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Title: Situationists Author: Cian Lynch Date: 2005 Language: en Topics: situationist, history, Red & Black Revolution Source: Retrieved on 9th August 2021 from http://struggle.ws/wsm/rbr/rbr10/situationists.html Notes: This article is from Red & Black Revolution (no 10, Autumn 2005)
The Situationists are mostly known to anarchists as a group that had
something to do with the May 1968 Paris Uprising. However, the
Situationists played a relatively peripheral role in the disturbances.
Although much of the graffiti that appeared around the city (some famous
ones included : “Never Work” and “All Power to the Imagination”) were
taken from Situationist works, the group did not play a major role in
initiating the revolt themselves.
The Situationist International formed in 1957 from two avant-garde
groups, COBRA, (a group that sought to to renew art, architecture, and
the action of art of life), and the Lettrist International, a tiny,
postwar neo-dada anti-art movement. The Situationists were an
avant-garde group that took artistic and cultural revolution just as
seriously as political revolution. Although the Situationists could be
described as an “anti-art” movement, this needs qualifiers to properly
clarify their position. The Situationist family tree begins with Dada,
the anti-art movement formed in Zurich at the legendary Cabaret
Voltaire.
Dada as a movement was wholly negative, rejecting entirely all the
values of bourgeois society. Though Debord saw that it was Dada’s wholly
negative definition that precipitated its almost immediate breakup, he
did not seem to apply the lessons of Dada’s decline to the case of the
Situationist’s own decline.
Surrealism, the art-form which followed on from Dada, sought to give
expression to the unconscious, which, through techniques like automatic
writing, would give the artist access to a previously untapped and what
Andre Breton and fellow artists of the time believed to be an
inexhaustible source of inspiration.
Unfortunately as Debord saw in his “Report on the Construction of
Situations”(1957), “The error that is at the root of surrealism is the
idea of the infinite wealth of the unconscious imagination”. As Debord
and the Situationists saw it, surrealism’s great failure was that it
“wanted to realise art without suppressing it” — thus surrealism
eventually became a gallery-bound art movement far removed from its
original ideal of transforming everyday life through art.
The Lettrist International, and later, the Situationists themselves,
wished to destroy Art as a separate, special activity but only so it
could be re-constituted as an integral, and indeed the driving force of
life itself.
One the major differences between Anarchism and the Situationist project
was the exclusiveness of the project itself. There were only 10 members
at most at any time, and many were expelled by Debord very quickly, over
what seem to be the utmost trivialities. For example, Constant, the
utopian architect from Amsterdam, was expelled because a guy who worked
with him built a church, this apparently was too disastrous an influence
for him to continue to be associated with the project!
The Situationists were a lot more concerned with developing a strong
theory and critique than building a network of people willing to work
with them. It was more important to Debord and those in his close inner
circle (Raoul Vanageim and Michele Bernstein) that they possessed this
unassailable unity of theory and action, than if they were “corrupted”
by members who did not fully understand the nature of the project. It
has to be said that this uncompromising stance seemed often to amount to
not a lot more than agreeing with all of Debord’s ideas. Practical,
real-world actions were risky for SI members since there seemed to be
such a high likelihood they might be seen as”reformist” or not
revolutionary enough, which would result in expulsion.
It is possible to view the Situationist project as one that attempted to
initiate a new revolutionary project which greatly emphasised the
importance of cultural revolution. In practice however, the
Situationists functioned mainly as a group that, although they claimed
to have moved beyond Dada’s nihilism, engaged themselves primarily in a
total critique of existing society and culture.
The idea of “The Spectacle” is central to the Situationist critique i.e
— “All that was once lived directly has become mere representation”. In
our 21^(st) Century culture of Reality TV Shows, Soap Operas and
Concerts like “Live 8” watched simultaneously by billions worldwide, it
might well be argued that we have entered a new era of the Spectacle,
where its domination is more far-reaching and omnipresent than ever
before.
The Situationists believed that the primary effect (indeed, the goal) of
this “immense accumulation of spectacles” was to create the maximum
level of alienation in workers’ everyday lives. The Spectacle’s
overwhelming (indeed inescapable) predominance would also require “the
downgrading of being into having”. To bring this up-to-date one need
take only a quick look at MTV programming — “Cribs”, “Pimp My Ride” or
magazines like “Stuff”.
The legacy of Situationism can also be seen in the “Culture Space
Jamming” movement, popularised by Adbusters, who have unfortunately
reformulated their approach and now seek to create a new “grassroots
capitalism” — seen most clearly in their production of the “guaranteed
produced by union-labor” “Black Spot” Sneaker. The Situationist project
remains of great relevance today to the Anarchist movement, since they
remind us that if we are to have a political revolution, it should
necessarily also be a cultural revolution, in which we eliminate the
division between actor/musician and spectactor, to enable a wholly
non-alienated society to emerge.