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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

The Situationist International « Previous | |Next »
September 15, 2010

The Situationist International was created in 1957, in large part out of the ruins of the less well known Letterist movement, as well as several other fledgling European avant-garde groups. Though international in scope with active sections all over Europe, the Paris branch of the S.I. remained the most important, exerting a great deal of often irksome authority over the other factions. The Letterists had been active in Paris throughout the 1950s, carrying on both the best and worst traditions of Dada and Surrealist art, criticism and activism. Led by former Letterist Guy Debord, members of the S.I. created various works of art, books, periodicals, posters, and graffiti. However, they differed from other avant-garde movements in their development of a critique of everyday life that went beyond and ultimately turned against the production and politics of art, focusing instead on city planning and the critique of mass communications

In The most radical gesture The Situationist International in a postmodern age Sadie Plant says that:

The situationists characterised modern capitalist society as an organisation of spectacles: a frozen moment of history in which it is impossible to experience real life or actively participate in the construction of the lived world. They argued that the alienation fundamental to class society and capitalist production has permeated all areas of social life, knowledge, and culture, with the consequence that people are removed and alienated not only from the goods they produce and consume, but also from their own experiences, emotions, creativity, and desires. People are spectators of their own lives, and even the most personal gestures are experienced at one remove.

Even though the ability to control one’s own life is lost in the midst of all-pervasive capitalist relations, the demand to do so continues to assert itself, and the situationists were convinced that this demand is encouraged by the increasingly obvious discrepancy between the possibilities awoken by capitalist development and the poverty of their actual use.

They drew on Dada and Surrealism to explore the role of the imagination, creativity, desire, and pleasure in the transformation of everyday life from a realm of bland consumption to free creation.

Plant says:

Dada and surrealism had interrupted and subverted the language and images with which they worked, invoking a wider world of meanings which challenged conventional arrangements of reality. And in their challenges to the inevitability and immutability of the spectacle, the situationists pursued this same attempt to conjure a totality of possible social relations which exceeds and opposes the totality of spectacular relations. They took the words, meanings, theories, and experiences of the spectacle, and placed them in an opposing context; a perspective from which the world was given a fluidity and motion with which the static mediocrity of the spectacle could be negated. Introducing a sense of historical continuity by showing that the spectacle, in spite of its seamless appearance, carries the seeds of an emancipated and pleasure-filled world, the situationists showed that what could become real is more meaningful and desirable than that which is in being. The spectacle circumscribes the reality it presents, but it does not preclude the possibility of identifying a bigger and better world of chosen relations and experiences beyond its constraints.

The situationists’ attempt to transform everyday life has been defeated after the troubles of 1968 which is remembered for the irruption of play, festivity, spontaneity, and the imagination into the political realm. However, the avant-garde had failed to deliver the transformation of everyday reality it promised, so had the city planners.

We are left with their image or picture: modern society is a spectacle, modern individuals are spectators: observers seduced by the glamorous representations of their own lives, bound up in the mediations of images, signs, and commodities, and intolerably constrained by the necessity of living solely in relation to spectacular categories and alienated relations. The response, they argued was to cultivate an awareness of the ways in which everyday life is presently conditioned and controlled, the ways in which this manipulation can be exposed and subverted.

Everyday life is the very realm over which we should have control, yet it is experienced as mundane and dull in its ubiquity. In our escape from the fragmentation and mediocrity of our own experience, we run blindly towards the promises of wholeness, fulfilment, and unity implicit in the world of the abundant commodity.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:29 PM |