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The Situationist International 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. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7453 3890 3 Hardback ISBN 978 0 7453 3889 7 Paperback ISBN 978 1 7868 0544 7 PDF eBook ISBN 978 1 7868 0546 1 Kindle eBook ISBN 978 1 7868 0545 4 EPUB eBook This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin. Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Contents Introduction: The Situationist International in Critical Perspective 1 Alastair Hemmens and Gabriel Zacarias PART I: KEY CONTEXTS 1 Debord’s Reading of Marx, Lukács and Wittfogel: A Look at the Archives 19 Anselm Jappe 2 The Unsurpassable: Dada, Surrealism and the Situationist International 27 Krzysztof Fijalkowski 3 Lettrism 43 Fabrice Flahutez 4 The Situationists, Hegel and Hegelian Marxism in France 51 Tom Bunyard 5 The Situationist International and the Rediscovery of the Revolutionary Workers’ Movement 71 Anthony Hayes 6 The Shadow Cast by the Situationist International on May ’68 94 Anna Trespeuch-Berthelot 7 The Situationists’ Anti-colonialism: An Internationalist Perspective 103 Sophie Dolto and Nedjib Sidi Moussa 8 Gender and Sexuality in the Situationist International 118 Ruth Baumeister 9 Revolutionary Romanticism in the Twentieth Century: Surrealists and Situationists 138 Michael Löwy vi The Situationist International PART II: KEY CONCEPTS 10 The Spectacle 149 Alastair Hemmens and Gabriel Zacarias 11 The Constructed Situation 168 Gabriel Zacarias 12 Unitary Urbanism: Three Psychogeographic Imaginaries 183 Craig Buckley 13 The Abolition of Alienated Labour 201 Alastair Hemmens 14 Détournement in Language and the Visual Arts 214 Gabriel Zacarias 15 The Situationists’ Revolution of Everyday Life 236 Michael E. Gardiner 16 Radical Subjectivity: Considered in its Psychological, Economic, Political, Sexual and, Notably, Philosophical Aspects 252 Alastair Hemmens 17 The ‘Realisation of Philosophy’ 270 Tom Bunyard 18 Recuperation 281 Patrick Marcolini 19 Internationalism 290 Bertrand Cochard Bibliography 301 Notes on Contributors 310 Index 314 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 under- stood 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 avant- garde or political cult that purged its members for a lack of ideological purity. No term perhaps embodies better such misunderstanding and half- truths than the history of ‘Situationism’. The Situationists anticipated the emergence of the term in the 1950s and gave it an entirely negative defini- tion. 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 Situation- ists 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 Situ- ationist work of art.’3 2 The Situationist International 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 revo- lutionary organisation with its own history, was largely unknown to them. Equally, when, several decades later, the group’s roots in the artistic avant- garde 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 misappro- priations 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 Introduction 3 on how to move forward. In so doing, we hope to present a new under- standing 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 het- erogeneous 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 capital- ist 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 authori- tarianism of the various workers’ states, parties and unions in favour of wildcat strikes, workers’ councils and other forms of autonomous prole- tarian radicalism. The radicality of the Situationists’
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