WHAT IS “SITUATIONISM”?
“If you have understood by now that there is no such thing as Situationism, you haven’t wasted your evening.” S.I. Conference IV (No. 5).
“Are you Marxists? Just as much as Marx said, ‘I am not a Marxist.'” S.I. (No. 9).
Nine years ago, a movement was born, similar in many respects to the libertarian movement and very distant in others. Why isn’t it being discussed? It seems to be linked, on the one hand, to the highly developed theoretical aspect of the Situationist International’s texts and, on the other, to Situationist concerns, which seem to interest only a small minority. What are the causes? Among them, one of the most important is undoubtedly that professional revolutionaries from Lenin to Bakunin always separated political-economic action from action in culture. In their view, it was first necessary to change the material basis of life and only address the rest (the problem of art and lifestyle) in a second phase, without realizing that they were thus leaving “culture” in the hands of the bourgeoisie.
We all know now that the possibilities of productivity have progressed, as have all the technical sciences leading capitalism to its advance of overconsumption; this being mandatory for its survival and this in all sectors of production. From automobiles to arms and works of art, everything is sold, everything is bought: “ultima ratio” of a world where commodities extend their reign. Quality disappears in favor of quantity, and the use value of the object (example: the automobile) disappears behind its exchange value.
The SI exists only in relation to the consumer society currently spreading across the planet, imposing its behaviors (conditioned freedom), its habitat, its work, its leisure activities and its spectacle. The Situationists condemn (in principle) the ineffectiveness of current political struggles or categorical demands because they are partial, not challenging social construction as a whole. Herbert Marcuse, whom the SI has studied, summarizes the position of current society in the face of the problem of “culture”: “In the cultural domain, instead of a total desublimation, we see at work the unitary order of this society. There is identity, or rather confusion, between leisure time and work time, so that fundamentally man will no longer find during his leisure time anything other than what is offered to him at work: he is allowed any mode of behavior necessary to allow him to continue working. Above all, he will identify his soul with the enterprise. In literature, in art, the impossibility of communicating in a reified language [1] will worsen even more. And even any act of accusation against society will no longer be able to be expressed without being immediately and inevitably transformed into a bestseller, that is to say, directly absorbed by the market, bought, sold, paid for by the very society it criticizes.” [2]
If the situationists were among the first to realize that power claims to seize free time (leisure), they were the first to clearly formulate an attack position against this form of appropriation. Since power needs to have its products and its passivity at its highest level consumed by its “spectators” (read proletariat), the constant propaganda of the bourgeois lifestyle is therefore one of the main bases of the alienation of the “massified” proletariat. The SI can say thus: “Revolutionary thought must criticize daily life in bourgeois society; spread another idea of happiness” (I.S. No. 2). For even today among revolutionaries the old ways of life of the old society are always being reconstituted. For the SI, it is necessary to change both the exterior and the interior: “Even in the most anti-hierarchical and libertarian revolutionary group, communication between people is in no way assured by their common political program” (I.S. No. 6). The appearance of the Provo movement, which worries sociologists so much, would thus correspond to the experimental value of life expressed by the SI, but as much as the situationists try to systematize and coordinate theory and action, the Provos are for action that is spontaneous, little theorized and therefore easily recuperated by power. It seems that the word recuperation is a key word to understand the situationists — power does not create anything, it recuperates — if we can say that the formation of the first International was a copy (a positive) of the international of the exploiters, the situationists recuperate in the opposite sense of power, taking elements from very different fields: sociology, political economy, psychoanalysis, urban planning, etc., to form a coherent and critical whole. “The qualitative is our striking force” (I.S. No. 8) and to arrive thus at a comprehensive formulation of this society (the project being inseparable from its own critique.)
How are the Situationists at the center of a debate that must open up to the theoretical and practical possibilities of the revolutionary movement? Because, paradoxically, they are the only ones to affirm that the revolutionary movement has disappeared: “If there is something derisory about talking about revolution, it is obviously because the organized revolutionary movement has long since disappeared from modern countries, where the possibilities for a decisive transformation of society are precisely concentrated” (I.S. No. 6). They do not, moreover, claim to constitute themselves as a party. Their disillusioned tone toward what they call the old revolutionary movement is also explained by their historical classification: “We can admit that the classical workers’ movement began, some twenty years before the official formation of the International, with this first connection of communist groups from several countries that Marx and his friends organized from Brussels in 1845. And that it was completely finished after the failure of the Spanish Revolution, that is, precisely in the aftermath of the May Days of 1937 in Barcelona” (I.S. No. 7).
Situationist activity could at first glance be described as anti-cultural; this aspect is even less understood when we know that the founders of the movement were “artists” from the Lettrist left, advocates of transcending art. The Situationist International was formed on July 28, 1957, at the Cosio d’Arroscia conference. Composed of the Lettrist International and other avant-garde artistic movements: Cobra, Imaginist Bauhaus and Psychogeographic Institute, from its inception the Situationists had come to the conclusion (later research, revue Potlatch 1954-1957) that it is not a question of producing works of art, but of realizing life as a work of art, life freed from constraints in the sense of a great game. For them, this can only be achieved in a collective manner, by having the possibility of using modern means of production for the free construction of the environment: “The construction of situations begins beyond the modern collapse of the notion of the spectacle. It is easy to see to what extent the very principle of the spectacle is attached to the alienation of the old world: non-intervention. We see, on the contrary, how the most valid revolutionary research in culture has sought to break the psychological identification of the spectator with the hero, to draw this spectator into activity… the situation is thus made to be experienced by its constructors.” [3]
The Situationists were led to criticize Surrealist activity as an artistic activity producing commodities and as a revolt put in the museum: “The very success of Surrealism is largely due to the fact that the ideology of this society, in its most modern aspect, has renounced a hierarchy of artificial values, but in turn openly uses the irrational, and Surrealist survivals at the same time” [4] and to criticize the “amour fou” style: “participation in this bourgeois propaganda which presents love as the only possible adventure in modern conditions of existence…” (I.S. no. 2). The Situationists give a precise meaning to the words they use — diversion, derivative, unitary urbanism, constructed situation, spectacle. One of the words that is most consistently used to describe a whole set of conditionings is the term “spectacle,” used for both the cultural and political activities of this world. Jorn sums it up for us thus: “But what is the truth of this spectacular conflict? John Kenneth Galbraith, employed during the war in the administration of strategic bombing, a military security officer, duly decorated, admits in his book The Affluent Society that modern capitalism, while still believing itself to be anti-socialist, clings today to some of the most obviously Marxist dogmas, ignoring their origins, and still cursing Karl Marx. We can see in parallel how Russian society, while still believing itself to be Marxist, was able to effectively curse the thought of Marx, while honoring it.” [5] In the system of compensation generalized in this world, we can cite the extreme point of this “collaborationism” of power: “The two camps are not actually preparing for war, but for the unlimited preservation of this balance, which is the image of the internal stabilization of their power. It goes without saying that this will require enormous resources, since it is imperative to rise ever higher in the spectacle of possible war” (I.S. No. 7).
At the beginning of this article, we noted aspects far removed from the libertarian movement. It seems that on the term ideology there is no agreement: “Everywhere the ideologies of the old world are criticized and rejected, but nowhere is ‘the real movement that suppresses existing conditions’ freed from an ‘ideology’ in Marx’s sense: ideas that serve masters.” [6] To fully understand what this implies, we must place this sentence in the context that the men of their time have brought out: Hegel, end of philosophy; Kierkegaard, end of theology (concept of anxiety); Marx, end of ideology. The situationists take up these themes in “overcoming,” that is to say that for them, it is a question of actually realizing these disappearances, by the creation of another life. All these problems are then nothing more than problems of the pre-history of man. This is a return of elements to their origins, little understood, moreover. For example, the so-called Sartre, who calls himself a “Marxist,” is not one since he believes in philosophy.
Precisely in the libertarian movement, concerns about these themes are practically nonexistent. Why? Because there seems to be a fixation on Marx’s political action as an enemy denounced by Bakunin, rightly so in his time, and also a lack of interest in dialectical reasoning. It does not seem that the Situationists see it in the same way: “‘Plagiarism is necessary: progress implies it. It closely follows an author’s sentence, uses his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with a correct one.’ [7] To save Marx’s thought, it must always be clarified, corrected, and reformulated in light of a hundred years of reinforced alienation and the possibilities of its negation. Marx needs to be diverted by those who continue this historical path and not be imbecilely quoted by the thousand varieties of recuperators” (I.S. no. 10). We are here on ground that is little verified by libertarians, wrongly, no doubt.
It is certain that the revolutionary movement needs to reconsider its own facts in light of the times. If the situationist proposals do not incur excessive enthusiasm, perhaps they will have allowed a fair reevaluation of this time, which should be “our” era.
Guy ANTOINE.
Notes:
1. Reified: see “Some definitions,” below: reification.
2. “Are we still men?”, text by Marcuse, 1999, pp. 52 and 53.
3 and 4. G. E. Debord, Report on the Construction of Situations, June 1957.
5. Text by Jorn, “Guy Debord and the Problem of the Damned.” Introduction to the presentation of three of Debord’s films in a book produced by the Institute of Comparative Vandalism. Guy Debord Against Cinema.
6. Address to the Revolutionaries of Algeria and All Countries, November 1965.
7. Lautréamont, Poesies.
SOME DEFINITIONS
What does the word situationist mean? — “The term situationist, in the sense of the SI, is the exact opposite of what is currently called in Portuguese a ‘situationist,’ that is, a supporter of the existing situation, hence of Salazarism” (LS: -n° 9):
Situationism. — A meaningless term, abusively coined by derivation from the previous term. There is no situationism, which would mean a doctrine of interpretation of existing facts. The notion of situationism was obviously conceived by anti-situationists.
Drift. — A mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of hasty passage through varied atmospheres. It is also used, more specifically, to designate the duration of a continuous exercise of this experience.
Détournement. — Used as an abbreviation of the phrase: diversion of prefabricated aesthetic elements. Integration of current or past artistic productions into a superior construction of the environment. In this sense, there can be no Situationist painting or music, but rather a Situationist use of these means. In a more primitive sense, the diversion within old cultural spheres is a method of propaganda, which testifies to the erosion and loss of importance of these spheres. (The last three definitions, I.S. No. 1)
Unitary urbanism. — “Unitary urbanism is not a doctrine of urbanism but a critique of urbanism.”
If the Nazis had known contemporary urban planners, they would have transformed the concentration camps into low-income housing. But this solution seems too brutal to Mr. Chombart de Lauwe. Ideal urbanism must engage everyone, without discomfort or revolt, towards the final solution to the problem of humanity: (Commentaries against Urbanism, I.S. No. 6.)
Reification. — The term alienation refers to the many situations in which human beings are torn from themselves, made foreign to themselves, torn apart, subjected to “something else,” given over to abstraction or division. Reification constitutes the limit case of alienation, where man tends towards the condition of a thing.
Le Monde Libertaire, no. 127 (Décembre 1966): 12.
OPEN LETTER TO GUY ANTOINE ON SITUATIONISM
by Charles-Auguste BONTEMPS
Although I no longer collaborate with the Monde Libertaire as I once did, I don’t like it when people disparage it when I appear there, nor do I like it when people avoid, with pejorative intent, any allusion to libertarian action in relation to Situationism, this new form of Baroquism.
Those who took the trouble and risk of founding the Monde Libertaire were also young people. They had managed to build useful relationships with veteran activists who had remained in the fray. If young people today cannot tolerate the diversity of opinions that was and remains the rule of the initiators, if the editors of a certain brochure published by Strasbourg students believe they can afford to print, regarding the members of the F.A., that “these people actually tolerate everything since they tolerate each other,” no one is stopping them from doing what we did and proving their abilities by creating their own organ instead of playing the cuckoo clock.
The F.A., the Association that made possible the purchase of the shop, the founding of the bookstore, and, first of all, the newspaper, were organized in such a way that all developments are possible. Developments, but not evictions and substitutions; I specify this objectively since, practically speaking, I am no longer entirely in the running.
As for referring me, as you do, to the “sources” of Situationism, that ignores the fact that the debates, in which I am constantly engaged and in which I deal with specialists, oblige me to keep myself informed. However, a pamphlet like the one by the young people of Strasbourg leads me to an observation. People your age are, in fact, unable to read the anarchist newspapers and pamphlets of the various tendencies that flourished in the 1900s. Because of this, they don’t realize they are discovering America. I read the texts of the pamphlet in question as they were (style, intentions, and insults) dozens of times before 1914. The Provos replace, albeit less effectively, the direct action activists (without the Vaillants, the Henrys, and others.) The beatniks replaced those individualists who claimed to be asocial, and like many of them, they fell into line at twenty-five.
As for the constructive aspect, it is regrettable that its authors are unaware that long before them, skilled theorists, at the end of the last century, had developed it in various forms. While it is necessary to review their theories, it is childish to reinvent them and claim to teach them. This comes down to the very old formula: “All power to the Workers’ Councils.” Formerly, republicans used to say: “All power to the elected representatives of the people.” All this is so new and so modern that, referring to Proudhon, I have long said how wary I am of powers, even those delegated by the people or by the workers who, in fact, relinquish them. This is only my opinion. The fact remains that the Situationists’ modernism smacks too much of botched work for us to wait for their directives. The current situation poses, above all, problems of capacity and responsibility, with leaders who are not their own judges. On the scale of planetary mechanics, this requires a little more than hot air.
You also tell me that the libertarians have done nothing for culture. I won’t tell you to read the Publico catalog, but since you think they ignored “surrealism in its time,” I will reply that at the time I was on good terms with André Breton and Robert Desnos. But, as an anarchist, precisely, I opposed their inconsistencies, their apology for the irrational while their anticlericalism was virulent, their taste for mystery, while every mystery, according to etymology, presupposes initiates, and therefore mystifiers. While it is true that these inconsistencies ultimately led André Breton from communism to anarchism, others have become allies either to Moscow or Rome, when they haven’t deserted. Some, alas! have ended up in asylums or committed suicide.
I have nonetheless written, in libertarian publications, that surrealism had cleansed rationalism of its academic crusts and given bite to style. Is this a lack of interest in culture? But an anarchist culture is, beyond knowledge, a training in the desire for lucidity and a conscious consent to the rigor of facts.
As for the modern world, which, it seems, we are not old enough to understand, it began when some of us were twenty. That was in 1914. We’ve been struggling with this for half a century now, and physical age has nothing to do with it. As for mental age, we know and regret that too many adolescents are a little behind the times. On the other hand, Rutherford was 48 years old when he made the first transmutation of the atom. That said, we only ask to exchange views on the future of anarchism, on anarchist activities that would cease to be anarchist if they were unified. Unification is the business of sects and parties. It is not ours as a group of exchanges and solidarity. As individuals, nothing prevents us from all kinds of participation as long as we act at the forefront and without concealing ourselves. This is how anarchists effectively manifest themselves in the present world.
Between us, in the exchange of concepts, the margin is wide and modern material too abundant to be easily accessible. We should admit that to speak about it with any wisdom, courtesy is not superfluous. It is a prejudice like any other to consider coarseness a form of emancipation. Since you are interested in culture, you will agree that the choice of words matters to both the ear and the mind.
Le Monde Libertaire, no. 128 (Janvier 1967): 12.
AN EXCHANGE OF LETTERS
Paris, December 5, 1966
To Guy Antoine
Comrade,
I was afraid, based on a few words I heard, that I would have to respond to your article on Situationism (I hate this term, which isn’t even a promotional one.) However, I have just read your article, and I believe that your presentation is in its rightful place in the M. L., which I constantly say is too often out of step with the times.
Where I disagree — or rather, where I see a flaw — is in the all-too-easy opposition of Situationism to libertarian philosophy by reducing the latter to revolutionary social action alone.
In a word, you challenge the cultural action of anarchism. In another, I reply that the opposite is true. It is free and searching culture that has what is valuable and remains in anarchism.
When we talk about Proudhon, we seem to ignore his great work: On Justice in the Revolution and in the Church; Reclus’ Man and the Earth. Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid and also Ethics, outdated in its late but still existing perspective. The entire individualist school, from Stirner to Han Ryner and even Armand, was concerned only with man as man.
Finally, allow me to point out that everything you report about Situationism in terms of overcoming the revolution, the conditioning of leisure and aesthetics as a fundamental element of Surrealism are themes that, referring to anarchism, I have treated, in a sense very close to that of Situationism, for thirty to forty years, in articles and countless interventions at the Faubourg Club, in many speeches, and that, finally, all of this was collected, summarized, and systematized in Anarchism and the Real.
So why deny to anarchists, attribute to non-anarchists the views in which we preceded them?
I can give you the answer, but it’s a bit disappointing. There aren’t many anarchists who have done so. What isn’t “in line” is suppressed. It took more than two years for my book to finally be cited at a congress of the French Association of Anarchists. Cited, no more. It’s not debated. It’s ignored.
Here’s a significant fact. My essays are largely profitable. For the genre and without a publisher, that’s not bad. It was at the Société des Gens de Lettres, and not on the Rue Ternaux, that this was noted. However — with the exception of Anarchism and the Real, which nevertheless caught the attention of my comrades — it was at Rue Ternaux that I sold the fewest books: the figure is insignificant. Currently, my album In Praise of Egoism is being discussed by Catholic priests and professors, and I had the displeasure of hearing a well-known journalist say to me, regarding the review of this album in the M. L., “So, Bontemps, it seems that a Brassens album is more important to anarchists than one on a libertarian theme!”
It was a way of saying to myself, once again, and for a long time now: “What the hell are you doing here?”
Personally, I know what I’m doing, and I know where the seeds grow. But I can’t always resist the irritation when a well-written article like yours isn’t focused on emphasizing that what’s valuable is already there among the anarchists. It’s a shame they’re the first not to know this.
Sincerely,
Ch-Aug. Bontemps.
4, rue Gustave-Rouanet (18th) ORN 42-38
GUY ANTOINE
3 rue Ternaux
Boulogne Group
Comrade
First of all, thank you for writing to me, because it’s better to have a written critique than a “what people are saying” critique.
I think some things need to be clarified: There is no such thing as “situationism,” even if my article bore that title — there are only situationists.
I challenge the cultural activity of anarchism (as well as “Marxism”) in the sense that it is a 19th-century cultural activity. For it must be recognized that the emergence of “theoreticians” dates from that period, and that, by that very fact, we are linked to them.
The entire meaning of the article can be distorted if we don’t take into account that it is about today’s culture, in the sense of pseudo-culture and pseudo-science (planet).
To talk about freedom today can only be a sad joke without referring to the central theme of the “milieu,” conditioning, and propaganda.
At this level, all ideologies are equal, even libertarian ideology, because they are nothing more than words that can be twisted in all directions. All the powers currently speak of freedom… the greatness of man, etc…. in short, they are all humanists — in the sense of the Nazis, who, after all, built stalags for prisoners.
In any case, I don’t think this article will satisfy anyone, neither anarchists nor situationists. But I feel I would have been stupidly honest. Because to elaborate on certain points, I would be obliged to mention the texts of the SI.
Regarding your book, I must say that I haven’t read it, for example. But even if you were to address all the problems of the time, you would theoretically, but not practically, make the individual of our time as valuable as a fly on sticky paper.
Finally, since I can’t develop everything here, I want to respond to your last sentence, which motivates your letter — “It’s not intended to emphasize that what is valid is already among anarchists.” Here, I regret that EVERYTHING is not already among anarchists. Indeed, there are many things, often scattered, without coherence. (Theoretically at least.) Taken in the indicated sense, I would have been obliged to make a “libertarian apology.”
I would therefore not dwell on the positive aspects of anarchy.
But for example, were there anarchists capable of being interested in surrealism in their time?
In any case, I think that instead of criticizing “situationism” through a short article, it would be better to read their brochures — Situationist International, “the old mole” 1 rue des fossés-jacques, Paris 5th. — I am enclosing the Strasbourg Situationists’ brochure with the same letter.
It’s up to you to judge, sincerely,
Guy Antoine.
(To be continued in M.L no. 128) — The first text was not expanded in its second part, as the Situationists request to insert it arrived on January 4, 1967.
Working translations by Shawn P. Wilbur,
last revised April 4, 2025.
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