Situationist International

Situationist International (SI), group of artists, writers, and social critics (1957–72) that aimed to eliminate capitalism through the revolutionization of everyday life. Instead of focusing on traditional sites of economic and social change, such as the factory, the Situationist International (SI) argued that a revolution would take place in the realm of everyday life because the alienating effects of capitalism were pervasive in modern society. Although it was an association of art movements from across Europe, its primary figures were French, and its primary writings, including its eponymous journal, were composed in French.

After World War II, consumer culture became more dominant in Europe. Modern standards of living were ordered around the consumption of products such as automobiles, refrigerators, and washing machines. Members of the SI, some of whom had belonged to the earlier avante-garde group Lettrist International, formally constituted SI at a conference in Cosio d’Arroscia, Italy, in July 1957. Its members believed that a society organized around such consumption induced boredom while shaping people’s desires in ways that could be fulfilled only through the purchase of consumer goods. In this type of society, they felt that the freedom to choose how to live was replaced by the freedom to choose what to buy. Deriving its politics from Marxism, particularly from Karl Marx’s ideas of commodification and of the fetishism of commodity, and from the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s concept of “everyday life” as a series of dialectical moments that contained the potential to ignite a revolution, the SI proposed a life outside of the dictates of capitalism. The group focused on systematically breaking from a world that required submission to the commodity. Influenced by Dadaism and Surrealism, its members developed methods of critique that articulated both the repression of a consumer culture and the liberating practices in which one could participate as a means to demolish this type of society.

One method was détournement, or taking preexisting images and mixing them together to highlight the underlying ideology of the original image. The SI identified film as being the most effective medium for détournement. Although it was made by a Situationist after the movement’s official disbanding, the filmmaker and Sinologist René Viénet’s La Dialectique peut-elle casser des briques? (1973; Can Dialectics Break Bricks?) serves as a prime example of détournement in action. Viénet took an already existing Hong Kong martial arts film and replaced its dialogue, changing the meaning of the original story into a newly “detourned” film about the politicized proletariat training to liberate themselves and society from the strict organization of life by capitalists and bureaucrats. Viénet’s film is an excellent distillation of the revolutionary ideas of the SI, for it took aim at sacred institutions of the bourgeoisie, such as marriage, religion, and private property.

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SI also sought to revolt against the built environment. The SI identified the design of the urban environment as being directly shaped by the needs of capitalism to separate people not only from others, but from their own desires. A rationalized urban design stresses efficiency and utility over leisure and imagination. The SI developed the idea of the dérive (French: “drifting,” or “wandering”) as a practice of aimlessly walking throughout the city to discover and record its more alluring ambiances. A dérive could last hours, an evening, or several days. They would use the information they collected to reconstruct another type of city in which spontaneity and imagination triumphed over the rationalization of space. They argued that a city that reflects desire would undo the crippling effects that a highly organized urban terrain has on the human mind. The practice of living beyond a highly rational organized environment would be realized in experimental cities designed according to the principles of what was termed unitary urbanism. The main unit of a city so designed was the architectural complex. These complexes are an ensemble of constructed situations producing certain ambiances. Unitary urbanism does not conform to the logic of capitalism; thus its space is highly political because the unitary city stresses play, unpredictability, and diversion in its design.

Perhaps the most recognizable member of the SI was Guy Debord, one of the few people associated with the SI from its beginning to its end. Aside from Debord’s being the dominant and dominating member of the SI—often Debord expelled members for what he perceived as their political infidelity to the group—his La Société du spectacle (1967; The Society of the Spectacle) remains one of the most intellectually powerful and theoretically rigorous critiques of a capitalist society. La Société du spectacle elaborates the ways in which commodity fetishism and reification have infiltrated and colonized all areas of life.

The SI remained a relatively obscure group until the events of May 1968 in France, when more than 10 million people, including both workers and students, participated in a general strike against capitalism, imperialism, and the French government. The SI did not ignite the strike, but its particular critique of capitalist society resonated with a number of people who favored the abolition of the inequalities inherent in the division of social classes. One particular SI publication, the pamphlet “De la misère en milieu étudiant considérée sous ses aspects économique, politique, psychologique, sexuel et notamment intellectuel et de quelques moyens pour y remédier” (1966; “On the Poverty of Student Life: A Consideration of Its Economic, Political, Sexual, Psychological and Notably Intellectual Aspects and of a Few Ways to Cure It”), was of particular interest to the strikers. It identified and denounced all forms of alienation in modern society. May 1968 expressed the frustrations people experienced under a rationally ordered society and suggested both that another world over which people have control was possible and also what a revolution initiated by the working class would look like. The May 1968 strike was the high watermark of the SI’s influence as a unified movement. It disbanded in 1972, although its members continued to employ Situationist methods in their work.