes, it is associated with Verso Books , and regularly features the essays of authorities on contemporary social...
.
The concept of revolution created by the Situationist International was anti-capitalist, Marxist, Young Hegelian, and from the very beginning in the 50s, remarkably differently from the established Left, anti-Stalinist
Anti-Stalinist left
The anti-Stalinist left is an element of left-wing politics that is critical of Joseph Stalin's policies and the political system that developed in the Soviet Union under his rule...
and against all repressive regimes. The S.I. called in May 1968 for the formation of Workers councils, and someone has argued that they were aligned with council communism
Council communism
Council communism is a current of libertarian Marxism that emerged out of the November Revolution in the 1920s, characterized by its opposition to state capitalism/state socialism as well as its advocacy of workers' councils as the basis for workers' democracy.Originally affiliated with the...
.
There was no separation between the artistic and the political perspectives. For instance, Asger Jorn
Asger Jorn
Asger Oluf Jorn was a Danish painter, sculptor, ceramic artist, and author. He was a founding member of the avant-garde movement COBRA and the Situationist International...
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.
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 BufeChaz Bufe
Charles Bufe, better known as Chaz Bufe, is a contemporary American Anarchist author.Bufe writes most notably on the problems faced by the modern anarchist movement...
asserts in Listen Anarchist! that "obscure situationist jargon" is a major problem in the anarchist movement.
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; in Italy, TV programs produced by situationist intellectuals, like Antonio Ricci's Striscia la notiziaStriscia la notizia
Striscia la notizia is an Italian television program on the Mediaset-controlled Canale 5. Its name in Italian translates as "the news slithers", a probable parody of the slighting italian journalist, submitted to politicians and overwhelmed with shame...
, or Carlo Freccero's programming schedule for Italia 1
Italia 1
Italia 1 is an Italian commercial television channel on the Mediaset network. It is oriented especially at young people.Italia 1 was launched in January 1982 and, originally, was owned by Rusconi; after a few months, however, due to the aggressive dumping practices of Silvio Berlusconi's rival...
in the early 1990s.
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
King Mob
King Mob was a radical group endeavouring to contribute to worldwide proletarian social revolution, based in London during the 1970s.It was a cultural mutation of the Situationists and the anarchist group Motherfuckers. They sought to emphasize the cultural anarchy and disorder being ignored in...
, the producers of Heatwave magazine (who later briefly joined the SI), and the Angry Brigade. In the US, groups like Black Mask
Black Mask (anarchists)
Black Mask was a radical anarchist art collective operating in New York City in the 1960s. They gained notoriety for their self-titled broadsheet as well as their public actions and demonstrations. The Black Mask was together from 1967 to late 1968 before reforming as Up Against the Wall...
(later Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers
Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers
Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers was an anarchist affinity group based in New York City...
), The Weathermen
Weatherman (organization)
Weatherman, known colloquially as the Weathermen and later the Weather Underground Organization , was an American radical left organization. It originated in 1969 as a faction of Students for a Democratic Society composed for the most part of the national office leadership of SDS and their...
, and the Rebel Worker
Chicago Surrealist Group
The Chicago Surrealist Group was founded in Chicago, Illinois in July, 1966 by Franklin and Penelope Rosemont after a 1965 trip to Paris, during which they had been in contact with André Breton...
group also explicitly employed their ideas.
Anarchist theorists such as Fredy Perlman
Fredy Perlman
Fredy Perlman was an author, publisher and activist. His most popular work, the book Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!, details the rise of state domination with a retelling of history through the Hobbesian metaphor of the Leviathan. The book remains a major source of inspiration for...
, Bob Black
Bob Black
Bob Black is an American anarchist. He is the author of The Abolition of Work and Other Essays, Beneath the Underground, Friendly Fire, Anarchy After Leftism, and numerous political essays.-Writing:Some of his work from the early 1980s includes...
, Hakim Bey, and John Zerzan
John Zerzan
John Zerzan is an American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author. His works criticize agricultural civilization as inherently oppressive, and advocate drawing upon the ways of life of prehistoric humans as an inspiration for what a free society should look like...
, have developed the SI's ideas in various directions away from Marxism. These theorists were predominantly associated with the magazines Fifth Estate
Fifth Estate
Fifth Estate is a US periodical, originally based in Detroit, Michigan, but now produced in a variety of locations. Its editorial collective shares divergent views on the topics the magazine addresses but generally shares an anti-authoritarian outlook and a non-dogmatic, action-oriented approach...
, Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed
Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed
Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed is a North American anarchist magazine, and is one of the most popular anarchist publications in North America. It could be described as a general interest and critical, non-ideological anarchist journal...
, and Green Anarchy
Green Anarchy
Green Anarchy was a magazine published by a collective located in Eugene, Oregon. The magazine's focus was primitivism, post-left anarchy, radical environmentalism, African American struggles, anarchist resistance, indigenous resistance, earth and animal liberation, anti-capitalism and supporting...
. 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.
CrimethInc.
CrimethInc., also known as CWC , is a decentralized anarchist collective of autonomous cells. CrimethInc. emerged in the mid-1990s, initially as the hardcore zine Inside Front, and began operating as a collective in 1996...
collective also claim Situationist influence.
Situationist urban theory, defined initially by the members of the Lettrist International
Lettrist International
The Letterist International was a Paris-based collective of radical artists and theorists between 1952 and 1957. It was created by Guy Debord as a schism from Isidore Isou's Letterist group...
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
London Psychogeographical Association
The London Psychogeographical Association is an organisation devoted to psychogeography. The LPA is perhaps best understood in the context of psychogeographical praxis.-London Psychogeographical Institute:...
also inspired many new pscyhogeographical groups including Manchester Area Psychogeographic. The LPA and the Neoist Alliance along with the Luther Blissett
Luther Blissett (nom de plume)
Luther Blissett is a multiple-use name, an "open reputation" informally adopted and shared by hundreds of artists and activists all over Europe and the Americas since 1994...
Project came together to form a New Lettrist International
Lettrist International
The Letterist International was a Paris-based collective of radical artists and theorists between 1952 and 1957. It was created by Guy Debord as a schism from Isidore Isou's Letterist group...
with a specifically Communist perspective. Around this time, Unpopular Books
Unpopular Books
Unpopular Books is a publisher in London's East End, producing leaflets, pamphlets and books.- Leaflets, pamphlets and booklets :* Jean Barrot - What is Communism * Jean Barrot - Fascism/Antifascism...
and the LPA released some key texts including new translations of Asger Jorn
Asger Jorn
Asger Oluf Jorn was a Danish painter, sculptor, ceramic artist, and author. He was a founding member of the avant-garde movement COBRA and the Situationist International...
's work.
Around this time also, groups such as Reclaim the Streets
Reclaim the Streets
Reclaim The Streets is a collective with a shared ideal of community ownership of public spaces. Participants characterize the collective as a resistance movement opposed to the dominance of corporate forces in globalization, and to the car as the dominant mode of transport.-Protests:Reclaim The...
and Adbusters
AdBusters
The Adbusters Media Foundation is a Canadian-based not-for-profit, anti-consumerist, pro-environment organization founded in 1989 by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz in Vancouver, British Columbia...
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 rockPunk rockPunk rock is a rock music genre that developed between 1974 and 1976 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Rooted in garage rock and other forms of what is now known as protopunk music, punk rock bands eschewed perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s 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 MobKing MobKing Mob was a radical group endeavouring to contribute to worldwide proletarian social revolution, based in London during the 1970s.It was a cultural mutation of the Situationists and the anarchist group Motherfuckers. They sought to emphasize the cultural anarchy and disorder being ignored in...
and Jamie ReidJamie ReidJamie Reid is a British artist and anarchist with connections to the Situationists. His work, featuring letters cut from newspaper headlines in the style of a ransom note, came close to defining the image of punk rock, particularly in the UK...
). In the late 1970s, Factory RecordsFactory RecordsFactory Records was a Manchester based British independent record label, started in 1978 by Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus, which featured several prominent musical acts on its roster such as Joy Division, New Order, A Certain Ratio, The Durutti Column, Happy Mondays, Northside and James and...
owner Tony WilsonTony WilsonAnthony Howard Wilson, commonly known as Tony Wilson , was an English record label owner, radio presenter, TV show host, nightclub manager, impresario and journalist for Granada Television and the BBC....
was known to have been influenced by these ideas. One Factory Records band influenced by the SI was The Durutti ColumnThe Durutti ColumnThe Durutti Column are an English post-punk band formed in 1978 in Manchester, England. The band is an ongoing project of guitarist Vini Reilly who is often accompanied by drummer Bruce Mitchell. Other current members are Keir Stewart and Reilly's girlfriend Poppy Morgan...
, which took its name from Andre Bertrand's collage Le Retour de la Colonne Durutti. Bertrand, in turn, took his title from the anarchist group of the same nameDurruti ColumnThe Durruti Column was the largest anarchist column formed during the Spanish Civil War . During the first months of the war it has come to be the most recognized and popular military organisations fighting at the republican side...
of the Spanish Civil WarSpanish Civil WarThe Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
. 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. Other musical artists have included buzzwords from the SI's critical theory in their lyrics, such as the Manic Street PreachersManic Street PreachersManic Street Preachers are a Welsh alternative rock band, formed in 1986. They are James Dean Bradfield, Nicky Wire, Richey Edwards and Sean Moore. The band are part of the Cardiff music scene, and were at their most prominent during the 1990s...
, the Nation of Ulysses, Joan of ArcJoan of Arc (band)Joan of Arc are an American indie rock band from Chicago, Illinois. They formed in 1995, following the breakup of Cap'n Jazz.Singer Tim Kinsella has been the only permanent member of the group; he has also recorded as a solo artist....
, and RefusedRefusedRefused was a Swedish hardcore punk band originating from Umeå, Sweden, formed in 1991. In total the band released five EPs and three albums, before splitting up in 1998...
. Situationist theory experienced a vogue in the late '90s hardcore punkHardcore punkHardcore punk is an underground music genre that originated in the late 1970s, following the mainstream success of punk rock. Hardcore is generally faster, thicker, and heavier than earlier punk rock. The origin of the term "hardcore punk" is uncertain. The Vancouver-based band D.O.A...
scene, being referenced by OrchidOrchid (band)Orchid was a screamo band from Amherst, Massachusetts, United States. Considered by many to be one of the pioneers of the "screamo" sound, Orchid combined this with a post-modern aesthetic, releasing several extended play and splits as well as three LPs...
, His Hero Is GoneHis Hero is GoneHis Hero Is Gone was an influential crust punk and sludge metal band from Memphis, Tennessee. Formed in 1995 from members of Copout, Man With Gun Lives Here, and FaceDown, they disbanded in 1999, playing their last show in Memphis. They toured the U.S. extensively several times, as well as Europe...
, and CrimethInc.CrimethInc.CrimethInc., also known as CWC , is a decentralized anarchist collective of autonomous cells. CrimethInc. emerged in the mid-1990s, initially as the hardcore zine Inside Front, and began operating as a collective in 1996...
. - Situationist practices allegedly continue to influence underground street artists such as BanksyBanksyBanksy is a pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, film director, and painter.His satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine irreverent dark humour with graffiti done in a distinctive stencilling technique...
, 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 NeoismNeoismNeoism is a parodistic -ism. It refers both to a specific subcultural network of artistic performance and media experimentalists, and more generally to a practical underground philosophy...
, Seahorse Liberation Army, Nation of UlyssesNation of UlyssesThe Nation of Ulysses was an American punk rock band from Washington, D.C., formed in spring 1988 with four members. Originally known as simply "Ulysses," the first mark of the group consisted of Ian Svenonius on vocals and trumpet, Steve Kroner on guitar, Steve Gamboa on bass guitar, and James...
, Libre SocietyLibre SocietyThe Libre Society is a radical artistic and cultural movement that is committed to releasing free/libre/open-source art, music and literature. The Libre Society released a manifesto, called the Libre Manifesto, as its call to action....
, and Mark DivoMark DivoMark Divo is a Luxembourgeois conceptual artist and curator who organises large scale interactive art projects incorporating the work of a number of well-known underground artists. His own work involves performance, photography, installation, often using found material.-Career:Between 1988 and...
. - Some hacker related e-zines, which, like samizdatSamizdatSamizdat was a key form of dissident activity across the Soviet bloc in which individuals reproduced censored publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader...
, 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 ZengotitaThomas de ZengotitaThomas de Zengotita is an author and contributing editor at Harper's Magazine. He holds an anthropology Ph.D from Columbia University and teaches at the Dalton School and New York University. His most recent book is called Mediated: How the Media Shapes your World and the Way you Live in it . De...
in "Mediated" wrote something which holds the spirit of the Situationists, describing the society of the "roaring zeroes" (i.e. 2000-).
Further reading
- Ford, SimonSimon FordSimon Gary Ford is an English-born Jamaican professional footballer who plays as a defender for Football League One side Chesterfield....
The Situationist International: A User's Guide (Black Dog, London, 2004) ISBN 978-1-904772-05-7 - Tom McDonough (2004) (Editor) Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents. The MIT PressMIT PressThe MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts .-History:...
(April 1, 2004) 514 pages ISBN 978-0-262-63300-0 - Sadler, SimonSimon SadlerSimon Sadler is Professor of Architectural and Urban History in the Art History Program at the University of California, Davis. Formerly a Lecturer in Architectural History at the University of Nottingham...
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, McKenzieMcKenzie WarkMcKenzie Wark is an Australian-born writer and scholar. He works mainly on media theory, critical theory and new media. His best known works are A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory.-Life:...
50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International (Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2008) ISBN 978-1-56898-789-7 - Wark, McKenzieMcKenzie WarkMcKenzie Wark is an Australian-born writer and scholar. He works mainly on media theory, critical theory and new media. His best known works are A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory.-Life:...
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