The Situationist
International (SI) was an internationalist group of revolutionaries based mainly in Europe with very restricted membership. Founded in 1957,
it reached its peak of influence in the May 1968 protests in France.
With their ideas rooted
in Marxism and the 20th-century
European artistic avant-gardes, they advocated experiences of life
alternative to those admitted by advanced capitalism, for the fulfillment of
human desires. For this purpose they suggested and experimented with the
"construction of situations", namely the setting up of environments favorable
for the fulfillment of such desires. Using methods drawn from the arts, they
developed a series of experimental fields of study, including unitary urbanism and
psychogeography.
Main concept and ideas of SI:
Anti-Capitalism
The Situationist
International, in the 15 years from its formation in 1957 and its dissolution in
1972, is characterized by a Marxist and surrealist perspective on aesthetics and politics,
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. 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.
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.
Dérive
By definition,
psychogeography combines subjective and objective knowledge and studies. Debord
struggled to stipulate the finer points of this theoretical paradox, ultimately
producing "Theory of the Dérive" in 1958, a document which essentially serves as
an instruction manual for the psychogeographic procedure, executed through the
act of dérive("drift").
In 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.
Psychogeography
The first edition of
Internationale Situationniste defined psychogeography as "the study of the specific
effects of the geographical environment (whether consciously organized or not)
on the emotions and behavior of individuals."The term was first recognized in 1955 by Guy Debord while still with the
Letterist International:
http://www.nethelper.com/article/Situationist_International
Detournement:
"short for: detournement of pre-existing aesthetic elements. 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.", Internationale Situationiste Issue 1, June 1958.
One could view detournement as forming the opposite side of the coin to 'recuperation' (where radical ideas and images become safe and commodified), in that images produced by the spectacle get altered and subverted so that rather than supporting the status quo, their meaning becomes changed in order to put across a more radical or oppositionist message.
The concept of detournement has had a popular influence amongst contemporary radicals, and the technique can be seen in action in the present day when looking at the work of Culture Jammers including the Cacophony Society, Billboard Liberation Front, and Adbusters, whose 'subvertisements' 'detourn' Nike adverts, for example. In this case the original advertisement's imagery is altered in order to draw attention to said company's policy of shifting their production base to cheap-labour third-world 'free trade zones'.
Recuperation:
"To survive, the spectacle must have social control. It can recuperate a potentially threatening situation by shifting ground, creating dazzling alternatives- or by embracing the threat, making it safe and then selling it back to us" – Larry Law, from The Spectacle – The Skeleton Keys, a 'Spectacular Times pocket book.
Situgraphy and Situlogy:
Drawing from the artistic Lettrist praxis of hypergraphy as well as older developments in mathematics and topology in Henri Poincare's Analysis Situs, the main theorist of the SI Asger Jorn formulated theories of plastic, anti-Euclidean geometry and topology which was at the heart of Situationist critiques of urbanism and other manifestations of contemporary capitalist culture and politics.
The Situation:
central to the SI, this concept was defined in the first issue of their journal 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 beat happening, and later identified it in historical events such as the Paris Commune or the Watts riots, and eventually not with partial insurrections, but with total revolution itself.
The Spectacle:
Debord's 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle attempted to provide the SI with a Marxian critical theory. The concept of 'the spectacle' expanded to all society the Marxist concept of reification drawn from Marx's Das Kapital, entitled "The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof" and developed by Georg Lukács. This was an analysis of the logic of commodities whereby they achieve an ideological autonomy from the process of their production, so that “social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them.” (Marx, Capital) Developing this analysis of the logic of the commodity, The Society of the Spectacle generally understood society as divided between the passive subject who consumes the spectacle and the reified spectacle itself.
Unitary urbanism: "Unitary urbanism is one of the central concerns of the SI" (Internationale Situationniste #3, December 1959). This was originally developed by the Lettrist International and the International Movement For An Imaginist Bauhaus, and then taken up by the SI. This development marked a move away from metagraphy and towards the use of Dérive and psychogeography and also situgraphy. Following expulsions and the move towards the theory of the spectacle, UU became a lesser concern for the SI in later years. See separate articles on Unitary urbanism, Dérive, and psychogeography.
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