Situationist International Research Articles

PERFORMANCE

Written by Kristine Stiles, an artist and Art History Professor at Duke University, “Performance” originally appeared in 1996 as the sixth chapter of the volume Critical Terms for Art History, edited by Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff. The essay’s goal is to theorize the genre that brings the artist as both the subject and object of the artwork. According to Stiles, performance constructs a transpersonal visual aesthetic that functions as an interstitial continuum connecting subjects through mutual identification. That identification spans from agreement to opposition but rarely achieves resolution. Central to Stiles’ interpretation of performance is her concept of commissure, which signifies the dual operations of linkage: 1. Connection, and 2. Entrustment. The author utilizes this concept and traces a brief history of performance art since the early 20th to examine Jim Dine’s work The Smiling Workman (1960). Her discussion includes artists and movements such as Oskar Schlemmer and the Bauhaus, Hermann Nitsch and the OMT, Guy Debord and the Situationist International. Stiles concludes that performance “tells a truth about art” that is based on the processes of making and the emphasis on the human body as the center of art production.

“The Society of the Spectacle”: a Diagnosis of (Post)Modernity and Its Challenges

This paper critically examines the complexities of contemporary society through the theoretical framework of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967), highlighting how modernity has transformed individuals from passive observers of the world to egomaniacal creators of their own reality, ultimately leading to a sense of alienation and existential unease. Furthermore, the paper elucidates the transition from a state of survival to one of collective psychosis, where the pursuit of abundance and commodification has ensnared individuals within a perpetual cycle of materialism and alienation. Debord’s concept of the spectacle is discussed to demonstrate how it has evolved into a tool for the suppression of genuine human interaction and a mechanism for upholding the prevailing status quo. The pivotal role played by the Situationist International and Guy Debord in confronting this social paradigm is also explored. Emphasis is placed on their concerted efforts to foment change and reignite a sense of enchantment in a world that has forfeited its mystique. In conclusion, the paper acknowledges the enduring relevance of Debord’s insights in the contemporary milieu, positing that rebellious youth, seeking to secure their own freedom, should turn to his works for guidance in addressing the challenges posed by “the society of the spectacle”.

A Situationist Portrait of Power: Cybernetics, May ’68, and The Situationist International

Abstract This article presents the critique of cybernetics as central to the history of one of the twentieth century’s most infamous avant-garde movements: the Situationist International (SI). Bringing together and analysing a series of seemingly marginal events in the build-up to May ’68, this article shows how the SI’s portrait of cybernetics as an emerging form of social power and control foreshadows later developments in French radical thought. This little-noted trajectory in the situationist movement also highlights the ways in which aesthetics, theory, and politics are inextricably tied together in the events of May ’68.

Book Review: With and Against: The Situationist International in the Age of Automation by Dominique Routhier

Book Review: <i>With and Against: The Situationist International in the Age of Automation</i> by Dominique Routhier

Science Fiction and the Situationist International

In an interview in the 1980s, Henri Lefebvre made the remarkable claim that his reading of some Anglo-American science fiction (SF) in the 1950s led him to a position similar to that of the Situationists, as pithily summarized in Guy Debord's 1954 graffito, ``"Ne travaillez jamais" ["Never work"]. Lefebvre further claimed that discussions of such SF played a role in his dealing with the Situationists. Unfortunately, there is little evidence of these discussion in the extant work of the Situationist International (SI). Certainly, the Situationists used images and occasionally text from contemporaneous SF comics and novels. But unlike many who followed and were influenced by them—notably Jean Baudrillard—, they never fully reckoned with the critical value of pulp SF. Indeed, the Situationists quickly came to consider SF as a peculiarly modern form of capitalist ideology, presenting a reductive caricature, and demonstrating their ignorance of more radical ideas and currents within the genre. Perhaps most unfortunately of all, the Situationists missed an opportunity to enrich their theories of cultural decomposition and the spectacle by way of an examination of SF as a cultural form which was itself undergoing decomposition in the Situationist sense of the term. It is on these bases—that is, disinterring what the SI thought of SF, alongside of speculatively developing a Situationist critique of the latter—that a more fruitful encounter between the SI and SF can be mounted.

Walking for Revolution: From Surrealism to the Situationist International

This article examines the Parisian Surrealist and Situationist engagement with urban walking as a critical artistic practice. Exploring how the theme of urban wandering, essential to Parisian Surrealism in its early years, is re-elaborated in the Situationist concept of the dérive [drift], the article sheds new light on the relationship between these rival movements. Firstly, it offers a narrative account of Surrealist wandering that closely considers two events, the Dadaist visit to Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre in 1921 and the aimless wandering (déambulation) experiment in Blois in 1924, alongside two landmark Surrealist texts, Louis Aragon's Le Paysan de Paris (1926) and André Breton's Nadja (1928). Secondly, it situates the difficult relationship of Guy Debord to Surrealism in the history of artistic avant-gardes. Thirdly, it highlights the importance of Surrealism to the elaboration of the dérive, by analysing the implicit and explicit references to Surrealism through Debord's writings of the 1950s. Finally, it turns to the literary precursors of the dérive, distinct from but related to the Baudelairean flâneur, to explore the poetic roots of Surrealism and the Situationist International in modern French literature. This article illuminates the importance of Surrealist concepts to the Situationist city, to deepen our understanding of the Parisian avant-garde and their legacies.

‘By Every Hyper-Political Means’: Internationale Situationniste and the Review as Weapon

Abstract This article examines the articulation of Situationist perspectives on art and politics with reference to the cycle of protest, surveillance, detention, scandal, repression and violence which accompanied the theoretical writings and practical activities of the Situationists. The Situationist International (SI) was, by design, a mercurial organization whose existence was marked by clandestine activity, conflict – internally and externally – scandal and subversion in multiple guises. The twin concepts of détournement [hijacking] and récupération [recovery] will be explored to show why the recourse to the terminology of war was more than a commonplace rhetorical trope for the SI. The group’s deployment of militaristic language reflects, first, the real-life attention the Situationists received from the forces of order and, secondly, an antagonism which underpinned their conception of political action. Their eponymous journal or review was not itself a privileged organ of the Situationist International, intellectually or aesthetically, but ‘heavy artillery’ which provided a convenient platform to become known to an active readership.

Techno-nationalism as the cultural logic of global infrastructural capitalism: media spectacles and cyber-situations in Huawei Meng Wanzhou’s extradition case

This article contributes to a theoretical formulation of techno-nationalism as the cultural logic of infrastructural capitalism by revisiting Debord and Situationist International’s discussion of Spectacle and digital struggles. We deconstruct the concept of techno-nationalism into three interlocking but contradictory media events: techno-nationalism as the “integrated Spectacle,” signifying the power of the state and capital; the disintegrative forces of media spectacles that highlight the ruptures and contradictions of global infrastructural capitalism; and digital resistance through the creation of “cyber-situations.” The case of Huawei’s Meng Wanzhou exemplifies how techno-nationalism emerges as an integrated ideological Spectacle with the help of media spectacles and yet undergoes a disintegration process due to inescapable contradictions and labor conflicts. This research not only analyses China as a case to understand the tactical deployment of the cultural logic of techno-nationalism with a focus on both domestic and international dimensions as political economic and social forces but also on the inherent contradictions and digital struggles in global infrastructural capitalism.

Making Sense of the Global 1960s: The Situationist International and the Navel of the World1

ABSTRACT This article revisits the history of the Situationist International (SI) from the perspective of its relationship with the Third World, with a specific focus on the Congo and, to lesser degree, Algeria. The SI is most often remembered for its critique of alienation in the West. Yet, the questions of decolonization, the Third World, and Third-Worldism were at the center of its political project, including its conceptualization of everyday life and of the society of spectacle. This project was not static and the SI went from a warm embrace of Third World revolutions to a position of strong skepticism, which was further accentuated after the uprisings of May 1968 in France. In its analysis of this evolution, the article revisits the works of Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem, Mustapha Khayati, and René Vienet; it also draws from the journal of the SI, the published correspondence of Debord, and various archival documents about the group. A strong focus is put on the importance of the notion of totality in the situationist critique. The article argues that this notion offers an interesting entry point into the current historiographical debate about the periodization of the global 1960s.

New Noise?

Abstract: October 26, 1966: At his inaugural lecture as professorial chair at the University of Strasbourg, the French cybernetician Abraham A. Moles was met not with applause but with tomatoes.1 Those responsible for the projectiles were members of the Situationist International (SI), the revolutionary avant-garde organization led by Guy Debord whose influence would color the uprisings of Mai 68. Taken together, these events can be seen as part of a continuum: while the SI later claimed the tomatoes to have been a preliminary action for their dissemination of On the Poverty of Student Life that fall, the subsequent media outcry over this pamphlet is still interpreted as a catalyst for the events of '68.

Mapping the protest. Static, dynamic, and spatial qualities of Occupy and Indignados movements protests in Spain and the United States of America in 2011-2012

This article examines the topic of protest mapping during the rise of Occupy Wall Street in the United States in 2011–2012. It focuses on various practices of protest mapping, including a con­sideration of how space (public, urban, or of the protest camp) is represented in the visual sources discussed. It also addresses the qualitative difference between protest mapping and other mapping practices, as well as the categorization of protest mapping terms. Using the method of source analysis and online research, the article adopts, as its key concept for studying protest as a multi-threaded phenomenon, the notion of détournement. This concept was first described in 1957 by Gil Wolman and Guy Debord, and from the early 1960s was used as a creative method and also a revolutionary strategy by the avant-garde artistic group, the Situationist International. The categories of stasis, dynamism, and spatiality will also be important points of reference.

Notes on Contributors

Other| January 01 2023 Notes on Contributors South Atlantic Quarterly (2023) 122 (1): 215–216. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10358006 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Notes on Contributors. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 January 2023; 122 (1): 215–216. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10358006 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsSouth Atlantic Quarterly Search Advanced Search Kieran Aarons teaches philosophy and interdisciplinary studies at Governors State University in Chicago.Giorgio Agamben is a contemporary Italian philosopher and political theorist whose works have been translated into numerous languages. His most recent book is L'irrealizzabile. Per una politica dell'ontologia (The Unrealizable: Toward a Politics of Ontology [2022]).Philippe Blouin is a PhD candidate in anthropology at McGill University. He published essays in Liaisons and Stasis and edited the forthcoming book The Mohawk Warrior Society: A Handbook on Sovereignty and Survival.Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen is professor of political aesthetics at the University of Copenhagen. He is the author of books on the Situationist International, politicized contemporary art, and the revolutionary tradition. His books have been translated into French, Italian, and Greek. His most recent book is Late Capitalist Fascism (2021).Rodrigo Karmy Bolton teaches classical Arab and contemporary philosophy in the Center for Arab Studies and... Issue Section: Contributors You do not currently have access to this content.

Fragments of a Forgotten Spectacle: Tito, the Serbs, and Appropriated Time

Želimir Žilnik’s Tito Among the Serbs for the Second Time was filmed and released in Serbia’s capital Belgrade, in 1994. The country was under severe international sanctions due to wars in the neighbouring republics, all of which until recently were parts of the Socialist Yugoslavia, once created and led by Josip Broz Tito. By taking an actor to wear Tito’s uniform through Belgrade, Žilnik documented the bemused comments of random passers-by, thus creating a ‘filmed happening’. In this essay it is argued that on a number of formal and narrative levels this is very much a typical Žilnik’s documentary, and as such it is contextualised within his work made both prior and after this film, with an emphasis on his most acclaimed feature Early Works (1969). However, by introducing the theory of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, as part of the Situationist International, it is also argued that this film marks a clear rupture within Žilnik’s oeuvre, after which he takes a new direction in his critical approach. This film thus further clarifies his political positions retrospectively, concluding that it could be read as an example of Situationist action too, re-appropriating time for its disenfranchised and marginalised subjects.

Guy Debord, an Untimely Aristocrat

This essay excavates the pre-capitalist influences of the thought of Guy Debord, French postwar critical theorist and founding member of the Situationist International. Tracing a lineage of what can be described as Debord’s aristocratic sensibility, we discover not simply an aesthetic approach to navigating social life, or guidelines for outmanoeuvring an adversary, but also contempt for honest labour, monetary transactions in cultural affairs, and conventional political gestures. Together these themes remain part of a legacy of an aristocratic past, one that, as will be examined here, informed Debord’s acrimony towards his own mid-20th-century moment. The following discussion will advance a genealogy of Debord’s thinking with these themes from late antiquity to the Italian Renaissance, and finally with an extended examination of the baroque, a concept that helps advance Debord’s diagnostic concept of the society of the spectacle.

Readymade-image-sentence: protest aesthetics in a time of democracy post-1989

ABSTRACTJacques Rancière perceives the image as what is sayable and visible and 20C film montage as an Image-sentence: the closest proximity of parallel realities (Rancière 2007). Prohibited from public view, Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 Readymade revolution is re-membered in a photographic image: a fountain-urinal. On the mourning after WWII, George Orwell noted readymade-sentences of what could(n’t) be said (Duchamp 1997). Captured by Rene Magritte, the treachery of a painted-word-image-thought, could have been a film about what it wasn’t (Flavia, 2014). About now, Walter Benjamin saw an optical unconscious in the photograph miraculously inverting the awe of culture and nature. (Benjamin 2004) After 1989, Bruno Latour held this modern Constitution as equally anti-modern (before ever having been modern) and postmodern, after which there would be nothing, except the digital image (Latour 1993). Before this, Situationist International and Fluxus showed life as the other side art. Keep your coins, I want change, read millennial graffiti’s signature anonymity . With no True North, this portfolio-essay presents an Image of protest aesthetics in a time of democracy post-1989. Before, from a North in the South; after from southern hemisphere parallels; in-between from a South in the North. Overarching is a Pacific mirror. Each readymade-image-sentence has four cartoons and four, 200-word max. abstract captions.Keywords – aesthetics, protest, city, North-South, East-West

Dérives: Street photography as post-/Situationist practice

Street photography has hardly lacked for popular cultural currency, as attested by those ubiquitous black framed prints and coffee table tomes. However, it has long been a relatively marginalized genre within photography that has seen relative critical neglect even compared to other demotic forms concerned with the everyday, such as the family portrait (Bourdieu) and snapshot (Barthes). This article seeks to sketch a series of potential intersections between street photography’s antecedent, formative and breakout phases on both sides of the Atlantic and the Situationist International’s (1957–72) embodied practices surrounding the dérive, détournement and psychogeography more generally. Arguably, remediating street photographic practice and composition in relation to these disruptive strategies can provide a kind of corrective to the more formalistic conception of the former, as exemplified in the reification of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous dictum of the ‘decisive moment’. I will argue that Situationist discourse helps reframe these moments of the street as ‘situations’ in the Situationist sense, lines of flight that became explicit when the development of street photography in Europe is overlaid with that of the United States, Paris with New York. Such détournement arguably brings into view vectors between street photography and revolutionary art practices often neglected in discussions of these dérives of the street, and gestures towards – at least in potentia – a kind of afterlife of post-/Situationist praxis in the practices of street photographers.

Cinema at a Standstill

Abstract “Cinema at a Standstill” examines the theory and practice of film within the Situationist International, circa 1968. Questioning Guy Debord's refusal to document the group's participation in the abortive revolution of May-June ‘68, the essay explores the Situationists' ambivalence to the image as mnemonic device. Their refusal of film's iconicity did not, however, mean a complete refusal of its logic: The austere, text-based posters produced by the SI during the uprising are here read as a species of revolutionary intertitle for a film running in real time along the streets. Sharing the aniconic quality found at the same moment in the work of Daniel Buren and Jean-Luc Godard, this Situationist imageless cinema is read through the dialectic of repetition and stoppage first developed by Giorgio Agamben.

CODED GEOMETRY: A Digitally Expanded Game of Psychogeography

The materiality, aesthetics, logics and processes of digitality have infused the physical space of cities. We can no longer speak of a clear distinction between analogue, carbon-based, offline entities and digital, silicon-based, online representations. The relationship between digital technology and the city is a complex, more-than-human one in which the convergence of digital technology and the city can be shown to have expanded not just the space of the city but what the space of the city is. This article asks whether the Situationist International’s psychogeographic walking practices can be modified to research the specificity of the digital city. Through the practices of CODED GEOMETRY, a walking collective based in East London that uses performative strategies to develop a digitally expanded psychogeography, the article considers the following questions: how does it feel to walk the streets of East London when the city has been expanded by technologies that blur the boundary between the physical world and the digital realm, between physical objects and their representations in the digital field as data?

Letters from ‘Glaucos’: The Correspondence of Guy Debord during the Portuguese Revolution

Abstract Guy Debord, founder of the Situationist International and filmmaker, kept a meticulous record of his correspondence between 1951 and 1994. Published by Fayard, the fifth volume of the correspondence includes several letters signed ‘Glaucos’ (a character from the Iliad), which were sent to Afonso Monteiro, Gianfranco Sanguinetti, Eduardo Rothe, and Jaime Semprún. In those letters, Debord developed several analyses of the ‘Carnation Revolution’, arguing that ‘the Portuguese proletariat’ had gone ‘further than the May 1968 movement’. Debord initially supported a local group called Conselho para o Desenvolvimento da Revolução Social, but he would later criticise it for not taking sufficient action. He also encouraged Jaime Semprún to write La Guerre Social au Portugal, a book published by Éditions Champ Libre in May 1975. This article analyses Debord’s correspondence in 1974 and 1975, offering a critical assessment of how he related to the revolutionary situation in Portugal.

ACTIVIST BROWSER EXTENSIONS AS INTERFACE DÉTOURNEMENT: REMINDING, COPING, AND INFRASTRUCTURAL ALIGNMENT

This paper investigates web browser extensions as an under-researched media object for their capacity for activism. “Activist extensions” disrupt a webpage’s intended use and redirect users’ attention to social issues by modifying textual, visual, or auditory elements of the web user interface. The relevance of the study stems from the ubiquity of the web browser as a communication tool and the potential of browser extensions to counter its power in shaping how web content is delivered to users. Based on the notions of transduction and affordance, the critical vocabulary of the Situationist International, and the conceptualization of platform governance through the provision of infrastructural services, this paper asks: Through what mechanism do activist extensions redirect users’ attention to social issues? What are the potential implications for users? And, how can browser platforms affect the creation and distribution of activist extensions? The study adopts a mixed-methods approach that includes discursive interface analysis of the extensions’ modification of the browser interface, critical discourse analysis of user comments on these extensions, and semi-structured interviews with extension developers. Major findings of the study include: 1) the redirection of users’ attention from the webpage to social issues is achieved through the mechanism of $2 , 2) activist extensions function as $2 that provides users with a coping mechanism against certain online rhetoric, and 3) the creation and distribution of activist extensions are conditioned by an $2 imposed by the browser platform on extension developers.