Situationist International

The Situationist International (SI) was an international organization of social revolutionaries made up of avant-garde artists, intellectuals, and political theorists. It was prominent in Europe from its formation in 1957 to its dissolution in 1972. The intellectual foundations of the Situationist International were derived primarily from libertarian Marxism and the avant-garde art movements of the early 20th century, particularly Dada and Surrealism. The situationists believed that the shift from individual expression through directly lived experiences, or the first-hand fulfillment of authentic desires, to individual expression by proxy through the exchange or consumption of commodities, or passive second-hand alienation, inflicted significant and far-reaching damage to the quality of human life for both individuals and society.

The situationists recognized that capitalism had changed since Karl Marx's formative writings, but maintained that his analysis of the capitalist mode of production remained fundamentally correct; they rearticulated and expanded upon several classical Marxist concepts, such as his theory of alienation.

The Situationist International strongly resisted use of the term "situationism", which Debord called a "meaningless term", adding "[t]here is no such thing as situationism, which would mean a doctrine for interpreting existing conditions". In The Society of the Spectacle, Debord asserted that ideology was "the abstract will to universality and the illusion thereof" which was "legitimated in modern society by universal abstraction and by the effective dictatorship of illusion".

History

Origins (1945–1955)

The situationist movement had its origins as a left wing tendency within Lettrism, an artistic and literary movement led by the Romanian-born French poet and visual artist Isidore Isou, originating in 1940s Paris. The group was heavily influenced by the preceding avant-garde movements of Dadaism and Surrealism, seeking to apply critical theories based on these concepts to all areas of art and culture, most notably in poetry, film, painting and political theory. André Breton prominently came out in support of the action in a letter that spawned a large debate in the 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 avant-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.

Formation (1956–1957)

In 1956, Guy Debord, a member of the Lettrist International, and Asger Jorn of the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, brought together a group of artistic collectives for the First World Congress of Free Artists in Alba, Italy. The meeting established the foundation for the development of the Situationist International, which was officially formed in July 1957 at a meeting in Cosio di Arroscia, Italy. The resulting International was a fusion of these extremely small avant-garde collectives: the Lettrist International, the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus (an offshoot of COBRA), and the London Psychogeographical Association, although Anselm Jappe has argued that the group pivoted around Jorn and Debord for the first four years. 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 Michèle Bernstein. Debord and Bernstein later married. In June 1957, Debord wrote the manifesto of the Situationist International, titled Report on the Construction of Situations. This manifesto plans a rereading of Karl Marx's Das Kapital and advocates a cultural revolution in western countries.

Artistic period (1958–1962)

thumb|right|[[Danes|Danish painter, sculptor, ceramic artist, and author Asger Jorn, founding member of the Situationist International.]]

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

thumb|left|Internationale situationniste

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"; and the betrayal, in the Spur #7 issue, of a common agreement on the Gruppe SPUR and SI publications.

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-gardes in other countries. The next significant split was in 1962, wherein the "Nashists", the Scandinavian section of the SI led by Jørgen Nash, were excluded from the organization. Nash created the 2nd Situationist International.

Political period (1963–1968)

By this point, the Situationist International consisted almost exclusively of the Franco-Belgian section, led by Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem. 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", André Bertrand's détourned comic strip. providing a central theoretical foundation. While SI's member count had been steadily falling for the preceding several years, the ones that remained were able to fill revolutionary roles for which they had patiently anticipated and prepared. The active ideologists ("enragés" and Situationists) behind the revolutionary events in Strasbourg, Nanterre and Paris, numbered only about one or two dozen persons. 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.

The Situationists made up the majority in the Occupation Committee of the Sorbonne. 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. 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, which (inspired by Bruno Bauer) purported to be the cynical writing of "Censor", a powerful industrialist. The pamphlet argued that the ruling class of Italy supported the Piazza Fontana bombing and other covert, false flag mass slaughter for the higher goal of defending the capitalist status quo from communist influence. The pamphlet was mailed to 520 of Italy's most powerful individuals. It was received as genuine and powerful politicians, industrialists and journalists praised its content. After reprinting the tract as a small book, Sanguinetti revealed himself to be the true author. In the outcry that ensued, 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,

Main concepts

The spectacle and its society

The Spectacle is a central notion in situationist theory, developed by Guy Debord in his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle. In a limited sense, spectacle includes the mass media, which are "its most glaring superficial manifestation." Debord said that the society of the spectacle came to existence in the late 1920s. The critique of the spectacle is a development and application of Karl Marx's concept of fetishism of commodities, reification and alienation, and the way it was reprised by György Lukács in 1923. In the society of the spectacle, the commodities rule the workers and the consumers instead of being ruled by them. The consumers are passive subjects that contemplate the reified spectacle. As early as 1958, in the situationist manifesto, Debord described official culture as a "rigged game", where conservative powers forbid subversive ideas to have direct access to the public discourse. Such ideas get first trivialized and sterilized, and then they are safely incorporated back within mainstream society, where they can be exploited to add new flavors to old dominant ideas. This technique of the spectacle is sometimes called recuperation, and its counter-technique is the détournement.

Détournement

A détournement is a technique developed in the 1950s by the Letterist International, like turning slogans and logos against the advertisers or the political status quo. Détournement was prominently used to set up subversive political pranks, an influential tactic called situationist prank that was reprised by the punk movement in the late 1970s and inspired the culture jamming movement in the late 1980s. 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, as well as the fake models advertised by the mass media, A major stance of the SI was to count on the force of a revolutionary proletariat. The SI remarked that this is a core Situationist principle, and that those that do not understand it and agree with it, are not Situationist. 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 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.

SI engaged in a play-form that was also

practiced by its predecessor organization, the Lettrist International, the art of wandering through urban space, which they termed dérive, whose unique mood is conveyed in Debord's darkly romantic meaning of palindrome. Two excursions organized by Andre Breton serve as the closest cultural precedents to the dérive. The first in 1921, was an excursion to the Church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre with the Parisian Dadaists; the second excursion was on 1 May 1923, when a small group of Surrealists walked toward the countryside outside of Blois. Debord was cautious however to differentiate between the derive and such precedents. He emphasized its active character as "a mode of experimental behavior" that reached to Romanticism, the Baroque, and the age of chivalry, with its tradition of long adventures voyages. Such urban roaming was characteristic of Left Bank bohemianism in Paris.

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.

Political theory

Major works

Twelve issues of the main French edition of journal Internationale Situationniste were published. Each issue was edited by a different individual or group, including: Guy Debord, Hadj Mohamed Dahou, 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 Strijbosch, 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.

Relationship with Marxism

Rooted firmly in the Marxist tradition, the Situationist International criticized Trotskyism, Marxism–Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism from a position they believed to be further left and more properly Marxist. The situationists possessed a strong anti-authoritarian current, commonly deriding the centralized bureaucracies of China and the Soviet Union in the same breath as capitalism. Debord'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 1950s also remarkably differently from the established anti-Stalinist left 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 contradictions, but to assuage reality. 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 (1969) of the Situationist International journal, featured an editorial analyzing the events of May 1968. The editorial, written by Guy Debord, was titled The Beginning of an Era, probably as a détournement 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 T. J. Clark and Donald 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". Debord did a critical assessment of the anarchists in his 1967 The Society of the Spectacle. In the final, 12th issue of the journal, the situationists rejected spontaneism and the "mystics of nonorganization," labeling them as a form of "sub-anarchism":

According to situationist Ken Knabb, Debord pointed out the flaws and merits of both Marxism and anarchism. He argued that "the split between Marxism and anarchism crippled both sides. The anarchists rightly criticized the authoritarian and narrowly economistic tendencies in Marxism, but they generally did so in an undialectical, moralistic, ahistorical manner... and leaving Marx and a few of the more radical Marxists with a virtual monopoly on coherent dialectical analysis—until the situationists finally brought the libertarian and dialectical aspects back together again."

Relationship with the established left

The SI poses a challenge to the model of political action of a portion of the left, the "established Left" and "Left opinion-makers". 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,

Reception

Criticism

Critics of the Situationists frequently assert that their ideas are not in fact complex and difficult to understand, but are at best simple ideas expressed in deliberately difficult language, and at worst actually nonsensical. For example, anarchist Chaz Bufe asserts in Listen Anarchist! that "obscure situationist jargon" is a major problem in the anarchist movement. Andrea Gibbons argues that the Parisian situationists failed to take on board practically or theoretically the experience of their African members, such as is shown by Abdelhafid Khattib's experience of police harassment while conducting psychogeographic research on Les Halles in 1958. She remarks how little the suppression of Algerians in Paris had impacted their activity and thinking – Bernstein and Debord co-signed the Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War in 1961, which led to them being questioned by the police. She cites a letter written by Jacqueline de Jong, Jorgen Nash, and Ansgar Elde protesting the expulsion of the Spur group in 1962 which highlights the political repression in Paris at that time. Gibbons also criticises the lack of mention of the Algerian situationists in either Debord's or Vaneigem's memoirs.

Influence

Debord's analysis of the spectacle has been 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 notizia, 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 of Situationist concepts in combination with a variety of other perspectives. Examples of these groups include: in Amsterdam, the Provos; in the UK, King Mob, the producers of Heatwave magazine (including Charles Radcliffe who later briefly joined the English Section of the Situationist International), 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.

In turn, Bertrand took his title from the eponymous anarchist army during the Spanish Civil War). American punk group the Feederz have been acclaimed as exhibiting a more direct and conscious influence. Formed in the late 1970s, they became known for extensive use of detournement and their intention to provoke their audience through the exposition of situationist themes. Other musical artists whose lyrics and artwork have referenced situationist concepts include the Clash, Pussy Riot, Crass, Tom Robinson Band, Ian Dury, X-Ray Spex, Sham 69, Buzzcocks, the Fall, Patrik Fitzgerald, Conflict, the Royal Family and the Poor, Angelic Upstarts, Chaos UK, Chaotic Dischord, MDC, Dead Kennedys, Reagan Youth, Chumbawamba and Manic Street Preachers. Situationist theory experienced a vogue in the late '90s hardcore punk scene, when it was referenced by Orchid, His Hero Is Gone and CrimethInc.

Situationist ideas may be found within the development of other avant-garde threads such as neoism, as well as artists such as Mark Divo and American artist Joey Skaggs who has been compared to Situationist practitioners for his use of staged spectacles and media infiltration to subvert dominant cultural narratives. His satirical hoaxes, such as Cathouse for Dogs and Portofess, reflect Situationist strategies like détournement by exposing media complicity and challenging societal norms. Writers such as Thomas de Zengotita have echoed situationist theories regarding the spectacle of contemporary society.

Notes

References

Full text.
Derrida, Jacques (2002) Q&A session at Film Forum, New York City, 23 October 2002, transcript by Gil Kofman. Published in Kirby Dick, Amy Ziering Kofman, Jacques Derrida (2005) Derrida: screenplay and essays on the film

External links

Situationist International Online
The Situationist International Text Library
Situationist Cinema at 0xDB
Translations of all twelve issues of Internationale Situationniste
"REVOLUTIONARY ABSENCE" by Ara H. Merjian found in Issue 67 of Cabinet Magazine (2019–20).