Situationism/Situationist Geography

Abstract

The term ‘situationism’ is derived from the ideas and practices of the Situationist International (SI), an avant-garde group active in Western Europe between 1957 and 1972 that sought the revolutionary transformation of everyday life and space. The significance of the situationists has become the subject of considerable attention recently, including in relation to human geography and understandings of space and place, and in terms of the spaces of revolutionary and anticapitalist struggle. The SI's background lay in the historic avant-gardes of dada and surrealism, and in Marxist theory and politics. The group placed particular significance on geography, in relation to which three themes may be highlighted: first, its concern with the production and contestation of space in critiques of the ‘society of the spectacle’; second, its critical and subversive ‘psychogeographical’ engagements with cities; and third, its utopian desire to transform sociospatial relations, apparent in artistic and political projects, as well as practical struggles. The situationists resisted the term ‘situationism’, believing it was employed by others to freeze their fluid activities into an ideology. What was important, they asserted, was changing life here and now. Their radical demands continue to inspire, challenge, scandalize, as well as inform both intellectual studies and political activism.