{"id":5479,"date":"2021-07-18T22:45:48","date_gmt":"2021-07-18T21:45:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kennywilson.org\/?p=5479"},"modified":"2021-07-18T22:45:48","modified_gmt":"2021-07-18T21:45:48","slug":"the-long-walk-of-the-situationist-international-greil-marcus-the-village-voice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/2021\/07\/18\/the-long-walk-of-the-situationist-international-greil-marcus-the-village-voice\/","title":{"rendered":"The Long Walk of the Situationist International | Greil Marcus (The Village Voice)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe situationists were bent on discovering the absolute ability to criticize anyone, anywhere \u2014 without re\u00adstraint, without the pull of alliances, and without self-satisfaction. And they were bent on turning that criticism into event.\u201d<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

by GREIL MARCUS<\/a><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Originally published May 1, 1982<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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How Extreme Was It<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014 1 \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I first became intrigued with the Situ\u00adationist International in 1979, when I strug\u00adgled through \u201cLe Bruit et la Fureur,\u201d one of the anonymous lead articles in the first issue of the journal Internationale Situationniste.<\/em> The writer reviewed the exploits of artistic rebels in the postwar West as if such matters had real political consequences, and then said this: \u201cThe rotten egg smell exuded by the idea of God envelops the mystical cretins of the American \u2018Beat Generation,\u2019 and is not even entirely absent from the declarations of the Angry Young Men\u2026 They have simply come to change their opinions about a few social conventions without even noticing the whole change of terrain<\/em> of all cultural activ\u00adity so evident in every avant-garde tendency of this century. The Angry Young Men are in fact particularly reactionary in their attribution of a privileged, redemptive value to the practice of literature: they are defending a mystification that was denounced in Europe around 1920 and whose survival today is of greater counterrevolutionary significance than that of the British Crown.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mystical cretins\u2026 finally, I thought (for\u00adgetting the date of the publication before me), someone has cut through the suburban cul-de-sac that passed for cultural rebellion in the 1950s. But this wasn\u2019t \u201cfinally\u201d \u2014 it was 1958, in a sober, carefully printed magazine (oddly illustrated with captionless photos of women in bathing suits), in an article that concluded: \u201cIf we are not surrealists it is because we don\u2019t want to be bored<\/em>\u2026 Decrepit surrealism, raging and ill-informed youth, well-off adolescent rebels lacking perspective but far from lacking a cause \u2014 boredom is what they all have in common. The situationists will execute the judgment contemporary leisure is pronouncing against itself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Strange stuff \u2014 almost mystifying for an American \u2014 but there was a power in the prose that was even more seductive than the hard-nosed dismissal of the Beat generation. This was the situationist style \u2014 what one commentator called \u201ca rather irritating form of hermetic terrorism,\u201d a judgment situ\u00adationist Raoul Vaneigem would quote with approval. Over the next decade it never really changed, but only became more seductive and more hard-nosed, because it discovered more seductive and hard-nosed opponents. Beginning with the notion that modern life was boring and therefore wrong<\/em>, the situationists sought out every manifestation of alienation and domination and every man\u00adifestation of the opposition produced by al\u00adienation and domination. They turned out original analyses of the former (whether it was the Kennedy-era fallout shelter program in \u201cThe Geopolitics of Hibernation\u201d \u2014 what a title! \u2014 or the Chinese cultural revolution in \u201cThe Explosion Point of Ideology in China\u201d) and mercilessly criticized the timidity and limits of the latter. In every case they tried to link specifics to a totality \u2014 why was the world struggling to turn itself inside out, and how could it be made to do so? What were the real sources of revolution in postwar society, and how were they different from any that had come before?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Situationist International Antho\u00adlogy<\/em> contains pre-SI documents, 250 pages of material from the situationist journal, May 1968 documents, two filmscripts, and far more, stretching from 1953, four years before the Situationist International was formed, to 1971, a year before its formal dissolution. It is exhilarating to read this book \u2014 to confront a group that was determined to make enemies, burn bridges, deny itself the rewards of cele\u00adbrity, to find and maintain its own voice in a world where, it seemed, all other voices of cultural or political resistance were either cravenly compromised or so lacking in consciousness they did not even recognize their compromises.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014 2 \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The attack on the Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men \u2014 in 1958, it is worth remembering, considered in the English-\u00adspeaking world the very summa<\/em> of \u201canti\u00ad-Establishment\u201d negation \u2014 was an opening round in a struggle the situationists thought was already going on, and a move toward a situation they meant to construct. \u201cOur ideas are in everyone\u2019s mind,\u201d they would say more than once over the next 10 years. They meant that their ideas for a different world were in everyone\u2019s mind as desires, but not yet as ideas. Their project was to expose the empti\u00adness of everyday life in the modern world and to make the link between desire and idea real. They meant to make that link so real it would be acted upon by almost everyone, since in the modern world, in the affluent capitalist West and the bureaucratic state-capitalist East, the split between desire and idea was part of almost everyone\u2019s life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Throughout the next decade, the situationists argued that the alienation which in the 19th century was rooted in production had, in the 20th century, become rooted in consumption. Consumption had come to de\u00adfine happiness and to suppress all other pos\u00adsibilities of freedom and selfhood. Lenin had written that under communism everyone would become an employee of the state; that was no less capitalism than the Western ver\u00adsion, in which everyone was first and fore\u00admost a member of an economy based in com\u00admodities. The cutting edge of the present-day contradiction \u2014 that place where the way of life almost everyone took for granted grated most harshly against what life promised and what it delivered \u2014 was as much leisure as work. This meant the concepts behind \u201ccul\u00adture\u201d were as much at stake as the ideas behind industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Culture, the situationists thought, was \u201cthe Northwest Passage\u201d to a superseding of the dominant society. This was where they started; this was the significance of their attack on the Beat generation. It was a means to a far more powerful attack on the nature of modern society itself: on the division of labor, the fragmentation of work and thought, the manner in which the material success of mod\u00adern life had leaped over all questions of the quality of life, in which \u201cthe struggle against poverty\u2026 [had] overshot its ultimate goal, the liberation of man from material cares,\u201d and produced a world in which, \u201cfaced with the alternative of love or a garbage disposal unit, young people of all countries have chosen the garbage disposal unit.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have presented a bare outline of the situationist perspective, but perhaps more important for a reader in 1982 is the use the situationists made of that perspective. Un\u00adlike many with whom they shared certain notions \u2014 Norman Mailer, the Marxist soci\u00adologist Henri Lefebvre, the gauchiste<\/em> review Socialisme ou Barbarie \u2014 <\/em>the situationists were bent on discovering the absolute ability to criticize anyone, anywhere \u2014 without re\u00adstraint, without the pull of alliances, and without self-satisfaction. And they were bent on turning that criticism into events.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014 3 \u2014 <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The situationists thought of themselves as avant-garde revolutionaries, linked as clearly to dada as to Marx. One could trace them back to Saint-Just \u2014 the 22-year-old who ar\u00adrived in Paris in 1789 with a blasphemous epic poem, Organt<\/em> (an account of the raping of nuns and of endless sexual adventures), and became the coldest, most romantic, most brilliant, most tragic administrator of the Terror. Prosecutor of Louis XVI, he gave his head to the same guillotine a year later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More directly, situationist thinking began in Paris in the early 1950s, when Guy Debord and a few other members of the Lettrist International \u2014 a group, known mostly to itself, which had split off from the Lettrists, a tiny, postwar neodada movement of anti-\u00adart intellectuals and students \u2014 devoted themselves to d\u00e9rives<\/em>: to drifting through the city for days, weeks, even months at a time, looking for what they called the city\u2019s psychogeography. They meant to find signs of what lettrist Ivan Chtcheglov called \u201cforgot\u00adten desires\u201d \u2014 images of play, eccentricity, secret rebellion, creativity, and negation. That led them into the Paris catacombs, where they sometimes spent the night. They looked for images of refusal, or for images society had itself refused, hidden, sup\u00adpressed, or \u201crecuperated\u201d \u2014 images of refusal, nihilism, or freedom that society had taken back into itself, co-opted or rehabilitated, isolated or discredited. Rooted in similar but intellectually (and physically!) far more lim\u00adited surrealist expeditions of the 1920s, the d\u00e9rives<\/em> were a search, Guy Debord would write many years later, for the \u201csupersession of art.\u201d They were an attempt to fashion a new version of daily life \u2014 a new version of how people organized their wishes, pains, fears, hopes, ambitions, limits, social rela\u00adtionships, and identities, a process that ordi\u00adnarily took place without consciousness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The few members of the grandiosely named Lettrist International wanted to re\u00adshape daily life according to the desires dis\u00adcovered and affirmed by modern art. Dada, at the Cabaret Voltaire \u201ca laboratory for the rehabilitation of everyday life\u201d in which art as art was denounced and scattered, \u201cwanted to suppress art without realizing it,<\/em>\u201d Debord wrote in 1967, in his book The Society of the Spectacle<\/em>. \u201cSurrealism wanted to realize art without suppressing it<\/em>.\u201d In other words, dada wanted to kill off the claim that art was superior to life and leave art for dead. Sur\u00adrealism wanted to turn the impulses that led one to create art into a recreation of life, but it also wanted to maintain the production of art works. Thus surrealism ended up as just another debilitated, gallery-bound art move\u00adment, a fate dada avoided at the price of being almost completely ignored. The Let\u00adtrist International thought art had to be both suppressed as separate, special activity, and<\/em> turned into life. That was the meaning of supersession, and that was the meaning of a group giving itself up to the pull of the city. It was also the meaning of the LI\u2019s attack on art as art. Debord produced a film without images; with the Danish painter Asger Jorn, he created a book \u201c \u2018composed entirely of prefabricated elements,\u2019 in which the writing on each page runs in all directions and the reciprocal relations of the phrases are in\u00advariably uncompleted.\u201d Not only was the book impossible to \u201cread,\u201d it featured a sand\u00adpaper jacket, so that when placed in a book\u00adshelf it would eat other books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In 1952, at the Ritz, the LI broke up a Charlie Chaplin press conference, part of the huge publicity campaign for Limelight.<\/em> \u201cWe believe that the most urgent expression of freedom is the destruction of idols, especially when they present themselves in the name of freedom,\u201d they explained. \u201cThe provocative tone of our leaflet was an attack against a unanimous, servile enthusiasm.\u201d (Pro\u00advocative was perhaps not the word. \u201cNo More Flat Feet,\u201d the leaflet Debord and others scattered in the Ritz, read: \u201cBecause you [Chaplin] identified yourself with the weak and the oppressed, to attack you was to strike the weak and the oppressed, but in the shadow of your rattan cane some could al\u00adready discern the policeman\u2019s night\u00adstick\u2026\u201d) The lettrist radicals practiced graffiti on the walls of Paris (one of their favorite mottoes, \u201cNever work!,\u201d would show up 15 years later during May 1968, and 13 years after that in Bow Wow Wow\u2019s \u201cW.O.R.K.,\u201d written by Malcolm McLaren). They painted slogans on their ties, shoes, and pants, hoping to walk the streets as living examples of d\u00e9tournement<\/em> \u2014 the diversion of an element of culture or everyday life (in this case, simply clothes) to a new and displacing purpose. The band \u201clived on the margins of the economy. It tended toward a role of pure consumption\u201d \u2014 not of commodities, but \u201cof time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Period of Time<\/em>, Debord\u2019s 1959 film on the group:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Voice 1<\/em>: That which was directly lived reappears frozen in the distance, fit into the tastes and illusions of an era carried away with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Voice 2<\/em>: The appearance of events we have not made, that others have made against us, obliges us from now on to be aware of the passage of time, its results, the trans\u00adformation of our own desires into events. What differentiates the past from the present is precisely its out-of-reach objectivity; there is no more should-be; being is so consumed that it has ceased to exist. The details are already lost in the dust of time. Who was afraid of life, afraid of the night, afraid of being taken, afraid of being kept?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Voice 3<\/em>: That which should be abolished continues, and we continue to wear away with it. Once again the fatigue of so many nights passed in the same way. It is a walk that has lasted a long time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Voice 1<\/em>: Really hard to drink more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was the search for that Northwest Passage, that unmarked alleyway from the world as it appeared to the world as it had never been, but which the art of the 20th century had promised it could be: a promise shaped in countless images of freedom to experiment with life and of freedom from the banality and tyranny of bourgeois order and bureaucratic rule. Debord and the others tried to practice, he said, \u201ca systematic ques\u00adtioning of all the diversions and works of a society, a total critique of its idea of happiness.\u201d \u201cOur movement was not a literary school, a revitalization of expression, a mod\u00adernism,\u201d a Lettrist International publication stated in 1955, after some years of the pure consumption of time, various manifestos, numerous jail sentences for drug possession and drunk driving, suicide attempts, and all\u00ad-night arguments. \u201cWe have the advantage of no longer expecting anything from known activities, known individuals, and known in\u00adstitutions.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They tried to practice a radical decondi\u00adtioning: to demystify their environment and the expectations they had brought to it, to escape the possibility that they would them\u00adselves recuperate their own gestures of re\u00adfusal. The formation of the Situationist In\u00adternational \u2014 at first, in 1957, including 15 or 20 painters, writers, and architects from Eng\u00adland, France, Algeria, Denmark, Holland, It\u00adaly, and Germany \u2014 was based on the recog\u00adnition that such a project, no matter bow poorly defined or mysterious, was either a revolutionary project or it was nothing. It was a recognition that the experiments of the d\u00e9rives<\/em>, the attempts to discover lost intima\u00adtions of real life behind the perfectly com\u00adposed face of modern society, had to be trans\u00adformed into a general contestation of that society, or else dissolve in bohemian solipsism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014 4 \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Born in Paris in 1931, Guy Debord was from beginning to end at the center of the Situationist International, and the editor of its journal. The Society of the Spectacle<\/em>, the concise and remarkably cant-free (or cant\u00ad-destroying, for that seems to be its effect) book of theory he published after 10 years of situationist activity, begins with these lines: \u201cIn societies where modern conditions of pro\u00adduction prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles<\/em>. Every\u00adthing that was lived has moved away into a representation.\u201d Determined to destroy the claims of 20th-century social organization, Debord was echoing the first sentence of Capital<\/em>: \u201cThe wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails ap\u00adpears as an \u2018immense collection of com\u00admodities.\u2019 \u201d To complain, as French Marxist critics did, that Debord misses Marx\u2019s quali\u00adfication, \u201cappears as,\u201d is to miss Debord\u2019s own apparent qualification, \u201cpresents itself as\u201d \u2014 and to miss the point of situationist writing altogether. Debord\u2019s qualification turned out not to be a qualification at all, but rather the basis of a theory in which a society organized as appearance can be disrupted on the field of appearance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Debord argued that the commodity \u2014 now transmuted into \u201cspectacle,\u201d or seemingly natural, autonomous images communicated as the facts of life \u2014 had taken over the social function once fulfilled by religion and myth, and that appearances were now inseparable from the essential processes of alienation and domination in modern society. In 1651, the cover of Thomas Hobbes\u2019s Leviathan<\/em> presented the manifestation of a nascent bour\u00adgeois domination: a picture of a gigantic sov\u00adereign being, whose body \u2014 the body politic\u00ad \u2014 was made up of countless faceless citizens. This was presented as an entirely positive image, as a utopia. In 1967, International Situationniste #11<\/em> printed an almost identical image, \u201cPortrait of Alienation\u201d: countless Chinese performing a card trick which pro\u00adduced the gigantic face of Mao Zedong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If society is organized around consump\u00adtion, one participates in social life as a con\u00adsumer; the spectacle produces spectators, and thus protects itself from questioning. It induces passivity rather than action, con\u00adtemplation rather than thinking, and a deg\u00adradation of life into materialism. It is no matter that in advanced societies, material survival is not at issue (except for those who are kept poor in order to represent poverty and reassure the rest of the population that they should be satisfied). The \u201cstandard of survival,\u201d like its twin, the \u201cstandard of boredom,\u201d is raised but the nature of the standard does not change. Desires are de\u00adgraded or displaced into needs and maintained as needs. A project precisely the op\u00adposite of that of modern art, from Lautr\u00e9a\u00admont and Rimbaud to dada and surrealism, is fulfilled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The spectacle is not merely advertising, or propaganda, or television. It is a world. The spectacle as we experience it, but fail to perceive it, \u201cis not a collection of images, but a social relationship between people, mediated by images.\u201d In 1928 in One-Way Street<\/em>, writing about German inflation, Walter Benjamin anticipated the argument: \u201cThe free\u00addom of conversation is being lost. If it was earlier a matter of course to take interest in one\u2019s partner, this is now replaced by inquiry into the price of his shoes or his umbrella. Irresistibly intruding upon any convivial ex\u00adchange is the theme of the conditions of life, of money. What this theme involves is not so much the concerns and sorrows of individu\u00adals, in which they might be able to help one another, as the overall picture. It is as if one were trapped in a theater and had to follow the events on the stage whether one wanted to or not, had to make them again and again, willingly or unwillingly, the subject of one\u2019s thought and speech.\u201d Raoul Vaneigem de\u00adfined the terrain of values such a situation produced: \u201cRozanov\u2019s definition of nihilism is the best: \u2018The show is over. The audience get up to leave their seats. Time to collect their coats and go home. They turn around\u2026 No more coats and no more home.\u2019 \u201d \u201cThe spectator feels at home nowhere,\u201d Debord wrote, \u201cbecause the spectacle is everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The spectacle is \u201cthe diplomatic represen\u00adtation of hierarchic society to itself, where all other expression is banned\u201d \u2014 which is to say where all other expression makes no sense, appears as babble (this may be the ironic, protesting meaning of dada phonetic poems, in which words were reduced to sounds, and of lettrist poetry, in which sounds were re\u00adduced to letters). The spectacle says \u201cnothing more than \u2018that which appears is good, that which is good appears.\u2019 \u201d (In a crisis, or when the \u201cstandard of survival\u201d falls, as in our own day, hierarchic society retreats, but main\u00adtains its hegemony, the closing of questions. The spectacle \u201cno longer promises any\u00adthing,\u201d Debord wrote in 1979, in a new pref\u00adace to the fourth Italian edition of his book. \u201cIt simply says, \u2018It is so.\u2019 \u201d) The spectacle organizes ordinary life (consider the following in terms of making love): \u201cThe alienation of the spectator to the profit of the con\u00adtemplated object is expressed in the following way: the more he contemplates the less he lives; the more he accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires. The externality of the spectacle in relation to the active man appears in the fact that his own gestures are no longer his but those of another who represents them to him.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Debord summed it up this way: \u201cThe first phase of the domination of the economy over social life brought into the definition of all human realization the obvious degradation of being<\/em> into having<\/em>. The present phase of total occupation of social life by the accumulated results of the economy\u201d \u2014 by spectacle\u00ad \u2014 \u201cleads to a generalized sliding of having<\/em> into appearing<\/em>.\u201d We are twice removed from where we want to be, the situationists argued \u2014 yet each day still seems like a natu\u00adral fact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 \u2014 5 \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was the situationists\u2019 account of what they, and everyone else, were up against. It was an argument from Marx\u2019s 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts<\/em>, an argument that the \u201cspectacle-commodity society,\u201d within which one could make only meaningless choices and against which one could seemingly not intervene, had suc\u00adceeded in producing fundamental contradic\u00adtions between what people accepted and what, in ways they could not understand, they wanted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was the precise opposite of social science, developed at precisely the time when the ideology of the end of ideology was con\u00adquering the universities of the West. It was an argument about consciousness and false consciousness, not as the primary cause of domination but as its primary battleground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If capitalism had shifted the terms of its organization from production to consump\u00adtion, and its means of control from economic misery to false consciousness, then the task of would-be revolutionaries was to bring about a recognition of the life already lived by almost everyone. Foreclosing the construc\u00adtion of one\u2019s own life, advanced capitalism had made almost everyone a member of a new proletariat, and thus a potential revolutionary. Here again, the discovery of the source of revolution in what \u201cmodern art [had] sought and promise<\/em>\u201d served as the axis of the argument. Modern art, one could read in Internationale Situationniste #8<\/em>, in January of 1963, had \u201cmade a clean sweep of all the values and rules of everyday behav\u00adior,\u201d of unquestioned order and the \u201cunani\u00admous, servile enthusiasm\u201d Debord and his friends had thrown up at Chaplin; but that clean sweep had been isolated in museums. Modern revolutionary impulses had been separated from the world, but \u201cjust as in the nineteenth century revolutionary theory arose out of philosophy\u201d \u2014 out of Marx\u2019s dic\u00adtum that philosophy, having interpreted the world, must set about changing it \u2014 now one had to look to the demands of art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the time of the Paris Commune in 1871, workers discussed matters that had previously been the exclusive province of philosophers \u2014 suggesting the possibility that philosophy could be realized in daily life. In the 20th century, with \u201csurvival\u201d conquered as fact but maintained as ideology, the same logic meant that just as artists constructed a version of life in words, paint, or stone, men and women could themselves begin to con\u00adstruct their own lives out of desire. This desire, in scattered and barely noticed ways, was shaping the 20th century, or the super\u00adseding of it (\u201cOurs is the best effort so far toward getting out of the twentieth century,\u201d an anonymous situationist wrote in 1963, in one of the most striking lines in the 12 issues of Internationale Situationniste<\/em>). It was the desire more hidden, more overwhelmed and confused by spectacle, than any other. It had shaped the lettrist adventures. It was the Northwest Passage. If the spectacle was \u201cboth the result and the project of the exist\u00ading mode of production,\u201d then the construc\u00adtion of life as artists constructed art \u2014 in terms of what one made of friendship, love, sex, work, play, and suffering \u2014 was under\u00adstood by the situationists as both the result and the project of revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014 6 \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

To pursue this revolution, it was neces\u00adsary to take all the partial and isolated inci\u00addents of resistance and refusal of things as they were, and then link them. It was neces\u00adsary to discover and speak the language of these incidents, to do for signs of life what the Lettrist International had tried to do for the city\u2019s signs of \u201cforgotten desires.\u201d This de\u00admanded a theory of exemplary acts. Society was organized as appearance, and could be contested on the field of appearance; what mattered was the puncturing of ap\u00adpearance \u2014 speech and action against the spectacle that was, suddenly, not babble, but understood. The situationist project, in this sense, was a quest for a new language of action. That quest resulted in the urgent, daring tone of even the lengthiest, most sol\u00ademn essays in Internationale Situationniste<\/em> \u2014 the sense of minds engaged, quickened be\u00adyond rhetoric, by emerging social contradic\u00adtions \u2014 and it resulted in such outrages as a six-word analysis of a leading French soci\u00adologist. (\u201cM. GEORGES LAPASSADE,\u201d announced almost a full page of I.S. #9<\/em>, \u201cEST UN CON.\u201d) It led as well to a style of absurdity and play, and to an affirmation that contestation was fun: a good way to live. The situationists delighted in the discovery that dialectics caused society to produce not just contradictions but also endless self parodies. Their journal was filled with them \u2014 my favorite is a reproduction of an ad for the Peace o\u2019 Mind Fallout Shelter Com\u00adpany. And the comics that illustrated I.S.<\/em> led to d\u00e9tournement<\/em> of the putative heroes of everyday life. Characters out of Steve Canyon<\/em> and True Romance<\/em> were given new balloons, and made to speak passionately of revolution, alienation, and the lie of culture \u2014 as if even the most unlikely people actually cared about such things. In the pages of I.S<\/em>., a kiss suggested not marriage but fantasies of liberation: a sigh for the Paris Commune.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The theory of exemplary acts and the quest for a new language of action also brought the situationists\u2019 pursuit of ex\u00adtremism into play. I.S #10<\/em>, March 1966, on the Watts riots: \u201c\u2026all those who went so far as to recognize the \u2018apparent justifications\u2019 of the rage of the Los Angeles blacks\u2026 all those \u2018theorists\u2019 and \u2018spokesmen\u2019 of interna\u00adtional Left, or rather of its nothingness, deplored the irresponsibility, the disorder, the looting (especially the fact that arms<\/em> and alcohol<\/em> were the first targets for plunder)\u2026 But who has defended the rioters of Los Angeles in the terms they deserve? We will.\u201d The article continued: \u201cThe looting of the Watts district was the most direct realization of the distorted principle, \u2018To each according to his false needs\u2019\u2026 [but] real desires begin to be expressed in festival, in the potlatch<\/em> of destruction\u2026 For the first time it is not poverty but material abundance which must be dominated [and of course it was the rela\u00adtive \u201caffluence\u201d of the Watts rioters, at least as compared to black Americans in Harlem, that so mystified the observers of this first outbreak of violent black rage]\u2026 Comfort will never be comfortable enough for those who seek what is not on the market.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe task of being more extremist than the SI falls to the SI itself,\u201d the situationists said; that was the basis of the group\u2019s con\u00adtinuation. The situationists looked for ex\u00ademplary acts which might reveal to spec\u00adtators that that was all they were. They cited, celebrated, and analyzed incidents which dramatized the contradictions of modern so\u00adciety, and contained suggestions of what forms a real contestation of that society might take. Such acts included the Watts riots; the resistance of students and workers to the Chinese cultural revolution (a struggle, the situationists wrote, of \u201cthe official owners of the ideology<\/em> against the majority of the owners of the apparatus of the economy<\/em> and the state\u201d); the burning of the Koran in the streets of Baghdad in 1959; the exposure of a site meant to house part of the British government in the event of nuclear war; the \u201ckidnapping\u201d of art works by Caracas stu\u00addents, who used them to demand the release of political prisoners; the Free Speech Move\u00adment in Berkeley in 1964; the situationist-\u00adinspired disruption of classes taught by French cyberneticians in 1966 at Strasbourg, and by sociologists at Nanterre in 1967 and 1968; and the subversion of Berlin actor Wolfgang Neuss, who in 1963 \u201cperpetrated a most suggestive act of sabotage\u2026 by placing a notice in the paper Der Abend<\/em> giving away the identity of the killer in a television serial that had been keeping the masses in suspense for weeks.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some of these actions led nowhere; some, like the assaults on the cyberneticians and sociologists, led to May 1968, where the idea of general contestation on the plane of ap\u00adpearances was realized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The situationist idea was to prevent the recuperation of such incidents by making theory out of them. Once the speech of the spectacle no longer held a monopoly, it would be heard as babble \u2014 as mystification ex\u00adposed. Those who took part in wildcat strikes or practiced cultural sabotage, the situationists argued, acted out of boredom, rage, disgust \u2014 out of an inchoate but inescapable perception that they were not free and, worse, could not form a real image of free\u00addom. Yet there were tentative images of free\u00addom being shaped, which, if made into theory, could allow people to understand and maintain their own actions. Out of this, a real image of freedom would appear, and it would dominate: the state and society would begin to dissolve. Resistance to that dissolution would be stillborn, because workers, soldiers, and bureaucrats would act on new possi\u00adbilities of freedom no less than anyone else\u00ad \u2014 they would join in a general wildcat strike that would end only when society was reconstructed on new terms. When the theory matched the pieces of practice from which the theory was derived, the world would change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014 7 \u2014 <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The situationist program \u2014 as opposed to the situationist project, the situationist practice \u2014 came down to Lautr\u00e9amont and work\u00aders\u2019 councils. On one side, the avant-garde saint of negation, who had written that poetry \u201cmust be made by all\u201d; on the other, the self-starting, self-managing organs of di\u00adrect democracy that had appeared in almost every revolutionary moment of the 20th cen\u00adtury, bypassing the state and allowing for complete participation (the soviets of Petro\u00adgrad in 1905 and 1917, the German R\u00e4te<\/em> of 1919, the anarchist collectives of Barcelona in 1936, the Hungarian councils of 1956). Be\u00adtween those poles, the situationists thought, one would find the liberation of everyday life, the part of experience that was omitted from the history books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These were the situationist touchstones \u2014 and, oddly, they were left unexamined. The situationists\u2019 use of workers\u2019 councils re\u00adminds me of those moments in D.W. Grif\u00adfith\u2019s Abraham Lincoln<\/em> when, stumped by how to get out of a scene, he simply had Walter Huston gaze heavenward and utter the magic words, \u201cThe Union!\u201d It is true that the direct democracy of workers\u2019 councils \u2014 \u00adwhere anyone was allowed to speak, where representation was kept to a minimum and delegates were recallable at any moment \u2014 was anathema both to the Bolsheviks and to the Right. It may also have been only the crisis of a revolutionary situation that pro\u00adduced the energy necessary to sustain council politics. The situationists wrote that no one had tried to find out how people had actually lived during those brief moments when revo\u00adlutionary contestation had found its form \u2014 a form that would shape the new society \u2014 but they did not try either. They spoke endlessly about \u201ceveryday life,\u201d but ignored work that examined it both politically and in its smallest details (James Agee\u2019s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men<\/em>, Foucault\u2019s Madness and Civilization<\/em>, the books of the Annale school, Walter Benjamin\u2019s One-Way Street<\/em> and A Berlin Chronicle<\/em>, the writing of Larissa Reissner, a Pravda correspondent who covered Weimar Germany), and pro\u00adduced nothing to match it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But if Lautr\u00e9amont, workers\u2019 councils, and everyday life were more signposts than true elements of a theory, they worked as signposts. The very distance of such images from the world as it was conventionally un\u00adderstood helped expose what that the world con\u00adcealed. What appeared between the signposts of Lautr\u00e9amont and workers\u2019 councils was the possibility of critique.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pursued without compromise or self-censorship, that critique liberated the situ\u00adationists from the reassurances of ideology as surely as the experiments of the Lettrist In\u00adternational had liberated its members from the seductions of the bourgeois art world. It opened up a space of freedom, and was a necessary preface to the new language of action the situationists were after. A single example will do: the situationist analysis of Vietnam, published in I.S. #11<\/em> in March 1967 \u2014 almost frightening in its prescience, and perhaps even more frightening in its clarity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt is obviously impossible to seek, at the moment, a revolutionary<\/em> solution to the Vietnam war,\u201d said the anonymous writer. \u201cIt is first of all necessary to put an end to the American aggression in order to allow the real social struggle in Vietnam to develop in a natural<\/em> way; that is to say, to allow the Vietnamese workers and peasants to re\u00addiscover their enemies at home; the bureau\u00adcracy of the North and all the propertied and ruling strata of the South. The withdrawal of the Americans will mean that the Stalinist bureaucracy will immediately seize control of the whole country: this is the unavoidable conclusion. Because the invaders cannot in\u00addefinitely sustain their aggression; ever since Talleyrand it has been a commonplace that one can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it. The point, therefore, is not to give unconditional (or even conditional) support to the Vietcong, but to struggle consistently and without any concessions against Ameri\u00adcan imperialism\u2026 The Vietnam war is rooted in America and it is from there that it must be rooted out.\u201d This was a long way from the situationists\u2019 rejection of the Beat generation, but the road had been a straight one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the situationists were fooled, it was only by themselves; they were not fooled by the world. They understood, as no one else of their time did, why major events \u2014 May 1968, the Free Speech Movement, or, for that mat\u00adter, Malcolm McLaren\u2019s experiment with what Simon Frith has called the politiciza\u00adtion of consumption \u2014 arise out of what are, seemingly, the most trivial provocations and the most banal repressions. They understood why the smallest incidents can lead, with astonishing speed, to a reopening of all ques\u00adtions. Specific, localized explanations tied to economic crises and political contexts never work, because the reason such events de\u00adveloped as they did was what the situationists said it was: people were bored, they were not free, they did not know how to say so. Given the chance, they would say so. People could not form a real image of freedom, and they would seize any opportunity that made the construction of such an image possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014 8 \u2014 <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leaving the 20th Century<\/em>, edited and translated by former British situationist Christopher Gray, published only in the UK and long out of print, was until Ken Knabb\u2019s book the best representation of situationist writing in English, and it was not good. Translations were messy and inaccurate, the selection of articles erratic and confusing, the commentary often mushy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the exception of a good edition of The Society of the Spectacle<\/em> put out by Black & Red of Detroit in 1977, other situ\u00adationist work in English was far worse. A few pieces \u2014 \u201cThe Decline and Fall of the Specta\u00adcle-Commodity Society\u201d (on Watts), \u201cOn the Poverty of Student Life\u201d (the SI\u2019s most fa\u00admous publication, which caused a scandal in France in 1966 and prefigured the May 1968 revolt), \u201cThe Beginning of an Era\u201d (on May 1968) \u2014 appeared as smudgy, sometimes gruesomely typeset and translated pamphlets. Most were put out by the short\u00ad-lived British or American sections of the SI, or by small situationist-inspired groups in New York or Berkeley.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The situationist journal, and the situ\u00adationist books as they were originally pub\u00adlished in Paris, could not have been more different. Wonderfully illustrated with photos, comics, reproductions of advertise\u00adments, drawings, and maps, Internationale Situationniste<\/em> had an elegant, straight\u00adforward design: flat, cool, and direct. It made a simple point: what we have written is meant seriously and should be read seriously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Situationist International Anthology<\/em> does not present the complete text of the situationist journal, and it has no illustrations. But the translations are clear and readable \u2014 sometimes too literal, sometimes inspired. Entirely self-published, the anthology is a better job of book-making than most of the books published today by com\u00admercial houses. There are virtually no typos; it is well indexed, briefly but usefully an\u00adnotated, and the design, binding, and print\u00ading are all first class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other words, Knabb has, unlike most other publishers of situationist material in English, taken the material seriously, and allowed it to speak with something like its original authority. One can follow the devel\u00adopment of a group of writers which devoted itself to living up to one of its original prescriptions: \u201cThe task of an avant-garde is to keep abreast of reality.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The situationist journal was never copyrighted. Rather, it bore this legend: \u201cAll the texts published in International Situationniste<\/em> may be freely reproduced, trans\u00adlated, or adapted, even without indication of origin.\u201d Knabb\u2019s book carries an equivalent notation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014 9 \u2014 <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The role of the Situationist International, its members wrote, was not to act as any sort of vanguard party. The situationists \u201chad to know how to wait,\u201d and to be ready to disap\u00adpear in a common festival of revolt. Their job was not to \u201cbuild\u201d the SI, as the job of a Trotskyist or Bolshevik militant is to build his or her organization, trimming all thoughts and all pronouncements to that goal, careful not to offend anyone who might be seduced or recruited. Their job was to think and speak as clearly as possible \u2014 not to get people to listen to speeches, they said, but to get people to think for themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rather than expanding their group, the situationists worked to make it smaller, ex\u00adpelling careerist, backsliding, or art-as-poli\u00adtics (as opposed to politics-as-art) members almost from the day the group was formed. By the time of the May 1968 revolt, the Situationist International was composed mostly of Parisians hardly more numerous\u00ad \u2014 perhaps less numerous \u2014 than those who walked the streets as the Lettrist Interna\u00adtional. Behind them they had 11 numbers of their journal, more than a decade of fitting theory to fragments of practice, and the scan\u00addals of Strasbourg and Nanterre, both of which gained them a far wider audience than they had ever had before. And so, in May, they made a difference. They defined the mood and the spirit of the event: almost all of the most memorable graffiti from that explosion came, as inspiration or simply quota\u00adtion, from situationist books and essays. \u201cThose who talk about revolution and class struggle, without understanding what is subversive about love and positive in the refusal of constraints,\u201d ran one apparently spontaneous slogan, in fact a quote from Raoul Vaneigem, \u201csuch people have corpses in their mouths.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the liberated Sorbonne and later in their own Council for Maintaining the Oc\u00adcupations, the situationists struggled against reformism, working to define the most radi\u00adcal possibilities of the May revolt \u2014 \u201c[This] is now a revolutionary movement,\u201d read their \u201cAddress to All Workers\u201d of May 30, 1968, \u201ca movement which lacks nothing but the con\u00adsciousness of what it has already done<\/em> in order to triumph\u201d \u2014 which meant, in the end, that the situationists would leave behind the most radical definition of the failure of that revolt. It was an event the situationists had constructed, in the pages of their journal, long before it took place. One can look back to January 1963 and read in I.S. #8<\/em>: \u201cWe will only organize the detonation.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014 10 \u2014 <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What to make of this strange mix of post-surrealist ideas about art, Marxian concepts of alienation, an attempt to recover a forgot\u00adten revolutionary tradition, millenarianism, and plain refusal of the world combined with a desire to smash it? Nothing, perhaps. The Situationist International cannot even be justified by piggy-backing it onto official his\u00adtory, onto May 1968, not because that revolt failed, but because it disappeared. If 300 books on May 1968 were published within a year of the event, as I.S. #12<\/em> trumpeted, how many were published in the years to follow? If the situationist idea of general contestation was realized in May 1968, the idea also re\u00adalized its limits. The theory of the exemplary act \u2014 and May was one great, complex, momentarily controlling exemplary act \u2014\u00ad may have gone as far as such a theory or such an act can go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What one can make of the material in the Situationist International Antholog<\/em>y is perhaps this: out of the goals and the perspectives the situationists defined for themselves came a critique so strong it forces one to try to understand its sources and its shape, no matter how much of it one might see through. In an attack on the Situationist International published in 1978, Jean Barrot wrote that it had wound up \u201cbeing used as literature.\u201d This is undoubtedly true, and it is as well a rather bizarre dismissal of the way in which people might use literature. \u201cAn author who teaches a writer nothing,\u201d Walter Benjamin wrote in \u201cThe Author as Pro\u00adducer,\u201d \u201cteaches nobody anything. The de\u00adtermining factor is the exemplary character of a production that enables it, first, to lead other producers to this production, and secondly to present them with an improved apparatus for their use. And this apparatus is better to the degree that it leads consumers to production, in short that it is capable of making co-workers out of readers or spectators.\u201d The fact is that the writing in the Situationist International Anthology<\/em> makes almost all present-day political and aesthetic thinking seem cowardly, self-protecting, careerist, and satisfied. The book is a means to the recovery of ambition. \u2756<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article from the Village Voice Archive<\/em> was posted on March 18, 2020<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cThe situationists were bent on discovering the absolute ability to criticize anyone, anywhere \u2014 without re\u00adstraint, without the pull of alliances, and without self-satisfaction. And they were bent on turning that criticism into event.\u201d by GREIL MARCUS Originally published May 1, 1982 How Extreme Was It \u2014 1 \u2014 I first became intrigued with the Situ\u00adationist International […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5496,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,9,13,14,33,44,58,70],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art","category-beatniks","category-counterculture","category-dadaism","category-marcel-duchamp","category-politics-and-philosophy","category-subculture","category-william-burroughs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5479\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennywilson.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}