Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents (October Books) [Paperback]

The Situationist International has retained a certain cache in postmodern thought. Guy Debord's concept of 'spectacle' is now widely bantered about in any discussion on the nature of consumer society. Ironically, in the eyes of the traditional left, the situationists have been seen as variously elitist, nihilistic and childishly utopian. Yet their central focus, on how consumer capitalism affects the most intimate and mundane aspects of our everyday lives, brings us right back to the essence of Marx's theory of alienation.

This book gathers together previously unpublished texts and acts as a useful supplement to 'The Situationist International Anthology' edited by Ken Knabb. Fortunately for the art historian Tom McDonagh (who edits the book) and the other art historians who add complementary blurbs on the back of the jacket, most of these previously unpublished texts were written when the SI still had an enthusiasm for art. Post '63 the political came to dominate their work. This was almost a realization that they were on the defensive, that in the socio-political world of the mid-60's art as a means of authentic experience had been pushed to the margins. 'The poetry of the streets' was the only sure-fire way of taking back everyday life. This form of aggressive poetry eventually culminated in the events of May '68 in Paris.

California it seems was the nemesis of the SI's Latin Quarter. The radicalism that evolved from the Beat Generation in the U.S. is dealt with by nothing but contempt by Debord and his cohorts. Freudian psychology: "We know that the unconscious imagination is poor, that automatic writing is monotonous"p.33; ecology: "...a greater domination of nature, a greater freedom."p.42; and eastern spirituality: "...the mental infirmity of American capitalist culture has enrolled in the school of Zen Buddhism"p.80 This searing revulsion of American hippie culture may have been one of the reasons the SI was so attractive to certain strains within the punk movement from Malcolm McLaren to the Gang of 4 (who's 'Natural's Not In It' is the best distillation of situationist ideas set to music).

What also sets the situationists apart from the radicals within the U.S. was their unbridled enthusiasm for technology. This might seem like evidence of their utopian strain, a throwback to pre-war surrealism. But a belief that technology will eventually relieve us of unnecessary toil is an idea that goes back as least as far as the 18th century. As far as I can deduce from the early texts included here, the most impressive and imaginative of the early situationists was not Debord or even Asger Jorn, but the Dutch painter Constant Nieuwenhuys. His 'A Different City for a Different Life' is fascinating in its vision of a situationist city in a post-capitalist world. New Babylon would be constructed above ground level with most of the traffic condemned below. Moving walls, changeable spaces, climate-controlled communities, neighbourhoods designed for different individual emotions and the creation of a variety of environments to facilitate chance encounters. What could be a greater experimental realization of Marx's dictum that consiousness is shaped by environment?

Constant's early technological optimism contrasts sharply with Debord's later political pessimism. For by the mid-60's it was clear that not only would imaginative and non-alienating uses of technology not be on the horizon, but that a stronger defensive must be made for existing environments that were about to be totally consumed for capitalist techne. One is reminded of New York's Parks Commissioner Robert Moses and his hubristic schemes to run expressways through every borough of New York. When it finally came to running one through bohemian Lower Manhatten, an anti-Moses action group was formed to put a stop to the idea of motorwaying old communal neighbourhoods into the ground. As such maybe 'derives' are still possible in Lower Manhatten?

In Mustapha Khayati's 'Captive Words', there seems to be a slight acknowledgement of some structualist arguments that were bandied around at the time, "Power resides in language, which is the refuge of its police violence."p.174 Detournement - the situationist subversion of the signifier - was probably the most powerfully striking method of conveying dialectical conflict in the later 20th century. Khayati looks back to the dadaists in whom "the innocence of words was....consciously attacked."p.175 The situationists sought to challenge traditional signifieds by constant subversion of popular signifiers. This attack on comfortable images provoked an immediate questioning of received meanings. Their natural artistic sympathies were with the European avant-garde but they also disavowed much of it due to its often political ambiguity and its sometime outright reactionary nature. In the words of Greil Marcus "The situationist program....came down to Lautreamont and workers councils."p.14

Of the essays on the SI, Jonathan Crary's 'Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory', proved to be more than a little contentious, if all the more illuminating for it. He takes a sentence from Debord's 'Comments on the Society of the Spectacle' written in 1988 in which he states that when he wrote the original back in 1967, the spectacle was barely 40 years old. Crary then theorizes on what Debord meant by placing the beginning of the spectacle in 1927 or around the late 20's. He gives a number of insightful reasons, including 1: 1927 saw the technological perfection of television; 2: 'The Jazz Singer' premiered in 1927 and saw the birth of synchronized sound; 3: The rise of facism in the late 20's and its emphasis on using all available mediums to propogate its ideas.

I leave you with Theo Frey's vision of our Internet future written in 1966(!) "Henceforth a universal communication network supresses the distance between things while increasing the distance between people, the future solution will consist in making people circulate less and information circulate more. People will stay at home, transformed into mere audiovisual 'receivers' of information."p.170

Guy debord,progenitor of the extraordianry Situationist Internationale, was brillaint, autocratic,difficult,syncretic genius who took his own life. He first came to "notieriety" with the Letterist Internationale,the forerunner of the situationists. His greatest known work, still, is THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE, a post-modern,post-marxist analysis of modern society,which in his terms, had gone form a commodity based to spectacle based. Difficult to read, even harder to catorgorize, Debord later wote{20 years later} COMMENTS ON THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE,which further[in his mind] established the spectacle based modern capitalist society]Now This book, gorgeously if expensively produced by MIT Press, places Debord front and center.It Starts with an introductory essay by the volume editor, Tom Mc Donough, which attempts to introduce the cast of characters, sch as they were[are]. Next, a brilliant essay by Greil Marcus, who with his book Lipstick Traces brought the situationists back[for the first time to many] into view. the essays that follow are by Debord[the first 6 are}then one by Michele Bernstein[former memeber,the SI disbanded in 1972]others by the brilliant,poeticlly inclined Raoul Vaneigem[who was proably nearer to Debords intellectual level than many of the others]t j clark,libero anderotti[architecture and play, a suerb essay] among others. The book itself is very well produced,which is nice considering the price.Though incomplete[it is a reprint of the magazine OCTOBER issue on the SI} it helps fill in the missing pieces with this vital thinker and his times. Though not as complete as I would have liked{no Ralph rumney,for example,who has such interesting things to say in his book, THE CONSUL} it is another in the growing interst to the SI.Well doneIntroduction: Ideology and the Situations Utopia
The Long Walk of the Situationist International 1
The Great Sleep and Its Clients (1955) 21
One Step Back (1957) 25
Report on the Construction of Situations and on the Terms of Organization and Action of the International Situationist Tendency (1957) 29
One More Try If You Want to Be Situationists (The SI in and against Decomposition) (1957) 51
Theses on Cultural Revolution (1958) 61
Contribution to the Debate "Is Surrealism Dead or Alive?" (1958) 67
In Praise of Pinot-Gallizio (1958) 69
Extracts from Letters to the Situationist International (1958) 75
Editorial Notes: Absence and Its Costumers (1958) 79
Editorial Notes: The Meaning of Decay in Art (1959) 85
A Different City for a Different Life (1959) 95
Editorial Notes: Critique of Urbanism (1961) 103
Editorial Notes: Once Again, on Decomposition (1961) 115
Comments against Urbanism (1961) 119
Editorial Notes: Priority Communication (1962) 129
Editorial Notes: The Avant-Garde of Presence (1963) 137
Editorial Notes: All the King's Men (1963) 153
The Situationists and the New Forms of Action in Politics or Art (1963) 159
Perspectives for a Generation (1966) 167
Captive Words - (Preface to a Situationist Dictionary) (1966) 173
The Situationists and the New Forms of Action against Politics and Art (1967) 181
The Practice of Theory: Cinema and Revolution (1969) 187
Asger Jorn's Avant-Garde Archives 189
Architecture and Play 213
Situationist Space 241
Lefebvre on the Situationists: An Interview 267
Angels of Purity 285
Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord's Films 313
Dismantling the Spectacle: The Cinema of Guy Debord 321

Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory 455
Why Art Can't Kill the Situationist International 467
Letter and Response 489

RELATED TITLES

* Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (The Verso Classics Series) by Guy Debord

* The Situationist City by Simon Sadler
* Situationist International Anthology by Ken Knabb
* Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century by Greil Marcus * The Tribe by Jean-Michel Mension, Donald Nicholson-Smith (Translator)
* May '68 and Its Afterlives by Kristin Ross
* Considerations on the Assassination of Gérard Lebovici by Guy Debord, Robert Greene
Revolution of Everyday Life
by Raoul Vaneigem)
* Beneath the Paving Stones: Situationists and the Beach, May 1968

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Skip this book and buy instead "The Situationist International: A User's Guide" by Simon Ford.

Tom McDonough's book embodies the worst aspects of contemporary academic re-appropriation of the Situationist movement. Don't put money into the hands of the people who did this (MIT press in case you were wondering, the providers of pseudo-hip cyber-semiotic fuel for the new glamor class of academia).

You can expect extremely complex scholarly arguments here which ultimately say one thing: "you the self-satisfied reader may rely on us the self-satisfied academics to dismantle and completely wash away any tendencies in the material under consideration which might in any way jostle or disturb the tranquility of your self-satisfaction."

The only interesting piece in this collection is an interview with Henri Lefebvre, author of "Critique of Everyday Life", who was involved with the situationists in the 1960s. In this interview Lefebvre spreads memories around like peanut butter, melding and stretching the past to the surprizing conclusion that he himself, not the situationists, was the instigator of the 1968 uprisings.