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The Situationist International (SI) was a small group of international political and artistic agitators with roots in Marxism, Lettrism and the early 20th century European artistic and political avant-gardes. Formed in 1957, the SI was active in Europe through the 1960s and aspired to major social and political transformations. In the 1960s it split into a number of different groups, including the Situationist Bauhaus, the Antinational and the Second Situationist International. The first SI disbanded in 1972. http://www.barbelith.com/cgi-bin/articles/00000011.shtml

The first issue of the journal Internationale Situationniste defined situationist as: "having to do with the theory or practical activity of constructing situations. One who engages in the construction of situations. A member of the Situationist International".http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/definitions.html The same journal defined situationism as "a meaningless term improperly derived from the above. There is no such thing as situationism, which would mean a doctrine of interpretation of existing facts. The notion of situationism is obviously devised by antisituationists."

History Earlier groups The SI was formed in 1957 as the fusion of several extremely small artistic tendencies, which claimed to be avant-gardistes: Lettrist International, the International movement for an imaginist Bauhaus (an off-shoot of COBRA (avant-garde movement)), and the London Psychogeographical Association.

Already in 1950, the Lettrist International was very active in provoking pranks. At the Easter mass at Notre Dame de Paris, they infiltrated Michel Mourre, who, dressed like a monk, "stood in front of the altar and read a pamphlet proclaiming that God was dead".http://www.snarkout.org/archives/2002/11/24/ http://www.mirorenzaglia.com/index.php?itemid=8 http://www.mirorenzaglia.com/index.php?itemid=311 This event became known as the Notre-Dame Affair.

Situationist International The SI was formed at a meeting in the Italian village of Cosio d'Arroscia on 28 July 1957 with the fusion of several extremely small artistic tendencies, which claimed to be avant-gardistes: Lettrist International, the International movement for an imaginist Bauhaus (an off-shoot of COBRA (avant-garde movement)), and the London Psychogeographical Association. The groups came together intending to reawaken the radical political potential of surrealism. The group also later drew ideas from the left communist group Socialisme ou Barbarie.



The most prominent French member of the group, Guy Debord, has tended to polarise opinion. Some describe him as having provided the theoretical clarity within the group; others say that he exercised dictatorial control over its development and membership; yet others believe that he was a powerful writer but a second-rate thinker. Other members included the Dutch painter Constant Nieuwenhuys, the Italo-Scottish writer Alexander Trocchi, the English artist Ralph Rumney (sole member of the London Psychogeographical Association, Rumney suffered expulsion relatively soon after the formation of the Situationist International), the Scandinavian artist Asger Jorn (who after parting with the SI also founded the Scandinavian Institute for Comparative Vandalism), the architect and veteran of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 Attila Kotanyi, the French writer Michele Bernstein, and Raoul Vaneigem. Debord and Bernstein later married.

Situationist Bauhaus The Denmark brothers Jørgen Nash and Asger Jorn formed the Bauhaus Situationniste in 1960, purchasing a farm in southern Sweden. where they continued with various artistic and political activities.

Second Situationist International The SI experienced splits and expulsions from its beginning. The most prominent split in the group, in 1962, resulted in the Paris section retaining the name Situationist International while excluding the German section, who as Gruppe SPUR had merged into the SI in 1959. The excluded group declared themselves The Second Situationist International and based themselves at the Bauhaus in Sweden.

While the entire history of the Situationists was marked by their impetus to revolutionize life, the split was characterised by Vaneigem (of the French section), and by many subsequent critics, as marking a transition in the French group from the Situationist view of revolution possibly taking an "artistic" form to an involvement in "political" agitation. Asger Jorn continued to fund both groups with the proceeds of his works of art.

One way or another, the currents which the SI took as predecessors saw their purpose as involving a radical redefinition of the role of art in the twentieth century. The Situationists themselves took a dialectical viewpoint, seeing their task as superseding art, abolishing the notion of art as a separate, specialized activity and transforming it so it became part of the fabric of everyday life. From the Situationist's viewpoint, art is revolutionary or it is nothing. In this way, the Situationists saw their efforts as completing the work of both Dada and surrealism while abolishing both. Still, the Situationists answered the question "What is revolutionary?" differently at different times.

May 1968 Those who followed the "artistic" view of the SI might view the evolution of SI as producing a more boring or dogmatic organization. Those following the political view would see the May 1968 as a logical outcome of the SI's dialectical approach: while savaging present day society, they sought a revolutionary society which would embody the positive tendencies of capitalist development. The "realization and suppression of Art" is simply the most developed of the many dialectical supersessions which the SI sought over the years. For the Situationist International of 1968, the world triumph of workers councils would bring about all these supersessions.

An important event leading up to May 1968 was the so called Strasbourg scandal. A group of students managed to use public funds to publish the pamphlet On the Poverty of Student Life: considered in its economic, political, psychological, sexual, and particularly intellectual aspects, and a modest proposal for its remedy. The pamphlet circulated in thousands of copies and helped to make the situationists well known throughout the nonstalinist left.

The SI's part in the revolt of 1968 has often been overemphasised. They were a very small group, but were expert self-propagandists, and their slogans appeared daubed on walls throughout Paris at this time. SI member René Viénet's 1968 book Enragés and Situationists in the Occupations Movement, France, May '68 gives an account of the involvement of the SI with the student group of Enragés and the occupation of the Sorbonne.

The occupations of 1968 started at the university of Nanterre and spread to the Sorbonne. The police tried to take back the Sorbonne and a riot ensued. Following this a general strike was declared with up to 10 million workers participating. The SI originally participated in the Sorbonne occupations and defended barricades in the riots. The SI distributed calls for the occupation of factories and the formation of workers’ councils but disillusioned with the students left the university to set up the CMDO (The Council For The Maintenance Of The Occupations) which distributed the SI’s demands on a much wider scale. After the end of the movement, the CMDO disbanded.

The Situationist Antinational was published for a short while in the 1970s, after the dissolving of the 1SI in 1972.

Influence Situationist ideas have continued to echo profoundly through many aspects of culture and politics in Europe and the USA. Even in their own time, with limited translations of their dense theoretical texts, combined with their very successful self-mythologisation, the term 'situationist' was often used to refer to any rebel or outsider, rather than to a body of surrealist-inspired Marxist critical theory. As such, the term 'situationist' and those of 'spectacle' and 'detournement' have often been decontextualised and recuperated.

In political terms, in the 1960s and 1970s elements of Situationist critique influenced anarchists and other leftists, with various emphases and interpretations which combine Situationist concepts more or less successfully with a variety of other perspectives. Examples of these groups include: in Amsterdam, the Provos, in the UK King Mob, the producers of Heatwave magazine (who later briefly joined the SI) and the Angry Brigade. In the US, groups like Black Mask (later Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers), Weatherman (organization) and the Rebel Worker group also explicitly employed their ideas.

In the 1980s and 90s, Situationist ideas were taken up by 'second wave' anarchists. These theorists, such as Bob Black, Hakim Bey, Fredy Perlman and John Zerzan developed the SI's ideas in various directions, but all attempted to remove the perspectives and proposed practices of the SI from a Marxist theoretical context. These theorists were predominantly associated with the magazines Fifth Estate, Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed and Green Anarchy, in which they developed these perspectives. Some hacker related e-zines, which like samizdat were distributed via email and FTP over early internet links and BBS quoted and developed ideas coming from SI. A few of them were N0 Way, N0 Route, UHF, in France; and early Phrack, CDC in the US. More recently, writers such as Thomas de Zengotita in "Mediated" wrote something which holds the spirit of situationism, describing the society of the "roaring zeroes" (i.e. 2000-).

Most recently, more politically heterogeneous radical groups such as Reclaim the Streets and Adbusters have respectively, seen themselves as 'creating situations' or practicing detournement on advertisements.

In cultural terms, the SI's influence has been even greater, if more diffuse. The list of cultural practices which claim a debt to the SI is almost limitless, but there are some prominent examples:

• Situationist ideas exerted a strong influence on the design language of the early punk rock phenomenon of the 1970s, for example. To a significant extent this came about due to the adoption of the style and aesthetics and sometimes slogans employed by the Situationists (though these latter were often second hand, via English pro-Situs such as King Mob and Jamie Reid). In the late 1970s during the Post-Punk movement, record company owner Tony Wilson of Factory Records was known to follow situationist ideas. Also the band nameThe Durutti Column(intentionally spelt incorrectly), was taken from the well known group of Anarchists during the Spanish Civil War. Other musical artists have attempted to more directly include buzzwords from the SI's critical theory into their lyrics, such as Swedish hardcore band Refused, The International Noise Conspiracy and the Welsh rock band The Manic Street Preachers.

• Situationist urban theory, defined initially by the members of the Letterist International as 'Unitary Urbanism', was extensively developed through the behavioural and performance structures of The Workshop for Non-Linear Architecture during the 1990s.

• Situationist practices allegedly continue to influence underground street artists such as gHOSTbOY, Banksy, Borf, and Mudwig, whose artistic interventions and subversive practice can be seen on advertising hoardings, street signs and walls throughout Europe and The United States.

• One can also trace situationist ideas within the development of innumerable other cultural avant-garde threads such as Neoism, Seahorse Liberation Army, The Nation of Ulysses, Libre Society, neo-Dadaists, Mark Divo.

Classic Situationist texts include: On the Poverty of Student Life, Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, The Revolution of Everyday Life, and The Situationist International Anthology edited by Ken Knabb. The initial English-language text, although poorly and freely translated, was "Leaving The 20th cCentury" edited by Chris Gray.

As many of the original Situationist texts tend to be carefully written, some people have found them dense and inaccessible. However, during the early 1980s English Anarchist Larry Law produced a series of 'pocket-books' under the name of Spectacular Times which aimed to make Situationist ideas more easily assimilated into popularist anarchism. Some people, however, feel that Law significantly reduced their cohesiveness by this process.

Contemporary Contemporary Situationist praxis is split between pro-situs, situlogy and psychogeography.

Criticism Critics of the Situationists frequently assert that their ideas are not in fact complex and difficult to understand, but are at best simple ideas expressed in deliberately difficult language, and at worst actually nonsensical. For example anarchist Chaz Bufe asserts that "obscure situationist jargon" is a major problem in the anarchist scene.http://www.seesharppress.com/listen.html

Key ideas in Situationist theory Ideas central to Situationist theory include:

• Situgraphy and Situgraphology: Drawing from the artistic Lettrist praxis of hypergraphics as well as older developments in mathematics and topology in Henri Poincare's List of publications in mathematics#Algebraic topology , the main theorist of the SI Asger Jorn formulated theories of plastic, anti-Euclidean geometry and topology which was at the heart of Situationist critiques of urbanism and other manifestations of contemporary capitalist culture and politics.

• The Situation: this concept, central to the SI, was defined in the first issue of their journal as "A moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and a game of events." As the SI embraced dialectical Marxism, the situation came to refer less to a specific avant-garde practice than to the dialectical unification of art and life more generally. Beyond this theoretical definition, the situation as a practical manifestation thus slipped between a series of proposals. The SI thus were first led to distinguish the situation from the mere artistic practice of the beat happening, and later identified it in historical events such as the Paris Commune or the Watts riots, and eventually not with partial insurrections, but with total revolution itself. SEE ALSO Situlogy

• The Spectacle (Situationism): Debord's 1968 book The Society of the Spectacle attempted to provide the SI with a Marxian critical theory. The concept of 'the spectacle' expanded to all society the Marxist concept of reification drawn from the first section of Marx's Capital, entitled The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof and developed by Georg Lukács. This was an analysis of the logic of commodities whereby they achieve an ideological autonomy from the process of their production, so that “social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them.” (Marx, Capital) Developing this analysis of the logic of the commodity, The Society of the Spectacle generally understood society as divided between the passive subject who consumes the spectacle and the reified spectacle itself.

• Unitary urbanism: "Unitary urbanism is one of the central concerns of the SI" (Internationale Situationniste #3, December 1959). This was originally developed by the Lettrist International and the International Movement For An Imaginist Bauhaus, and then taken up by the SI. This development marked a move away from metagraphy and towards the use of Dérive and psychogeography and also situgraphy. Following expulsions and the move towards the theory of the spectacle, UU became a lesser concern for the SI in later years. See separate articles on Unitary urbanism, Dérive, and psychogeography.

• Recuperation (sociology): "To survive, the spectacle must have social control. It can recuperate a potentially threatening situation by shifting ground, creating dazzling alternatives- or by embracing the threat, making it safe and then selling it back to us" -- Larry Law, from The Spectacle- The Skeleton Keys, a 'Spectacular Times pocket book.

• Detournement: "short for: detournement of pre-existing aesthetic elements. The integration of past or present artistic production into a superior construction of a milieu. In this sense there can be no Situationist painting or music, but only a Situationist use of these means.", Internationale Situationiste Issue 1, June 1958.

One could view detournement as forming the opposite side of the coin to 'recuperation' (where radical ideas and images become safe and commodified), in that images produced by the spectacle get altered and subverted so that rather than supporting the status quo, their meaning becomes changed in order to put across a more radical or oppositionist message.

The concept of detournement has had a popular influence amongst contemporary radicals, and the technique can be seen in action in the present day when looking at the work of Culture Jammers including Cacophony Society], Billboard Liberation Front, and Adbusters 1, whose 'subvertisements' 'detourn' Nike, Inc. adverts, for example. In this case the original advertisement's imagery is altered in order to draw attention to said company's policy of shifting their production base to cheap-labour third-world 'free trade zones'. However, the line between 'recuperation' and 'detournement' can become thin (or at least very fuzzy) at times, as Naomi Klein points out in her book No Logo. Here she details how corporations such as Nike, Pepsi or Diesel have approached Culture Jammers and Adbusters (sometimes successfully) and offered them lucrative contracts in return for partaking in 'ironic' promotional campaigns. She points out further irony by drawing attention to merchandising produced in order to promote Adbusters' Buy Nothing day, an example of the recuperation of detournement (or of culture eating itself) if ever there was one. Klein's arguments about irony reifying rather than breaking down power structures is echoed by Slavoj Zizek. Zizek argues that the kind of distance opened up by detournement is the condition of possibility for ideology to operate: by attacking and distancing oneself from the sign-systems of capital, the subject creates a fantasy of transgression that "covers up" his/her actual complicity with capitalism as an overarching system. In contrast, evoLhypergrapHyCx are very fond of pointing out the differences between hypergraphics, 'detournement', the postmodern idea of appropriation and the Neoist use of plagiarism as the use of different and similar techniques used for different and similar means, effects and causes.

Another (possibly less contentious) extension of the concept of detournement lies within the technique of sampling in music production.

Quotations

• "Live without dead time" - Vivez sans temps mort - Anonymous graffiti, Paris 1968
• "I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires" - Anonymous graffiti, Paris 1968
• "What beautiful and priceless potlatches the affluent society will see -- whether it likes it or not! -- when the exuberance of the younger generation discovers the pure gift; a growing passion for stealing books, clothes, food, weapons or jewelry simply for the pleasure of giving them away"- Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life
• "Be realistic - demand the impossible!" - Soyez réalistes, demandez l'impossible! - Anonymous graffiti, Paris 1968
• "Beneath the paving stones - the beach!" - Sous les pavés, la plage! - Anonymous graffiti, Paris 1968
• "Never work" - Ne travaillez jamais" - Anonymous graffiti, rue de Seine Paris 1952
• "Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom." - Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution Of Everyday Life

• "People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth"- Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution Of Everyday Life

Bibliography SI writings Twelve issues of the journal Internationale Situationniste were published. they were edited (at different times) byGuy Debord, Mohamed Dahoiu, Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, Maurice Wyckaert,Constant, Asger Jorn, Hlemout Sturm, Attila Kotanyi, Jørgen Nash, Uwe Lausen, Raoul Vaneigem, Michèle Bernstein, Jeppesen Victor Martin, Jan Stijbosch, Alexander Trocchi, Théo Frey, Mustapha Khayati, Donald Nicholson-Smith, René Riesel and René Viénet.

• Translations of all twelve issues can be found here.
• Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb
• Situationist International Online Archive

Writings on the SI

• Stewart Home The Assault on Culture: Utopian currents from Lettrisme to Class War (Aporia Press and Unpopular Books, London, 1988) ISBN 0-948518-88-X
• Greil Marcus Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press, 1990) ISBN 0-674-53581-2
• Sadie Plant The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (Routledge, 1992) ISBN 0-415-06222-5

• Simon Ford The Situationist International: A User's Guide (Black Dog, London, 2004) ISBN 1-904772-05-6
• Slater, Howard "Divided We Stand: An Outline of Scandinavian Situationism"
• Bob Black The Realization and Suppression of Situationism
• Simon Sadler The Situationist City (MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1998) ISBN 0-262-69225-2
• Marc Vachon L’arpenteur de la ville: L’utopie situationniste et Patrick Straram (Les Éditions Triptyque, Montreal, 2003) ISBN 2-89031-476-6
• "The Situationist international (1957-1972) In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni" (JRP Ringier, Zurich, 2007) ISBN 3905770148

Notes

See also

• Anarchism
• Autonomism
• Dada
• Members of the Situationist International
• Lettrist International
• King Mob
• Black Mask (Radical Group)
• Libertarian Communism
• Libre Society
• Alternative society
• Diggers (theater)
• Fluxus
• Social criticism
• Surrealism
• Provo (movement)
• Psychogeography
• Épater la bourgeoisie
• The Workshop for Non-linear Architecture

Activities or publications that share Situationist ideas See also - Anarchism and the arts

• Not Bored! - situationist publication in New York City (http://www.notbored.org)
• Pygmalion Books - non-profit publishing house and creators of the NCISBN (http://www.pygmalionbooks.org)
• CrimethInc - creators of anarchist publications (http://www.crimethinc.com)
• Adbusters - current anti-consumerist magazine (http://www.adbusters.org)
• Autonomedia - non-profit publishers of much situationist influenced thought
• Semiotext(e) - publishing company founded by Sylvère Lotringer, inspired by Paris '68, the SI, and post-structuralism
• YAWN: Sporadic Critique of Culture - newsletter of the combined Art Strike Action Committees (http://yawn.detritus.net/)

External links

• Nothingness.org
• Situationist International Online
• The Situationist International Text Library
• Libcom.org/library: Situationist International archive
• Dionysus Unemployed
• Spectacular Times
• Bureau of Public Secrets
• Against Sleep And Nightmare Magazine
• The Realization and Suppression of Situationism by Bob Black
• The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination
• Situationists and Critical Mass
• Works catalog

The Situationist International (SI) was a small group of international political and artistic agitators with roots in Marxism, Lettrism and the early 20th century European artistic and political avant-gardes. Formed in 1957, the SI was active in Europe through the 1960s and aspired to major social and political transformations. In the 1960s it split into a number of different groups, including the Situationist Bauhaus, the Antinational and the Second Situationist International. The first SI disbanded in 1972. http://www.barbelith.com/cgi-bin/articles/00000011.shtml

The first issue of the journal Internationale Situationniste defined situationist as: "having to do with the theory or practical activity of constructing situations. One who engages in the construction of situations. A member of the Situationist International".http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/definitions.html The same journal defined situationism as "a meaningless term improperly derived from the above. There is no such thing as situationism, which would mean a doctrine of interpretation of existing facts. The notion of situationism is obviously devised by antisituationists."

History Earlier groups The SI was formed in 1957 as the fusion of several extremely small artistic tendencies, which claimed to be avant-gardistes: Lettrist International, the International movement for an imaginist Bauhaus (an off-shoot of COBRA (avant-garde movement)), and the London Psychogeographical Association.

Already in 1950, the Lettrist International was very active in provoking pranks. At the Easter mass at Notre Dame de Paris, they infiltrated Michel Mourre, who, dressed like a monk, "stood in front of the altar and read a pamphlet proclaiming that God was dead".http://www.snarkout.org/archives/2002/11/24/ http://www.mirorenzaglia.com/index.php?itemid=8 http://www.mirorenzaglia.com/index.php?itemid=311 This event became known as the Notre-Dame Affair.

Situationist International The SI was formed at a meeting in the Italian village of Cosio d'Arroscia on 28 July 1957 with the fusion of several extremely small artistic tendencies, which claimed to be avant-gardistes: Lettrist International, the International movement for an imaginist Bauhaus (an off-shoot of COBRA (avant-garde movement)), and the London Psychogeographical Association. The groups came together intending to reawaken the radical political potential of surrealism. The group also later drew ideas from the left communist group Socialisme ou Barbarie.



The most prominent French member of the group, Guy Debord, has tended to polarise opinion. Some describe him as having provided the theoretical clarity within the group; others say that he exercised dictatorial control over its development and membership; yet others believe that he was a powerful writer but a second-rate thinker. Other members included the Dutch painter Constant Nieuwenhuys, the Italo-Scottish writer Alexander Trocchi, the English artist Ralph Rumney (sole member of the London Psychogeographical Association, Rumney suffered expulsion relatively soon after the formation of the Situationist International), the Scandinavian artist Asger Jorn (who after parting with the SI also founded the Scandinavian Institute for Comparative Vandalism), the architect and veteran of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 Attila Kotanyi, the French writer Michele Bernstein, and Raoul Vaneigem. Debord and Bernstein later married.

Situationist Bauhaus The Denmark brothers Jørgen Nash and Asger Jorn formed the Bauhaus Situationniste in 1960, purchasing a farm in southern Sweden. where they continued with various artistic and political activities.

Second Situationist International The SI experienced splits and expulsions from its beginning. The most prominent split in the group, in 1962, resulted in the Paris section retaining the name Situationist International while excluding the German section, who as Gruppe SPUR had merged into the SI in 1959. The excluded group declared themselves The Second Situationist International and based themselves at the Bauhaus in Sweden.

While the entire history of the Situationists was marked by their impetus to revolutionize life, the split was characterised by Vaneigem (of the French section), and by many subsequent critics, as marking a transition in the French group from the Situationist view of revolution possibly taking an "artistic" form to an involvement in "political" agitation. Asger Jorn continued to fund both groups with the proceeds of his works of art.

One way or another, the currents which the SI took as predecessors saw their purpose as involving a radical redefinition of the role of art in the twentieth century. The Situationists themselves took a dialectical viewpoint, seeing their task as superseding art, abolishing the notion of art as a separate, specialized activity and transforming it so it became part of the fabric of everyday life. From the Situationist's viewpoint, art is revolutionary or it is nothing. In this way, the Situationists saw their efforts as completing the work of both Dada and surrealism while abolishing both. Still, the Situationists answered the question "What is revolutionary?" differently at different times.

May 1968 Those who followed the "artistic" view of the SI might view the evolution of SI as producing a more boring or dogmatic organization. Those following the political view would see the May 1968 as a logical outcome of the SI's dialectical approach: while savaging present day society, they sought a revolutionary society which would embody the positive tendencies of capitalist development. The "realization and suppression of Art" is simply the most developed of the many dialectical supersessions which the SI sought over the years. For the Situationist International of 1968, the world triumph of workers councils would bring about all these supersessions.

An important event leading up to May 1968 was the so called Strasbourg scandal. A group of students managed to use public funds to publish the pamphlet On the Poverty of Student Life: considered in its economic, political, psychological, sexual, and particularly intellectual aspects, and a modest proposal for its remedy. The pamphlet circulated in thousands of copies and helped to make the situationists well known throughout the nonstalinist left.

The SI's part in the revolt of 1968 has often been overemphasised. They were a very small group, but were expert self-propagandists, and their slogans appeared daubed on walls throughout Paris at this time. SI member René Viénet's 1968 book Enragés and Situationists in the Occupations Movement, France, May '68 gives an account of the involvement of the SI with the student group of Enragés and the occupation of the Sorbonne.

The occupations of 1968 started at the university of Nanterre and spread to the Sorbonne. The police tried to take back the Sorbonne and a riot ensued. Following this a general strike was declared with up to 10 million workers participating. The SI originally participated in the Sorbonne occupations and defended barricades in the riots. The SI distributed calls for the occupation of factories and the formation of workers’ councils but disillusioned with the students left the university to set up the CMDO (The Council For The Maintenance Of The Occupations) which distributed the SI’s demands on a much wider scale. After the end of the movement, the CMDO disbanded.

The Situationist Antinational was published for a short while in the 1970s, after the dissolving of the 1SI in 1972.

Influence Situationist ideas have continued to echo profoundly through many aspects of culture and politics in Europe and the USA. Even in their own time, with limited translations of their dense theoretical texts, combined with their very successful self-mythologisation, the term 'situationist' was often used to refer to any rebel or outsider, rather than to a body of surrealist-inspired Marxist critical theory. As such, the term 'situationist' and those of 'spectacle' and 'detournement' have often been decontextualised and recuperated.

In political terms, in the 1960s and 1970s elements of Situationist critique influenced anarchists and other leftists, with various emphases and interpretations which combine Situationist concepts more or less successfully with a variety of other perspectives. Examples of these groups include: in Amsterdam, the Provos, in the UK King Mob, the producers of Heatwave magazine (who later briefly joined the SI) and the Angry Brigade. In the US, groups like Black Mask (later Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers), Weatherman (organization) and the Rebel Worker group also explicitly employed their ideas.

In the 1980s and 90s, Situationist ideas were taken up by 'second wave' anarchists. These theorists, such as Bob Black, Hakim Bey, Fredy Perlman and John Zerzan developed the SI's ideas in various directions, but all attempted to remove the perspectives and proposed practices of the SI from a Marxist theoretical context. These theorists were predominantly associated with the magazines Fifth Estate, Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed and Green Anarchy, in which they developed these perspectives. Some hacker related e-zines, which like samizdat were distributed via email and FTP over early internet links and BBS quoted and developed ideas coming from SI. A few of them were N0 Way, N0 Route, UHF, in France; and early Phrack, CDC in the US. More recently, writers such as Thomas de Zengotita in "Mediated" wrote something which holds the spirit of situationism, describing the society of the "roaring zeroes" (i.e. 2000-).

Most recently, more politically heterogeneous radical groups such as Reclaim the Streets and Adbusters have respectively, seen themselves as 'creating situations' or practicing detournement on advertisements.

In cultural terms, the SI's influence has been even greater, if more diffuse. The list of cultural practices which claim a debt to the SI is almost limitless, but there are some prominent examples:

• Situationist ideas exerted a strong influence on the design language of the early punk rock phenomenon of the 1970s, for example. To a significant extent this came about due to the adoption of the style and aesthetics and sometimes slogans employed by the Situationists (though these latter were often second hand, via English pro-Situs such as King Mob and Jamie Reid). In the late 1970s during the Post-Punk movement, record company owner Tony Wilson of Factory Records was known to follow situationist ideas. Also the band nameThe Durutti Column(intentionally spelt incorrectly), was taken from the well known group of Anarchists during the Spanish Civil War. Other musical artists have attempted to more directly include buzzwords from the SI's critical theory into their lyrics, such as Swedish hardcore band Refused, The International Noise Conspiracy and the Welsh rock band The Manic Street Preachers.

• Situationist urban theory, defined initially by the members of the Letterist International as 'Unitary Urbanism', was extensively developed through the behavioural and performance structures of The Workshop for Non-Linear Architecture during the 1990s.

• Situationist practices allegedly continue to influence underground street artists such as gHOSTbOY, Banksy, Borf, and Mudwig, whose artistic interventions and subversive practice can be seen on advertising hoardings, street signs and walls throughout Europe and The United States.

• One can also trace situationist ideas within the development of innumerable other cultural avant-garde threads such as Neoism, Seahorse Liberation Army, The Nation of Ulysses, Libre Society, neo-Dadaists, Mark Divo.

Classic Situationist texts include: On the Poverty of Student Life, Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, The Revolution of Everyday Life, and The Situationist International Anthology edited by Ken Knabb. The initial English-language text, although poorly and freely translated, was "Leaving The 20th cCentury" edited by Chris Gray.

As many of the original Situationist texts tend to be carefully written, some people have found them dense and inaccessible. However, during the early 1980s English Anarchist Larry Law produced a series of 'pocket-books' under the name of Spectacular Times which aimed to make Situationist ideas more easily assimilated into popularist anarchism. Some people, however, feel that Law significantly reduced their cohesiveness by this process.

Contemporary Contemporary Situationist praxis is split between pro-situs, situlogy and psychogeography.

Criticism Critics of the Situationists frequently assert that their ideas are not in fact complex and difficult to understand, but are at best simple ideas expressed in deliberately difficult language, and at worst actually nonsensical. For example anarchist Chaz Bufe asserts that "obscure situationist jargon" is a major problem in the anarchist scene.http://www.seesharppress.com/listen.html

Key ideas in Situationist theory Ideas central to Situationist theory include:

• Situgraphy and Situgraphology: Drawing from the artistic Lettrist praxis of hypergraphics as well as older developments in mathematics and topology in Henri Poincare's List of publications in mathematics#Algebraic topology , the main theorist of the SI Asger Jorn formulated theories of plastic, anti-Euclidean geometry and topology which was at the heart of Situationist critiques of urbanism and other manifestations of contemporary capitalist culture and politics.

• The Situation: this concept, central to the SI, was defined in the first issue of their journal as "A moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and a game of events." As the SI embraced dialectical Marxism, the situation came to refer less to a specific avant-garde practice than to the dialectical unification of art and life more generally. Beyond this theoretical definition, the situation as a practical manifestation thus slipped between a series of proposals. The SI thus were first led to distinguish the situation from the mere artistic practice of the beat happening, and later identified it in historical events such as the Paris Commune or the Watts riots, and eventually not with partial insurrections, but with total revolution itself. SEE ALSO Situlogy

• The Spectacle (Situationism): Debord's 1968 book The Society of the Spectacle attempted to provide the SI with a Marxian critical theory. The concept of 'the spectacle' expanded to all society the Marxist concept of reification drawn from the first section of Marx's Capital, entitled The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof and developed by Georg Lukács. This was an analysis of the logic of commodities whereby they achieve an ideological autonomy from the process of their production, so that “social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them.” (Marx, Capital) Developing this analysis of the logic of the commodity, The Society of the Spectacle generally understood society as divided between the passive subject who consumes the spectacle and the reified spectacle itself.

• Unitary urbanism: "Unitary urbanism is one of the central concerns of the SI" (Internationale Situationniste #3, December 1959). This was originally developed by the Lettrist International and the International Movement For An Imaginist Bauhaus, and then taken up by the SI. This development marked a move away from metagraphy and towards the use of Dérive and psychogeography and also situgraphy. Following expulsions and the move towards the theory of the spectacle, UU became a lesser concern for the SI in later years. See separate articles on Unitary urbanism, Dérive, and psychogeography.

• Recuperation (sociology): "To survive, the spectacle must have social control. It can recuperate a potentially threatening situation by shifting ground, creating dazzling alternatives- or by embracing the threat, making it safe and then selling it back to us" -- Larry Law, from The Spectacle- The Skeleton Keys, a 'Spectacular Times pocket book.

• Detournement: "short for: detournement of pre-existing aesthetic elements. The integration of past or present artistic production into a superior construction of a milieu. In this sense there can be no Situationist painting or music, but only a Situationist use of these means.", Internationale Situationiste Issue 1, June 1958.

One could view detournement as forming the opposite side of the coin to 'recuperation' (where radical ideas and images become safe and commodified), in that images produced by the spectacle get altered and subverted so that rather than supporting the status quo, their meaning becomes changed in order to put across a more radical or oppositionist message.

The concept of detournement has had a popular influence amongst contemporary radicals, and the technique can be seen in action in the present day when looking at the work of Culture Jammers including Cacophony Society], Billboard Liberation Front, and Adbusters 1, whose 'subvertisements' 'detourn' Nike, Inc. adverts, for example. In this case the original advertisement's imagery is altered in order to draw attention to said company's policy of shifting their production base to cheap-labour third-world 'free trade zones'. However, the line between 'recuperation' and 'detournement' can become thin (or at least very fuzzy) at times, as Naomi Klein points out in her book No Logo. Here she details how corporations such as Nike, Pepsi or Diesel have approached Culture Jammers and Adbusters (sometimes successfully) and offered them lucrative contracts in return for partaking in 'ironic' promotional campaigns. She points out further irony by drawing attention to merchandising produced in order to promote Adbusters' Buy Nothing day, an example of the recuperation of detournement (or of culture eating itself) if ever there was one. Klein's arguments about irony reifying rather than breaking down power structures is echoed by Slavoj Zizek. Zizek argues that the kind of distance opened up by detournement is the condition of possibility for ideology to operate: by attacking and distancing oneself from the sign-systems of capital, the subject creates a fantasy of transgression that "covers up" his/her actual complicity with capitalism as an overarching system. In contrast, evoLhypergrapHyCx are very fond of pointing out the differences between hypergraphics, 'detournement', the postmodern idea of appropriation and the Neoist use of plagiarism as the use of different and similar techniques used for different and similar means, effects and causes.

Another (possibly less contentious) extension of the concept of detournement lies within the technique of sampling in music production.

Quotations

• "Live without dead time" - Vivez sans temps mort - Anonymous graffiti, Paris 1968
• "I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires" - Anonymous graffiti, Paris 1968
• "What beautiful and priceless potlatches the affluent society will see -- whether it likes it or not! -- when the exuberance of the younger generation discovers the pure gift; a growing passion for stealing books, clothes, food, weapons or jewelry simply for the pleasure of giving them away"- Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life
• "Be realistic - demand the impossible!" - Soyez réalistes, demandez l'impossible! - Anonymous graffiti, Paris 1968
• "Beneath the paving stones - the beach!" - Sous les pavés, la plage! - Anonymous graffiti, Paris 1968
• "Never work" - Ne travaillez jamais" - Anonymous graffiti, rue de Seine Paris 1952
• "Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom." - Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution Of Everyday Life

• "People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth"- Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution Of Everyday Life

Bibliography SI writings Twelve issues of the journal Internationale Situationniste were published. they were edited (at different times) byGuy Debord, Mohamed Dahoiu, Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, Maurice Wyckaert,Constant, Asger Jorn, Hlemout Sturm, Attila Kotanyi, Jørgen Nash, Uwe Lausen, Raoul Vaneigem, Michèle Bernstein, Jeppesen Victor Martin, Jan Stijbosch, Alexander Trocchi, Théo Frey, Mustapha Khayati, Donald Nicholson-Smith, René Riesel and René Viénet.

• Translations of all twelve issues can be found here.
• Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb
• Situationist International Online Archive

Writings on the SI

• Stewart Home The Assault on Culture: Utopian currents from Lettrisme to Class War (Aporia Press and Unpopular Books, London, 1988) ISBN 0-948518-88-X
• Greil Marcus Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press, 1990) ISBN 0-674-53581-2
• Sadie Plant The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (Routledge, 1992) ISBN 0-415-06222-5

• Simon Ford The Situationist International: A User's Guide (Black Dog, London, 2004) ISBN 1-904772-05-6
• Slater, Howard "Divided We Stand: An Outline of Scandinavian Situationism"
• Bob Black The Realization and Suppression of Situationism
• Simon Sadler The Situationist City (MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1998) ISBN 0-262-69225-2
• Marc Vachon L’arpenteur de la ville: L’utopie situationniste et Patrick Straram (Les Éditions Triptyque, Montreal, 2003) ISBN 2-89031-476-6
• "The Situationist international (1957-1972) In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni" (JRP Ringier, Zurich, 2007) ISBN 3905770148

Notes

See also

• Anarchism
• Autonomism
• Dada
• Members of the Situationist International
• Lettrist International
• King Mob
• Black Mask (Radical Group)
• Libertarian Communism
• Libre Society
• Alternative society
• Diggers (theater)
• Fluxus
• Social criticism
• Surrealism
• Provo (movement)
• Psychogeography
• Épater la bourgeoisie
• The Workshop for Non-linear Architecture

Activities or publications that share Situationist ideas See also - Anarchism and the arts

• Not Bored! - situationist publication in New York City (http://www.notbored.org)
• Pygmalion Books - non-profit publishing house and creators of the NCISBN (http://www.pygmalionbooks.org)
• CrimethInc - creators of anarchist publications (http://www.crimethinc.com)
• Adbusters - current anti-consumerist magazine (http://www.adbusters.org)
• Autonomedia - non-profit publishers of much situationist influenced thought
• Semiotext(e) - publishing company founded by Sylvère Lotringer, inspired by Paris '68, the SI, and post-structuralism
• YAWN: Sporadic Critique of Culture - newsletter of the combined Art Strike Action Committees (http://yawn.detritus.net/)

External links

• Nothingness.org
• Situationist International Online
• The Situationist International Text Library
• Libcom.org/library: Situationist International archive
• Dionysus Unemployed
• Spectacular Times
• Bureau of Public Secrets
• Against Sleep And Nightmare Magazine
• The Realization and Suppression of Situationism by Bob Black
• The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination
• Situationists and Critical Mass
• Works catalog

Tate | Glossary | Situationist International
Revolutionary alliance of European avant-garde artists, writers and poets formed at a conference in Italy in 1957 (as Internationale Situationiste or IS).

situationist international online
Comprehensive resource and archive of virtually every situationist text available in English, with an extensive chronology, glossary and individually biographies, as well as an ...

Situationist International - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Situationist International (SI) was a small group of international political and artistic agitators with roots in Marxism, Lettrism and the early 20th century European artistic ...

S.I. Archives
a.h.s. boy dada typo spud(at)nothingness.org. Updated: 3/14/01. New! The Situationist International archives have been updated and reorganized to ameliorate their utility.

Situationism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Situationism may refer to: The ideas of Situationist International, an international political and artistic movement of the 1960s; Situationism (psychology), which holds that ...

Situationist International Online
English translations of situationist, lettrist and cobra texts

nothingness.org
Server hosting resources, libraries and mailing lists on various types of anarchism including situationism and social anarchism.

Situationist International Online
text archives > situationist international archive 1957 Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organization and ...

MMU Sociology - Driftnet - Situationist International
Manchester Metropolitan University Department of Sociology - Driftnet ... The Situationist International and Guy Debord The Situationist International (SI) was a political movement ...

Situationist International
Situationist and lettrist archives. Includes files on the Surveillance Camera Players.