The Situationist International , livre ebook

The Situationist International
The Situationist International
A Critical Handbook
Edited by Alastair Hemmens and Gabriel Zacarias
First published 2020 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright Alastair Hemmens and Gabriel Zacarias 2020
The right of the individual contributors to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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ISBN 978 0 7453 3890 3 Hardback
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Contents
Introduction: The Situationist International in Critical Perspective
Alastair Hemmens and Gabriel Zacarias
PART I: KEY CONTEXTS
1 Debord s Reading of Marx, Luk cs and Wittfogel: A Look at the Archives
Anselm Jappe
2 The Unsurpassable: Dada, Surrealism and the Situationist International
Krzysztof Fijalkowski
3 Lettrism
Fabrice Flahutez
4 The Situationists, Hegel and Hegelian Marxism in France
Tom Bunyard
5 The Situationist International and the Rediscovery of the Revolutionary Workers Movement
Anthony Hayes
6 The Shadow Cast by the Situationist International on May 68
Anna Trespeuch-Berthelot
7 The Situationists Anti-colonialism: An Internationalist Perspective
Sophie Dolto and Nedjib Sidi Moussa
8 Gender and Sexuality in the Situationist International
Ruth Baumeister
9 Revolutionary Romanticism in the Twentieth Century: Surrealists and Situationists
Michael L wy
PART II: KEY CONCEPTS
10 The Spectacle
Alastair Hemmens and Gabriel Zacarias
11 The Constructed Situation
Gabriel Zacarias
12 Unitary Urbanism: Three Psychogeographic Imaginaries
Craig Buckley
13 The Abolition of Alienated Labour
Alastair Hemmens
14 D tournement in Language and the Visual Arts
Gabriel Zacarias
15 The Situationists Revolution of Everyday Life
Michael E. Gardiner
16 Radical Subjectivity: Considered in its Psychological, Economic, Political, Sexual and, Notably, Philosophical Aspects
Alastair Hemmens
17 The Realisation of Philosophy
Tom Bunyard
18 Recuperation
Patrick Marcolini
19 Internationalism
Bertrand Cochard
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
Introduction: The Situationist International in Critical Perspective
Alastair Hemmens and Gabriel Zacarias
The central premise of the current book is that a radical shift in our understanding of the history and theory of the Situationist International (1957-72) is under way. For a very long time, the historical details and even the very content of Situationist activity remained poorly understood and something of a mystery. The Situationist International (SI) was a fringe subject that, thanks to its marginal status, retained an aura of esoterism and mythos that occasionally drew the interest of certain artists and political activists on the far left who looked to it for inspiration. Most famously, it was whispered, that the group had predicted, or at least been a major source of inspiration for, the May 68 student uprisings in France. Others rumoured that the group was more of an extremist avantgarde or political cult that purged its members for a lack of ideological purity. No term perhaps embodies better such misunderstanding and halftruths than the history of Situationism . The Situationists anticipated the emergence of the term in the 1950s and gave it an entirely negative definition. It was, they said, a word without meaning : There is no such thing as Situationism, a term which would signify a doctrinal interpretation of existing facts. 1 Indeed, the very notion of Situationism , the Situationists wrote, is evidently conceived by anti-Situationists . 2 The Situationists wanted no part, in a direct criticism of many contemporary Marxist groups and previous avant-gardes, in the development of an ideology that demanded uncritical adherence and conceptual narrowness. Later, in the early 1960s, the term Situationism became associated, equally negatively, with attempts by artists within the SI (who were soon after excluded), to hitch their careers to the development of the Situationist International as another moment in the history of aesthetics. Such attempts were put down with the phrase: There is no such thing as Situationism, nor a Situationist work of art. 3
However, although the Situationists themselves rejected Situationism , the use of the term became almost inevitable after 1968 when it came to be associated with the most radical tendencies within contemporary youth counterculture and political contestation. For those students who had taken part in May 68, and indeed anyone influenced by the events , a Situationist was simply someone, anyone, who rejected all authority (but without being an anarchist), and who criticised commodity society (but without being a Marxist). Situationism appeared, to the uninitiated, to be a kind of new political position between these two traditional left-wing tendencies. The fact that the Situationists had originally emerged from the artistic avant-garde, and in some cases perhaps that it was an actual revolutionary organisation with its own history, was largely unknown to them. Equally, when, several decades later, the group s roots in the artistic avantgarde came to light, Situationism was mistakenly understood as another -ism in the history of art, like Dadaism or Surrealism. The Situationists, as such, were simply acclaimed as the very last avant-garde, while the political and theoretical critique of commodity society was, for the most part, marginalised or ignored.
Nevertheless, as the Situationists texts have become more widely available, in both French and a variety of other languages, Situationist theory and practice has gradually come to be seen as far richer and more profound than originally thought. It can no longer be simply pigeonholed as another -ism in the history of art nor as a mere expression of 1960s youth contestation. Guy Debord s The Society of the Spectacle (1967), in particular, has increasingly come to be regarded as an important work of critical theory in its own right. Situationism , which could perhaps be understood today as the history of misunderstandings and misappropriations that have been heaped upon the SI, seems to be on its way out. We might even suggest that, although the battle is by no means over, the Situationists may yet survive Situationism . Moreover, we could say, with some confidence, that we have learned more about the SI in the first two decades of this century than we ever did in the latter half of the twentieth.
The problem remains, however, that this new mass of knowledge and the critical interest that comes with it, as welcome as it may be, remains diffuse and uncoordinated. Indeed, there are few fields of research that have produced such differing opinions and been undertaken on such an independent basis by researchers in such a variety of fields. Our objective in this book is to bring a balanced perspective to the SI that may provide the basis for a more complete understanding and, ideally, greater consensus on how to move forward. In so doing, we hope to present a new understanding of the Situationists, to reconsider the SI critically, in a manner that both breaks with some of the misconceptions of the past, such as the reductive understanding of the Spectacle as a mere critique of the media, and that addresses specific issues, such as race and gender, which were often previously neglected. In order to demonstrate that such a goal is, indeed, a necessity, however, we must delve deeper into the history of the SI and its critical reception.
* * *
The Situationist International was founded in 1957 by a small and heterogeneous group of European artists based mostly in Paris. Its review, Internationale situationniste , published from 1957 to 1969, became the main organ for the diffusion of its revolutionary ideas and practices. The Situationist International, although at first formed mainly of artists, was from the very start concerned with the radical critique of capitalist society and the development of proletarian revolution. Art, rather than an end in itself, was to be superseded , to be abolished as a separate activity and integrated into the totality of everyday life. Later, the artistic dimension became incorporated into a more fully developed critical theory of capitalist society as a form of total alienation, a world dominated by an economy that had become autonomous from qualitative human need, where humanity no longer had control over its own creative powers and that, through consumerism, which artificially expanded what was considered necessary , prevented the producers from freeing themselves of work. Perhaps most importantly of all, the Situationists rejected the authoritarianism of the various workers states, parties and unions in favour of wildcat strikes, workers councils and other forms of autonomous proletarian radicalism.
The radicality of the Situationists ideas found a receptive audience among young people who were eager to transform a post-war society dominated by patriarchal structures and a strict bourgeois morality that did not reflect their own values. The Situationists, indeed, first came to public attention thanks to their participation in the Strasbourg Scandal of 1966. The SI was invited, by several students at the University of Strasbourg, to help organise a serie