The Situationist International (SI) was created on 27 July 1957 in Cosio di Arroscia in Italy. Its nine founding members were drawn from three groupuscules of the European avant garde: the Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, the Lettrist International (a neo-surrealist outfit that had emerged in the early 50s bohemia of the Parisian Left Bank) and the London Psychogeographical Society which, in the person of its solitary member, Ralph Rumney, had brought the practice of dérive, or purposeful urban "drifting", to the streets of the English capital.
Rumney was expelled the next year – the first in a series of excommunications, defenestrations and resignations that would continue until 1972, when the SI's "secretary" and intellectual éminence grise, the Frenchman Guy Debord, wound the organisation up. In 1960, the situationists made a shambolic appearance at the ICA in London which was later described by one of the participants as a "big joke". As McKenzie Wark shows in his fascinating, if somewhat uneven, new book, it was also a turning point in the history of the SI.
For this was the moment that Debord, together with his lieutenants Attila Kotányi and Raoul Vaneigem, and under the influence of heterodox French Marxist groups such as Socialisme ou Barbarie, began to concentrate his energies on the theoretical analysis of what he called the "spectacle". By this, Debord meant the relentless commodification of human experience that was, and indeed still is, the defining characteristic of late capitalism. The creation of "situations", or aesthetic shocks, and the détournement, or distortion, of the cultural products of the spectacle was left to the mostly German and Scandinavian artists who eventually formed a breakaway Second Situationist International in the early 60s. Here, albeit in new clothes, Wark writes, was "the old dilemma between romantic revolt and class struggle" – and, one might add, between theory and practice.
It was as romantic revolt rather than social critique that situationism survived in this country. Its principal anglophone representative was the writer Alexander Trocchi, whose novels of disaffected hipsterdom (notably Cain's Book) owe more to William Burroughs and the Beats than they do to, say, Bakunin. Today, Trocchi's influence is felt in the obsessive pamphleteering of the poète maudit Stewart Home, who revived Rumney's London Psychogeographical Association in the early 90s and continues to pledge his allegiance to "non-Debordist situationism". And a vestigial folk memory of situationist dérive ("street ethnography" Wark calls it), as it was practised by Debord and his lettrist comrade Ivan Chtcheglov in Saint-Germain-des-Prés in the 50s, is preserved in the literary peregrinations of Iain Sinclair and Will Self, where psychogeography is parlayed into a kind of Blakean metropolitan mysticism.
The British situationists of the late 60s thought Debord and the others had taken a wrong turn. SI apostate Christopher Gray, whose band of London-based provocateurs King Mob included the future Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, opined: "What they [Debord et al] gained in intellectual power and scope they had lost in terms of the richness and verve of their own everyday lives." The SI, Gray argued, "turned inward". "Cultural sabotage" and "drunken exuberance" had been replaced by theoretical austerity.
But that turning inward didn't prevent the Parisian situationists from exerting the most profound influence on the French student movement in May 1968. More than 300,000 copies were printed of a pamphlet, On the Poverty of Student Life, written by an SI cadre named Mustapha Khayati. And it was a protégé of Debord's, René Viénet, who was responsible for some of the more memorable of the graffiti that appeared all over Paris during that tumultuous month – including the one Wark has taken for the title of his book.
This is a story that has been told before, of course: not only by Gray, in his 1974 book Leaving the 20th Century, but also in Andrew Hussey's biography of Debord, The Game of War, and most exhilaratingly by Greil Marcus in Lipstick Traces, his "secret history" of the 20th century. Because he doesn't want to tell that same tale over again, Wark decides to turn the focus away from Debord and to place it instead upon a "large cast of disparate characters" – artists, bohemians and sundry fellow-travellers of the situationist project. "To reduce a movement to a biography," he writes, "is to cut a piece away from what made it of interest in the first place."
Wark is probably right about the limitations of the great man theory of history. But he also declares at the start of the book that his aim is to find in situationism what is "specific to the demands of this present", to tease out its "contemporary resonance". To do that, you can't ignore Debord, who was described recently, without hyperbole, by political historian and theorist Jan-Werner Müller, as the "most innovative Marxist thinker in Europe after 1945".
"The spectacle," Debord wrote, "is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life." Sounds familiar, doesn't it?
Jonathan Derbyshire @'The Guardian'
Ordered this the other day...looking forward to reading it!
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