Leaving the Twentieth Century: The Situationist International

Abstract

only just arrived, writes Guy Debord in his Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, adding that nothing, in the last twenty years, has been so thoroughly coated with obedient lies than the history of May 1968. In its lapidary style, this passage is typical of Debord, whose revolutionary tracts inspired a generation of radicals and helped set off the May 1968 uprising in France. Reading Debord, one sees easily how his thoughts are still able to strike sympathetic readers like piercing light through a dense fog, as American activist Tom Ward put it recently. In any case, whatever one may think of Debord's strident tone, in the present end-of-millennium atmosphere of postmodernity, the message of the Internationale Situationniste seems more relevant than ever. The situationists were a group and political activists who gained a wide following in Europe and the United States beginning in the late sixties. The group was formed in 1957 with the merger of several avant-garde organizations that took their inspiration from Dada and surrealism. The two principal organizations were the International Movementfor an Imaginist Bauhaus, founded as an alternative to Max Bill's school at Ulm by the Danish painter Asger Jorn in 1953, and the Lettrist International, an association of artists, poets, and filmmakers who had been active in Paris since 1952. The latter group was represented by Parisian Gil Wolman and by Debord, who emerged as the group's spiritual and intellectual leader. During the first few years, the Situationist International (SI) included from half a dozen countries, mostly European. They held conferences on average once a year and published a journal in French, directed by Debord. The Internationale Situationniste, as it was called, is still the best record of the group's activities from 1957 through 1969. Some situationists also staged events at the Rive Gauche and Rene Drouin galleries in Paris and at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where the Dutch painter-turned-urbanist Constant showed his model encampments, entitled New Babylon, in 1959. The success of these shows-New Babylon, in particular, can now be seen to anticipate the megastructural fantasies of Archigram -prompted the SI to schedule a group exhibition at that same museum for April-May 1960. Unfortunately the project was brought to a halt by disagreements within the group, which resulted in a split and several expulsions. The argument concerned the attitude to take toward cultural institutions. The majority, centered around Debord, wanted to broaden the group's activities beyond the art world; they called for the complete supersession of art in alliance with insurrectionary movements around the world. The Swedish and German factions, on the other hand, were skeptical about the possibilities of abolishing capitalism and argued that for the short term, at least, the art world offered the best opportunities for meaningful work. Having expelled the artists in the summer of 1961, the SI regrouped around Debord and turned increasingly toward theory. This phase was nourished by Debord's association with the renegade Communist party philosopher Henri Lefebvre, who taught at the University of Nanterre and headed a study group, Socialisme ou Barbarie, which also included Jean Baudrillard and Frangois Lyotard. Debord developed his own original reading of Marx in the context of this nonorthodox anti-Stalinist tradition, which used Marx's early manuscripts to develop a critique of everyday life against the party-line philosophy of Althusser and structuralism. Debord's principal contribution--set out in his most important work, The Society of the Spectacle (1967)-consisted of joining Journal ofArchitectural Education, pp. 196-199 ? 1996 ACSA, Inc.