An Introduction to the Situationist International
NB! #6 1984 *
1
This text may be freely reproduced, translated or adapted, even without mentioning the source.
2
As recently as the 1940s, art forms which shared punk's ugliness,
dissonance, and bohemian roots -- dada and surrealism in the visual
arts, existentialism in philosophy, and serialism in music, to name but a
few -- were considered scandalous and offensive by middle-class
culture. Whatever notoriety these art forms attained in their day, they
were suppressed for being attempts to destroy aesthetic, political and
moral values. Since then, middle-class culture has come to regard these
works of art as "classics," as "realistic" perspectives on society,
things to be studied in the universities and copied -- minus their
critical edge -- by the advertising industry. As a result, our
generation (I am 25) has grown up with the mistaken idea that these
gestures of opposition are reified monuments to a dead culture, rather
than starting points in our efforts to create a world without alienation
or boredom.
3
It is highly significant, therefore, that in 1976, when punk took its
stand against the English socio-cultural terrain, the most powerful
cultural institutions -- EMI and CBS Records, Melody Maker and New
Musical Express -- greeted the Damned, the Sex Pistols and the Clash
with open arms. With the lone exception of the Pistols, the first wave
of punk bands shook, rather than bit, the hands that fed them. The
Clash, in particular, have always shown a desire to help those who have
rather opportunistically helped them. Eight years later, "punk rock" is a
commercially successful form of expression, something that even frat
boys and neo-Nazis can like without fear of being considered weird or
repulsive. Mohawks, shaved heads and safety pins, not to mention the
Clash or John Lydon, can now be seen with increasing frequency on MTV.
4
What has happened since the 1940s is that aesthetic production has
become fully integrated into commodity production generally. Rather than
merely tolerating "art for art's sake," the capitalist imperative to
produce fresh waves of ever-more novel-seeming goods, at ever greater
rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural
function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation. As a
result of these changes in the cultural logic of capitalism, changes
brought about by the movement from the monopoly stage to the
multinational stage of capitalism, our sense of history, both personal
and collective, has been completely eroded. We now live in a perpetual
present. Under such conditions, it's nearly impossible to conceive of
the future; any traditional attempt to oppose society's development are
now secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by that very society.
5
The intellectual adjuncts of official Western culture would have us
believe that it has only been very recently that anyone has come to
understand these dizzying, discomforting and historically original
changes in culture, and that it will be many more years before anyone,
even revolutionaries, will be able to develop a new set of oppositional
tactics. From art magazines such as Artforum and ZG to the sociology
departments of Yale and the University of Paris to "alternative"
newspapers such as The Village Voice and In These Times, one now sees a
torrent of discussion and analysis of these themes, generally lumped
under the rubric of "theories of postmodernism." Yet the fact of the
matter is that the nature of the cultural logic of multinational
capitalism, as well as the nature of the new forms of revolt, have been
known for at least 30 years! Preeminent in this regard, and not solely
by dint of personal talent, have been a group of extremists collectively
known as the Situationist International. It is no coincidence that the
recent proliferation of analyses of "postmodernism" have been
accompanied, after years of silence, by growing references to the
situationists. In a passage equally applicable to the sudden visibility
of postmodern culture as it was to the reception of the SI in the early
1960s, the SI wrote that "many intellectuals hesitate to speak openly of
the SI because to speak of it implies taking a minimum position. Many
of them believe, quite mistakenly, that to feign ignorance of it in the
meantime will suffice to clear them of responsibility later."
6
Originating in the
Lettrist movement in Paris in the early 1950s, the Situationist International was
formed in 1957
by a few European avant-garde groups. Over the next decade, the SI
developed an increasingly incisive and coherent critique of Western
multinational capitalism and Eastern bureaucratic capitalism, its
pseudo-opposition. The new methods of agitation developed by the SI were
highly influential in leading up to the May 1968 revolt in France.
Since then -- though the organization itself was dissolved in 1972 --
situationist theses and tactics have been taken up by radical currents
in dozens of countries all over the world, perhaps most notably [for our
purposes] in the punk movement in England in the mid-1970s. In this
article I will attempt to present a useful selection of excerpted
situationist writings and images "detourned" by the SI, as well as to
illustrate the SI's origins and development. Anyone who is serious about
learning from the SI's example will want to read their writings in
their entirety.
Guy Debord's
The Society of the Spectacle is available for $2 from Black & Red
(POB 02374, Detroit MI 48202); Raoul Vaneigem's The Revolution of
Everyday Life is available for $7 from Left Bank Books (Box B 92 Pike
Street, Seattle WA 98101); an anthology of the SI's journal, as well as
various postmortem critiques, are available for $10 from Ken Knabb (POB
1044, Berkeley CA 94701); my own attempts to update situationist theory
and practice can be sampled for $2 [outdated address deleted].
7
The misfortune of the situationists' theory and that to which
comparable movements of revolutionary intellectuals in the past
succumbed were ultimately reunited in the very nature of their failures.
Just as with Marxist thought and other, later attempts at revolutionary
critique, all the results of the SI's efforts wound up knowing a
complete inversion of their meaning in the 1970s, so as to now
constitute nothing more than a particular brand of cultural verbiage in
the generalized false communication imposed on men and women by existing
conditions, as much in their acceptance of these conditions as in their
revolt against them. A case in point is the band the Feederz, who
proclaim with great self-satisfaction that "the situationists were a big
influence on us," despite the fact that the Feederz have done violence
to the integrity of the situationists' theory by turning it into an
ideology, into situationism. "Such people," the situationists
proclaimed, "are extremely handicapped and uninteresting compared to
those who may not be aware of the SI but who unflinchingly confront
their own lives." One must invert the Feederz's song "Dead Bodies,"
itself an inversion of one of the SI's theses, to get at its real truth
(i.e., that any attempt to apply an ideology to current conditions is
necrophilous by definition). To pursue this line of thought (and thus
clear up any misconceptions about the situationists' ideas about
revolutionary violence): the real truth of the Feederz's song
"Destruction Unit," once it has been inverted to correct for itself
inverted perspective, is that unarmed dissatisfaction, which goes so far
as refusing the false activities offered by the work-a-day "world"
without being able to reinvent human activity upon other bases, is
indistinguishable from capitalist advertizing and twice as odious when
it is advocated by so-called revolutionaries.
8
An objection might very well be made that the writing and publication
of this article will encourage spectacular, imbecilic (a la the
Feederz) or otherwise inappropriate uses of the situationists' theses
and example. My hope is that by intentionally nourishing these
inappropriate uses of the SI, I will thus dialectically create the
possibility of better uses of it. To be blunt: everyone reading this
article must realize that the situationists are in the past. By
extinguishing the security afforded by self-satisfied references to the
SI, or to any external authority, for that matter, it is hoped that each
revolutionary feels as I do: namely, that he or she has to take
responsibility for his or her own thoughts and actions. This is
necessarily the first step toward autonomy and the possibility of
forming truly revolutionary organizations without militants, followers
or sycophants.
9
"The new revolutionary theory," the situationist Mustapha Khayati
wrote in 1966, "cannot advance without redefining its fundamental
concepts. 'Ideas improve,' says Lautremont. 'The meaning of words
participates in the movement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies
it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his or her expressions,
erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.' To salvage
Marx's thought it is necessary continually to make it more precise, to
correct it, to reformulate it in the light of a hundred years of
reinforcement of alienation and the possibilities of negating it." The
situationists, in their attempts to develop a coherent critique of
society as it really is, plagiarized the writings of Marx, Hegel,
Fourier, Lewis Carroll, Sade, Lautremont, the surrealists,
Henri Lefebvre,
Georg Lukacs -- in short, from anyone whose basic impulse was to
theorize the totality of society. Yet, unlike nearly all of the
theorists and artists from whom they plagiarized, the situationists
critiqued society without the pull of allegiances or the fear of
reprisals. The SI never pretended to have a monopoly on intelligence,
but on its use.
10
The touchstones of Marxist-situationist theory are these: A). That
all forms of capitalist society, be they corporate or bureaucratic, are
in the final analysis based on the generalized and -- at the level of
the masses -- stable division between directors and executants: those
who give orders and those who carry them out. B). That subsequent to the
total domination and colonialization of nature by technology (a victory
that freed mankind from having to struggle to survive), the
directorate, its hand forced by capitalism's need to locate and exploit
new raw materials and new markets for its products, began its domination
and colonialization of human nature. The only other alternative was for
the directorate to admit that the battle against nature had been won
and that the directorate itself was no longer necessary or even
desirable. C). That the domination and colonialization of human nature
took the form of a consumption-based society, rather than a
production-based society; this "new" society the situationists called
the society of the spectacle. D). That the alienation which, in the 19th
century, was rooted in economic misery had, in the 20th century, become
located in false consciousness. E). That this false consciousness
believes that "everyday life" (i.e., one's personally selected ensemble
of commodities and ideologies) is separate from "history" (i.e., the sum
total of that which is accomplished at and by work). And F). That the
society of the spectacle perpetuates itself by compensating those denied
the opportunity to make history with more and more commodities, all of
which are fundamentally unsatisfying because the ideology of survival
remains coded within them.
11
The touchstones of Marxist-situationist practice are these: A). That
during the 1910 to 1925 period, in the form of dadaism and surrealism,
modern art had already revealed and, on the plane of ideas, destroyed
the workings of the society of the spectacle. B). That the failure of
modern art, on the plane of actions, to make good its promise to destroy
spectacular society is inseparable from the failure of the workers'
movement of that same era. C). That post-surrealist modern art, if it
doesn't link up with the workers' movements of the current era, cannot
help but be boring, sterile and openly apologetic for multinational
capitalism. D). That there is most definitely a modern workers'
movement; the problem is that clinging to outdated notions of who the
modern proletariat is prevents everyone from seeing what it is doing.
E). that the modern proletariat, which more often than not revolts out
of boredom, does not yet know that it encompasses nearly everyone. And
F). That, when situations are constructed (this is the derivation of the
term "situationist") in which the freedom of modern art is put into
practice, the modern proletariat will come to know what it truly is and
will realize that it wants to live modern freedom rather than be a
spectator of it.
12
One can discern three main periods in the situationists' development.
In the first, which preceded the actual formation of the International
in 1957, the situationists devoted themselves to derives, to drifting
through the city for days, weeks, even months at a time, trying to find
what the Lettrist Ivan Chtcheglov called "forgotten desires": images of
play, eccentricity, secret rebellion, negation. The derives were part of
a self-conscious attempt to organize a new vision of everyday life;
this was a process that ordinarily took place without self-awareness. In
the second period, which stretched from 1958 to 1962, the situationists
experimented with the supersession of art. These experiments took four
forms: 1). the imposition of additional or altered speech bubbles on
pre-existing photocomics; 2). the promotion of guerilla tactics in the
mass media; 3). the development of situationist comics; and 4). the
production of situationist films. Accompanying this article, one will
find several examples of "authentic" situationist cartoons and
photocomics. (I've placed the word authentic in quotes because the whole
point of situationist comics is that anyone with an understanding of
what distinguishes them from mere parody or satire can produce
"authentic" examples themselves.) In the third period, which extended
from 1963 to 1968, the SI developed a theory and practice of the
exemplary act. Citing, celebrating, analyzing and, as often as possible,
lending practical support to such exemplary acts of refusal as the
Watts riots of 1965, the Algerian Revolution of 1966 and the resistance
of students to the Chinese Cultural Revolution in 1967, the SI made
explicit their belief that the only successful revolutionary movement
would be an international one. Some of these actions led nowhere; some
-- like the assaults the SI itself made against French cyberneticians at
the University of Strasbourg in 1966, and against sociologists at the
University of Nanterre in 1967 -- led to May 1968, which was the first
wildcat general strike in history, and the largest general strike that
ever stopped the economy of an advanced industrial society.
13
Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of the SI was its steadfast
refusal to reproduce internally the hierarchical conditions of both the
"world" of the commodity and the various self-styled "workers" parties
which claim to oppose it. "The SI cannot be a massive organization and
it will not even accept disciples as do the conventional radical
groups," wrote an unidentified situationist in 1963. "One of the classic
weapons of the old world, perhaps the one most used against groups
attempting to alter the organization of life, is to single out and
isolate a few of the participants as 'stars.' We have to defend
ourselves against this process, which has an air of being 'natural.'
Those among us who aspired to the role of stars or depended on stars had
to be rejected. The SI will only organize the detonation; the free
explosion must escape us and any other control forever." True to their
word, when the explosion came in 1968, the situationists, unlike others
involved in the insurrection, didn't trade their victory for whatever
rewards the momentarily defeated spectacular society offered them.
Rather, the SI struggled against reformism in an attempt to define the
revolt's most radical possibilities, which meant that, in the end, the
situationists would leave behind the most radical definition of all that
May 1968 could have been, but wasn't.
14
If the May 1968 insurrection was the realization of the Situationist
International and the confirmation of its theses and tactics, then this
realization was also the end of the SI. Though the situationists used
their theories about the society of the spectacle as rules of thumb in
the construction of their organization, they did not apply them to the
very activity of theory formulation. The backlash generated by the
confirmation of situationist theory threw the SI, which was generally
unprepared to resist self-satisfaction, into incoherence, impotence and
finally massive psychological repression of the whole experience,
without their ever having asked themselves what was happening to them.
15
In the aftermath of the May 1968 revolt, two things have happened
which are of great importance to the readers of Maximum Rock 'n' Roll.
The first is that revolution has moved from being an apparently marginal
phenomenon to a visibly central one. The underdeveloped countries have
lost their apparent monopoly on contestation; but the "Third World"
revolutions haven't stopped; they have simply become modern and are
resembling more and more the struggles in the advanced countries. The
formerly isolated gestures of revolt against what seemed to be isolated
alienation and boredom now know themselves to be international and
proliferating. It is this global visibility which has once and for all
shattered the ideologies that saw revolution everywhere but in the
proletariat. The second aftermath of May 1968 is that this society,
which proclaimed its well-being in the 1950s, is now officially in
crisis. Everything that the situationists said about art, the
proletariat, the spectacle, is broadcast everywhere -- minus the
essentials. Revolutionary theses don't appear to be what they really are
(the ideas of revolutionaries), but rather appear to be images seen in
unexpected outbursts of lucidity on the part of the rulers, the stars
and vendors of illusions. The very fact that EMI Records, the biggest
and most conservative label in England, agreed to release "Anarchy in
the U.K." is confirmation of this hypothesis.
16
The genius of the Sex Pistols -- the style that distinguished them
from their contemporaries in the English punk movement of the mid-1970s
-- was their thorough understanding of society's weaknesses in the
aftermath of May 1968. By making explicit reference to the MPLA, the UDA
and the IRA, "Anarchy in the U.K." accomplished several things at once:
it restored revolutionary ideas as the product of revolutionaries; it
pointed out the visibly central nature of revolution to modern society;
and, by asserting that dissatisfaction with society is either profound
or it is nothing, it revealed the true desperation behind society's
official proclamations that it's in a state of crisis. Like the
situationists before them, the Sex Pistols didn't exchange the ground
"Anarchy in the U.K." won for them for whatever rewards society offered
them. Rather, the Pistols progressively upped the ante: by asserting, in
"God Save the Queen," that the function of sacred thought has been
taken over by ideology; by challenging, in "Pretty Vacant," the cult of
the image; and finally, in "Holidays in the Sun," by demanding the right
to make history now. Once again like the situationists, the Sex Pistols
only organized the detonation; they -- Johnny Rotten, at least --
allowed the free explosion to escape them. If one can believe Malcolm
McLaren, who once told Melody Maker that "it's wonderful to use
situationism in rock 'n' roll," the connection between the Pistols and
the SI is a solid one.
17
Earlier in this article I asserted that punk is dead, that it is no
longer at all shocking to middle-class culture, and that it and its
hallmarks can now be seen with increasing frequency on MTV. Quite
obviously, the same cannot be said for the hardcore movement. Yet the
hardcore movement's days may be limited if we don't act fast. Already
one can detect in it the same weaknesses which crippled and ultimately
destroyed punk: namely, the fact that the vast majority of the people
involved in it haven't theorized their relationship to the "world" of
the commodity. In the absence of such a critique, the hardcore movement
has found itself under the tutelage of a small clique of dubious leaders
who have tried to maintain their visibility by developing an ideology
of anarchism, a salad thrown together out of the mildewed leftovers of a
feast they've never known. Since anarchism can never be more than a
period of wavering between two extremes -- one leading to submission and
subservience (as in Jello Biafra's mayoral campaign), the other leading
to permanent revolt (the Dead Kennedys' "Nazi Punks Fuck Off") -- it is
most definitely not the ground upon which to build a revolutionary
movement. An example? East Bay Ray of the Dead Kennedys: "You'd be
surprised how many people think we're serious. 'Kill the Poor' was
Number 4 on the charts in Portugal. We think the government promoted
it." To save itself, from its external enemies as well as its internal
enemies, the hardcore movement must revolt against its own leaders,
which means dumping people like Frank Discussion and Ian MacKaye; it
must reduce its numbers, which means de-emphasizing "scene building"; it
must increase the quality of its numbers, which means that each person
should be able to understand his or her own relationship to the totality
of social life; and it must internationalize its reach, which means
linking up with the revolutionary forces of the modern proletariat.
Quickly! I have already taken up too much of your time.
Editor's Note
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