Kaynak: revolutionaryboredom.wordpress.com
Introduction
I thought it most appropriate for this to be a beginner’s guide to the Situationist International (SI) – or perhaps even a user’s guide. I’m sure there are people here who are already familiar with the SI, and for those people what I’m about to talk about will probably also be familiar already, so perhaps this introduction could just be considered as a launching-board into a more engaged discussion.
I decided that, in the spirit of the Free School, I should talk about the SI in terms of tactics and practices rather than, say, in terms of high theory or art. You can discuss the SI from a lot of different perspectives: in relation to modern art, in relation to anarchist practice, in relation to ultraleft theory, in relation to cultural practices… but I’ll approach the SI according to four concepts, those being: the situation, psychogeography, spectacle, and détournement. These concepts, I think, remain most relevant to us today, not just as participants in a Free School but also as people living through a period of the accelerated polarisation of capital.
From 1957 to 1972, through writings, artworks and (most importantly) direct interventions into what they called the spectacle, the SI was engaged in a project of exposing the conditions of consumer capitalism. The Situationists were concerned with the specific nature or character of capitalism as it existed at their world-historical moment – though ironically, the Situationists’ diagnosis of their own age is perhaps even more accurate today. However, following Marx’s imperative that philosophers must not only interpret the world, but also change it, the Situationists sought to identify forms of resistance that were appropriate to contemporary cultural conditions.
So, for example, as ultra-leftists or libertarian Marxists or as the most radical manifestation of the avant-garde, the Situationists spent a lot of energy denouncing the organised left – that is, trade unions, leftist mainstream political parties, and so on. The Situationists thought that the type of workplace struggle then advocated by these organisations didn’t truly address the conditions of capitalism, which had spilled out of the workplace, and their only effects could be reformist: an increase in wages, but no reduction in the qualitative poverty of modern life. Similarly, the Situationists spent a lot of time demonstrating how the Bolshevik revolution had created a class of bureaucrats, that it had recreated an equally repressive hierarchy; and there was an ever-present danger that these processes would be reproduced in the Western left.
The Situationists are perhaps most interesting in relation to the everyday: how we should think of the everyday as the place in which we live (rather than in grand political narratives, or in prescribed roles such as worker or student), and how the everyday is the place in which power reproduces itself. To put it crudely: the SI argued that the everyday was territory colonised by capitalism. They insisted, likewise, that politics cannot be talked out without reference to the supposedly non-political – reference to love, for example, or to desire, to human relations. This is demonstrated in a quote from Raoul Vaneigem, which goes:
People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth
The SI began as a group called the Lettrist International, which was a collection of artists and drop-outs living in Paris during the 1950s. The Lettrists belonged to that long French tradition of épater la bourgeoisie – to shock and provoke and unsettle the bourgeoisie – that is, they wanted to reject the banalities of bourgeois life and celebrate instead all their wildest and most profane impulses. They wanted to find new and experimental ways of living and of being.
The Lettrists were most famous for their elaborate stunts and pranks – one example of which would be when one of their number snuck into Notre Dame cathedral during Easter High Mass in 1950, stole a priest’s outfit and went up to the main pulpit where he started giving a sermon on how God is Dead. When the congregation eventually realised what was going on, they chased him down and, the legend goes, if a policeman hadn’t intervened he would’ve been lynched.
There are loads of examples of Lettrist pranks like this – but in 1957 the so-called left-wing of the group realised that its activities needed more structure, more focus. This left-wing split off and formed the Situationist International, which was founded as a way of formulating these types of nihilistic gestures of defiance into a more systematic and ordered programme of assault upon life and culture under capitalism.
Term no.1: The Situation
Let’s begin with the name: the Situationist International. The group was composed of sections from across Europe and further afield, though it was based in Paris. The ‘International’ of the name is a tip-of-the-hat, or maybe a parody, of the early worker’s organisations like the First and Second Internationals – but what we’re more interested in is this notion of a Situation, the central principle of the SI. And it’s explained in the group’s founding document when Guy Debord (who is typically thought of as the SI’s leading figure) writes that,
Our central idea is the construction of situations, that is to say, the concrete construction of momentary ambiences of life and their transformation into a superior passional quality. We must develop a systematic intervention based on the complex factors of two components in perpetual interaction: the material environment of life and the behaviours which that environment gives rise to and which radically transform it.
So, right from its beginnings the SI was attempting produce a theory and a practice of ‘the situation’. Their premise was that capitalism had infiltrated every aspect of modern life, that all social relations had come to be determined by capitalist exchange. People had been alienated from their true nature, from their true desires. Marketing, advertising, mass media, political representation, urbanism: all of these things obscured people from their true selves by endlessly creating false desires, distractions, things to be passively consumed. The Situationists thought that where material poverty had been eradicated, the biggest threat to life was boredom, routine.
What the SI wanted to do was find methods of experiencing a life that wasn’t dominated by the rules, routines and structures of capitalism. To that end, the SI came up with the idea of situations, which were transgressive moments in everyday life that might allow for a brief glimpse beyond the present reality, beyond those structures imposed on us and which we unconsciously reproduce. The SI wanted to deliberately and consciously create moments—fleeting and temporary and ephemeral moments—that broke rules, that abounded in life, that overflowed with some profound truth; moments which at once exposed the falsity of life as it is presented to us, but which also pointed towards a new human subjectivity, a new way of living.
Term no.2: Psychogeography
How did the Situationists go about creating such situations? Well, to begin with, they wanted to use games and free play to disrupt the status-quo. They recognised, for example, that cities and the layout of cities reflected how far life had been organised around capitalist exchange: the preponderance of advertising, the tyranny of the private car, the separation and sequestering of different parts of the city, the spatial division of labour, and so on. And when the very layout of the modern city is designed to internalise and to naturalise the logic of capital for its inhabitants, then the Situationists wanted to intervene into or to counteract this process.
And so the Situationists developed the concept of psychogeography, which they described as ‘The study of the specific effects of the geographical environment (whether consciously organised or not) on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.’ A key psychogeographical practice was the dérive, or the drift, which was the attempt to navigate a city on one’s own terms – to wander according only to one’s unconscious desires, to follow areas that felt somehow attractive and to avoid areas that felt repellent. On a dérive, one would move in defiance of the official, imposed routes of circulation, and the implication was that one would unlearn the authoritarian version of the city, and re-learn it on one’s own terms. At the same time, this practice could offer some insight into the desires and the fears of one’s unconscious mind and that which has been otherwise suppressed.
The other important characteristic of the dérive was that it was a practice that didn’t perpetuate a commodity logic: it could produce situations, and it didn’t produce commodities (at least in its earliest articulations). Again, right at the founding of the SI, Guy Debord writes that,
Our situations will be ephemeral, without a future. Passageways. Our only concern is real life; we care nothing about the permanence of art or of anything else. Eternity is the grossest idea a person can conceive of in connection with his acts.
You can see how the SI was looking for practices that were also passageways to a different type of consciousness, practices that triggered some change in how one thinks of oneself and of one’s environment.
Term no.3: Spectacle
By 1962-1963, the SI was starting to develop beyond these art-based practices. On the one hand, it recognised that anything it did which operated solely on the level of the individual couldn’t challenge the atomisation of individuals which it recognised was another of the everyday effects of capitalism. Individualist situationist practices needed to be complemented by some effort to increase one’s consciousness of the totality, of the whole network, of power’s large-scale workings. In addition, the SI found itself increasingly populated by artists and architects, and recognised that whatever these people produced, those things would always feed into and propagate commodity logic and spectacular capitalist exchange. The point wasn’t to make great art about life’s decomposition, but reverse that decomposition – to act directly upon life and social conditions.
So the SI expelled all of its artists and entered another phase of its existence, usually called its political phase. It replaced its affirmative and positive practices with practices of negation, of explicit and aggressive assault on the reproduction of capitalist ideology. The Situationists sharpened their critique of capitalism and developed the concept of spectacle. This is most comprehensively outlined in a book published in 1967 by Guy Debord called The Society of the Spectacle.
This book begins by saying that,
1. In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.
The spectacle is based on the claim that all lived experience has been replaced by the image of itself – that we experience everything as a representation, we understand life not through a direct engagement with it, but through the images which represent life to us. As such, an active participation in social life is supplanted by a passive gaze, and the individual becomes increasingly atomised, pacified. We become spectators of our own lives. Debord continues to say that,
30. The alienation of the spectator… works like this: The more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands of his own life and his own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him. The spectator does not feel at home anywhere, because the spectacle is everywhere.
The Situationists were keen to stress that the spectacle isn’t the images themselves, but the social relation produced by those images; the spectacle as a stage of capitalism as we might now talk about neoliberalism. The spectacle is the relation, or more accurate the gulf, between life and its representation: the spectacle is the controlling mechanism of advanced capitalism and it is that which prescribes and regulates what we think of and how we engage (or not) with the world.
The idea of the spectacle perhaps now seem rather familiar. The word has been accepted into common discourse – we might speak, for example, of the spectacle of party politics. But think of its implications in the mid-1960s, and even its continued relevance now: the suggestion that capitalism isn’t regulated by coercion or overt violence, but by the control of representation, most notably through the media; the suggestion that we live all the time in an ideologically-constructed environment, that we’re never in neutral territory; that power extends through all areas of life, and so on.
The spectacle addresses representation in every sense. I’ve already mentioned how much effort the SI spent in denouncing the outdated methods of the left: one alternative mode of organisation that they proposed was the worker’s council, whereby organisation occurred horizontally, without hierarchy, and within the spaces concerned. The worker’s council was, for the SI, a means of living without that breach of representation, closing that gap between the thing and its image – a means of directly acting upon the material conditions of one’s life. In contemporary terms, we might associate the worker’s council with terms like DIY, autonomy, horizontality and so on.
Term no.4: Détournement
By the mid-to-late 1960s, the Situationists had proposed that capitalism now worked by way of an endless series of spectacles, and that life was being ever more concealed by this mass of representation. They’d recognised also that by producing commodities, or producing objects, they’re complicit in the spectacular processes of capitalism, the perpetuation of alienation, the prioritising of representation over experience.
The Situationists had, however, been developing a tactic that was intended to negate the workings of the spectacle, to expose its false construction of reality, and gesture towards something else, something new. This tactic was called détournement – which means a turning-around, a reversing. It was a tactic appropriated from Dada and Surrealism, and the found object, the ready-made, and the collage. The Situationists described détournement as,
Short for “détournement of pre-existing aesthetic elements.” The integration of present or past artistic productions into a superior construction of a milieu. In this sense there can be no situationist painting or music, but only a situationist use of those means. In a more elementary sense, détournement within the old cultural sphere is a method of propaganda, a method which reveals the wearing out and loss of importance of those spheres.
The Situationists would take a piece of writing, an artwork, a film or any other cultural object, and they would subvert it, they would change it slightly so that it came to mean something different. A newsphoto, for example, would have a speech bubble added that contained a Marxist slogan; a cartoon would have its dialogue boxes changed so it told a very different story to its original. The Situationists loved slogans and graffiti – these things intervened directly into the environments in which we live, the cities that have otherwise been written by town-planners; slogans acted as pin-pricks to the spectacular capitalism’ flimsy veneer of ideology. To the SI, all cultural material was fair game for pillaging: everything was up for grabs, it just needed to be re-arranged into a coherent message.
In relation to writing, Guy Debord wrote that détournement is the first step towards a literary communism: a shared resource of words and of phrases, an effort to undermine individual authorship and the illegality of plagiarism. Debord appropriated phrases from an obscure C19th writer, called the Comte de Lautreamont, who wrote that, ‘Plagiarism is necessary, progress implies it’ and that ‘poetry must be made by all, not by one’.
The film that I’ll turn on in a moment is an example of détournement – in fact, at the start it declares itself to be the first ever fully détourned film. It takes an old martial arts movie and re-dubs it, so that it becomes a story about class struggle. A group of villagers are transformed in proletarians under threat by the authoritarian class of bureaucrats, and they discuss organisational strategies, radical subjectivites, wildcat strikes and Worker’s Councils. At the same time, there are subplots about gender relations and the possibility of new uninhibited sexualities
The SI disbanded in 1972, partly because it couldn’t maintain the momentum gathered during May and June of 1968. Those events – the mass strikes, the university occupations, the worker-student solidarity – confirmed, for the SI, many of their theses: they saw a spontaneous rejection of the qualitative, subjective conditions of late capitalism; and then they saw the co-optation of that struggle by the organised left, who transformed the debates into a reformist struggle over wages and workplace conditions when something greater could have been changed. The SI weren’t so much interested in quantitative change (higher wages, bigger houses, etc.) so much as qualitative change (the eradication of wage labour, for example).
The influence of the SI has since penetrated all sorts of different fields – cultural and activist fields in particular – to the extent that many of its original observations have been decontextualised or misunderstood. However, we can still learn from the positions that the SI took: productive skepticism; a refusal to constrain their language and their imagination to the ‘proper’ limits of those things; an insistence that life should be measured and judged according to desire and subjective happiness rather than material wealth. I want to end with a judge’s report, from 1967, about a group of students and situationists who had distributed a pamphlet at Strasbourg university which had catalysed the May ’68 events:
One has only to read what the accused have written, for it is obvious that these five students, scarcely more than adolescents, lacking all experience of real life, their minds confused by ill-digested philosophical, social, political and economic theories, and perplexed by the drab monotony of their everyday life, make the empty, arrogant, and pathetic claim to pass definitive judgments, sinking to outright abuse, on their fellow-students, their teachers, God, religion, the clergy, the governments and political systems of the whole world. Rejecting all morality and restraint, these cynics do not hesitate to commend theft, the destruction of scholarship, the abolition of work, total subversion, and a world-wide proletarian revolution with “unlicensed pleasure” as its only goal.
