They originated in a small band of avante-garde artists and intellectuals influenced by Dada, Surrealism and Lettrism. The post-war Lettrist International, which sought to fuse poetry and music and transform the urban landscape, was a direct forerunner of the group who founded the magazine Situationiste Internationale in 1957. At first, they were principally concerned with the "suppression of art", that is to say, they wished like the Dadaists and the Surrealists before them to supersede the categorization of art and culture as separate activities and to transform them into part of everyday life. Like the Lettrists, they were against work and for complete _divertissement_. Under capitalism, the creativity of most people had become diverted and stifled, and society had been divided into actors and spectators, producers and consumers. The Situationists therefore wanted a different kind of revolution: they wanted the imagination, not a group of men, to seize power, and poetry and art to be made by all. Enough! they declared. To hell with work, to hell with boredom! Create and construct an eternal festival.
At first, the movement was mainly made up of artists, of whom Asger Jorn was the most prominent. From 1962, the Situationists increasingly applied their critique not only in culture but to all aspects of capitalist society. Guy Debord emerged as the most important figure: he had been involved in the Lettrist International, and had made several films, including _Hurlements en faveur de Sade_ (1952). Inspired by the libertarian journal _Socialisme on Barbarie_, the Situationists rediscovered the history of the anarchist movement, particularly during the period of the First International, and drew inspiration from Spain, Kronstadt, and the Makhnovists. They described the USSR as a capitalist bureaucracy, and advocated workers' councils. But they were not entirely anarchist in orientation and retained elements of Marxism, especially through Henri Lefebvre's critique of the alienation of everyday life. They believed that the revolutionary movement in advanced capitalist countries should be led by an "enlarged proletariat" which would include the majority of waged laborers. In addition, although they claimed to want neither disciples nor a leadership, they remained an elitist vanguard group who dealt with differences by expelling the dissenting minority. They looked to a world-wide proletarian revolution to bring about the maximum pleasure.
At the end of 1967, Guy Debord in _The Society of the Spectacle_ and Raoul Vaneigem in _The Revolution of Everyday Life_ presented the most elaborate expositions of Situationist theory which had a widespread influence in France during the 1968 student rebellion. [NOTE: Anarchy magazine has been including a chapter per issue of Vaneigem's book -- currently up to chapter 16, "The Fascination of Time". -- Ken] Many of the most famous slogans which were scribbled on the walls of Paris were taken from their theses, such as FREE THE PASSIONS, NEVER WORK, LIVE WITHOUT DEAD TIME. Members of the Situationist International (SI) co-operated with the _enrages_ from Nanterre University in the Occupations COmmittee of the Sorbonne, an assembly held in permanent session. On 17 May, the Committee sent the following telegram to the Communist Party of the USSR:
SHAKE IN YOUR SHOES BUREAUCRATS STOP THE INTERNATIONAL POWER OF THE WORKERS' COUNCILS WILL SOON WIPE YOU OUT STOP HUMANITY WILL NOT BE HAPPY UNTIL THE LAST BUREAU- CRAT IS HUNG WITH THE GUTS OF THE LAST CAPITALIST STOP LONG LIVE THE STRUGGLE OF THE KRONSTADT SAILORS AND OF THE MAKHNOVSCHINA AGAINST TROTSKY AND LENIN STOP LONG LIVE THE 1956 COUNCILIST INSURRECTION OF BUDAPEST STOP DOWN WITH THE STATE STOP
Groups of _enrages_ in Strasbourg, Nantes and Boudreaux were also inspired by the Situationists and attempted to "organize chaos" on the campuses. The active thinkers however never numbered much more than a dozen.
In their analysis, the Situationists argued that capitalism had turned
all relationships transactional, and that life had been reduced to a
"spectacle". The spectacle is the key concept of their theory. In many
ways, they merely reworked Marx's view of alienation, as developed in
his early writings. The worker is alienated from his product and from
his fellow workers and finds himself living in an alien world:
At the same time, while modern technology has ended natural alienation
(the struggle for survival against nature), social alienation in the
form of a hierarchy of masters and slaves has continued. People are
treated like passive objects, not active subjects. After degrading
being into having, the society of the spectacle has further transformed
having into merely appearing. The result is an appalling contrast
between cultural poverty and economic wealth, between what is and what
could be. "Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not
die of starvation," Vaneigem asks, "entails the risk of dying of
boredom?"
The way out of the Situationists was not to wait for a distant
revolution but to reinvent everyday life here and now. To transform the
perception of the world and to change the structure of society is the
same thing. By liberating oneself, one changed power relations and
therefore transformed society. They therefore tried to construct
situations which disrupt the ordinary and normal in order to jolt people
out of their customary ways of thinking and acting. [Hardly an original
idea, spanning from Leary-style LSD use to zen, etc. -- Ken.] In place
of petrified life, they sought the _derive_ (with its flow of acts and
encounters) and _detournement_ (rerouting events and images). They
supported vandalism, wildcat strikes and sabotage as a way of destroying
the manufactured spectacle and commodity economy. Such gestures of
refusal were considered signs of creativity. The role of the SI was to
make clear to the masses what they were already implicitly doing. In
this way, they wished to act as catalysts within the revolutionary
process. Once the revolution was underway, the SI would disappear as a
group.
In place of the society of the spectacle, the Situationists proposed a
communistic society bereft of money, commodity production, wage labor,
classes, private property and the State. Pseudo-needs would be replaced
by real desires, and the economy of profit become one of pleasure. The
division of labor and the antagonism between work and play would be
overcome. It would be a society founded on the love of free play,
characterized by the refusal to be led, to make sacrifices, and to
perform roles. Above all, they insisted that every individual should
actively and consciously participate in the reconstruction of every
moment of life. They called themselves Situationists precisely because
they believed that all individuals should construct the situations of
their lives and release their own potential and obtain their own
pleasure.
As for the basic unit of the future society, they recommended workers'
councils by which they meant "sovereign rank-and-file assemblies, in the
enterprises and the neighborhoods". As with the communes of the
anarcho-communists, the councils would practice a form of direct
democracy and make and execute all the key decisions affecting everyday
life. Delegates would be mandated and recallable. The councils would
then federate locally, nationally and internationally.
In their call for the "concrete transcendence of the State and of every
kind of alienating collectivity" and in their vision of communist
society the Situationists come closest to the anarchists. They not only
referred to Bakunin for their attack on authoritarian structures and
bureaucracy, but Debord argued that "anarchism had led in 1936 [in
Spain] to a social revolution and to a rough sketch, the most advanced
ever, of proletarian power." The Situationists differ however from
traditional anarchism in their elitism as an exclusive group and in
their overriding concern with coherence of theory and practice. In
their narrow insistence on the proletariat as the sole revolutionary
class, they overlooked the revolutionary potential of other social
groups, especially the students. They also denied that they were
"spontaneists" like the 22 March Movement and rejected the "ideology" of
anarchism in so far as it was allegedly another restrictive ideology
imposed on the workers.
Despite the acuteness of their critique of modern capitalism, the
Situationists mistakenly took a temporary economic boom in post-war
France for a permanent trend in capitalist societies. Their belief in
economic abundance now seems wildly optimistic; not only underproduction
but also underconsumption continue in advanced industrial societies. In
many parts of the globe, especially in the southern hemisphere,
so-called "natural alienation", let alone social alienation, has yet to
be overcome. Nevertheless, for all their weaknesses, the Situationists
have undoubtedly enriched anarchist theory by their critique of modern
culture, their celebration of creativity, and their stress on the
immediate transformation of everyday life. Although the SI group
disbanded in 1972 after bitter wrangling over tactics, their ideas have
continued to have widespread influence in anarchist and feminist circles
and inspired, at times almost subconsciously it seemed, much of the
style and content of punk rock.
[p.551-53]
DEMANDING THE IMPOSSIBLE
The increasing division of labor and specialization have transformed
work into meaningless drudgery. "It is useless," Vaneigem observes, "to
expect even a caricature of creativity from a conveyor belt." What they
added to Marx was the recognition that in order to ensure continued
economic growth, capitalism has created "pseudo-needs" to increase
consumption. Instead of saying that consciousness was determined at the
point of production, they said it occurred at the point of consumption.
Modern capitalist society is a consumer society, a society of
"spectacular" commodity consumption. Having long been treated with the
utmost contempt as a producer, the worker is now lavishly courted and
seduced as a consumer.
From:
A history of Anarchism
Peter Marshall, 1992
Fontana Press
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