Book: What Is Situationism?: A Reader

WHAT IS SITUATIONISM? A READER

Chapter one – essays from leaving the 20thcentury – Christopher Gray

The situationists’ programme was based on what they called the constructions of situations. In the first place this meant the bringing together and fusion of various separated art forms in the creation of a single unified environment. For the first time art and technology could become one: put on the some practical footing with reality. Page 5

Everyday life. Page 11

They developed what was become their most famous single concept – that of the spectacle. Used from the very first as a term to designate contemporary culture – French: spectacle a spectacle, a circus, a show, an exhibition – a one-way transmission of experience; a form of ‘communication’ o which one side, the audience, can never reply; a culture based on the reproduction of almost everyone to a state of abject non-creativity: of receptivity, passivity and isolation. This experience was the universal experience imposed by contemporary capitalism: an experience radiating from its basic alienation, the commodity. Henceforward, consumer capitalism was to be simply the society of the spectacle. The first thing this meant was that the situationists could no longer see themselves as an art movement of any sort at all: art was no more than the consumer good pas excellence. An work of art, however radical, could be digested by modern capitalism and turned into opposite of all it had meant to those who originally created it. Page 12

By the mid-sixties the situationists project had taken on its definitive form. The SI was to be a small, tightly knit group of revolutionaries devoted to forging a critique of contemporary, that is to say, consumer capitalism – and the publicizing this critique by every form of scandal and agitation possible. All practical experiment with art wen by the board, everything depended on universal insurrection. Poetry could only be made by everyone. Page 13

What remains of the SI? What is still relevant? Above all, I think, its iconoclasm, its destructivity. What the SI did was to redefine the nature of exploitation and poverty. The SI showed exactly how loneliness and anxiety and aimlessness have replaced the nineteenth century struggle for material survival, though they are still generated by the same class society. The focused on immediate experience, everyday life as the area people most desperately wanted to transform.

The SI rediscovered the vast importance of visionary politics, of the Utopian tradition – and included art, in all its positive aspects, in this tradition. Page 22 What was basically wrong with the SI was that it focused exclusively on an intellectual critique of society. There was no concern whatsoever with either the emotions or the body. Their quest was for the perfect formula, the magic charm that would disperse the evil spell. This pursuit of the perfect intellectual formula meant inevitably that situationists groups were based on a hierarchy of intellectual ability – and thus on disciples and followers, on fears and exhibitionism, the whole political horror trip. After their initial period, creativity, apart from its intellectual forms, was denied expression – and in the lies the basic instability and sterility of their own organizations. Page 23 Everyone’s life is a switch between changing oneself and changing the world. Page 23

Chapter two – critique of the situationists international – Jean Barrot

The logic of alienation: one is another; the wage system makes one foreign to what one does, to what one is, to other people. All activity is symbolic: it creates, at one and the same time, products and a vision of the world. The layout of a primitive village. The fetishism of commodities is merely the form taken by this symbolism in societies dominated by exchange.

As capital tends to produce everything as capital, to parcelize everything so as to recompose it with the help of market relations, it also makes of representation a specialized sector of production. Stripped of the means of their material existence, wage-workers are also stripped of the means of producing their ideas, which are produced by a specialized sector )where the role of the ‘intellectuals’, a term introduced in France by the Manifesto of the Intellectuals, 1898) Marx defined ideology as the substitute for a real but impossible change: the change is lived at the level of the imaginary. Capital rests on the production and sale of objects. That these objects also function as signs is a fact, but this never annuls their materiality. Only intellectuals believe themselves to be living in a world. Made purely if signs. ₁ Page 24-25

1. The term ‘signs’ is used in structuralist writing to mean a signifier (representation) that has become separated from what it originality signified. Page 60

The SI understood the communist movement and the revolution as the production by the proletarians of new relations to each other and to ‘things’. It rediscovered the Marxian idea of communism as the movement of self-creation by men of their own relations. With the exception of Bordiga, it was the first connect again with the utopian tradition. This was at once its strength and its ambiguity. The SI was initially a revolt which sought to take back cultural means monopolized by money and power. Previously the most lucid artist had wanted to break the separation between art and life: the SI raised the demand to a higher level in their desire to abolish the distance between life and revolution. ‘Experimentation’ had been for surrealism an illusory means of wrenching art out of its isolation from reality: the SI applied it in order to found a positive utopia. The ambiguity comes from the fact that the SI did not know exactly whether it was a matter of living differently from now or only of heading that way. Page 33-34

Home, Stewart. What Is Situationism?: A Reader. Edinburgh, Scotland: AK, 1996. Print.