Cr*,
qualche nota storica...
Guy Debord and the Situationists
The other great important libertarian group which came to prominence during
the May-June events in France in 1968 were the Situationists.
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: The worker does not
produce himself; he produces an independent power. The success of this
production, its abundance, returns to the producer as an abundance of
dispossession. All the time and space of his world becomes foreign to him
with the accumulation of his alienated products....
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.
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]
From:
DEMANDING THE IMPOSSIBLE
A history of Anarchism
Peter Marshall, 1992
Fontana Press
77-85 Fulham Palace Road
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
ISBN 0 00 686245 4
Walk the earth naked
with me
embrace a life,
filter a truth
silent
solitude
my eyes, your
cries
c/
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