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Mar 9, 2010

The SI- because I couldn't have said it better

Situationist International
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist_International

The Situationist International (SI) was a restricted group of international revolutionaries founded in 1957, and which had its peak in its influence on the unprecedented general wildcat strikes of May 1968 in France.
With their ideas rooted in Marxism and the 20th century European artistic avant-gardes, they advocated experiences of life being alternative to those admitted by the capitalist order, for the fulfillment of human primitive desires and the pursuing of a superior passional quality. For this purpose they suggested and experimented with the construction of situations, namely the setting up of environments favorable for the fulfillment of such desires. Using methods drawn from the arts, they developed a series of experimental fields of study for the construction of such situations, like unitary urbanism and psychogeography.
They fought against the main obstacle on the fulfillment of such superior passional living, identified by them in advanced capitalism. Their theoretical work peaked on the highly influential book The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord. Debord argued in 1967 that spectacular features like mass media and advertising have a central role in an advanced capitalist society, which is to show a fake reality in order to mask the real capitalist degradation of human life. To overthrow such a system, the Situationist International supported the May '68 revolts, and asked the workers to occupy the factories and to run them with direct democracy, through workers' councils composed by instantly revocable delegates.
After publishing in the last issue of the magazine an analysis of the May 1968 revolts, and the strategies that will need to be adopted in future revolutions, the SI was dissolved in 1972.

The SI noted how reactionary forces forbid subversive ideas from artists and intellectuals to reach the public discourse, and how they attack the artworks that express comprehensive critique of society, by saying that art should not involve itself into politics. A precise mechanism followed by conservartives to defuse the role of subversive artists and intellectuals, is to reframe them as separated from the most topical events, and divert from them the taste for the new that may dangerously appeal the masses; after such separation, such artworks are sterilized, banalized, degraded, and can be safely integrated into the official culture and the public discourse, where they can add new flavors to old dominant ideas and play the role of a gear wheel in the mechanism of the society of the spectacle.
Artists, and intellectuals, that accept such compromises are rewarded by the art dealers and praised by the dominant culture. The SI received many offers to sponsor “creations” that would just have a "situationist" label but a diluted political content, that would have brought things back to order and the SI back into the old fold of artistic praxis. The majority of SI continued to refuse such offers and any involvement on the conventional avant-garde artistic plane.


The Most Radical Gesture : The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age
Author: Plant, Sadie.
Publication: London ; New York Routledge, 2002.

In common with other situationist texts, therefore, The Society of the Spectacle painted a picture of a society which believes itself capable of providing everything, satisfying all desire, relieving every burden, and fulfilling every dream. But this is also a world which insists that every moment of life must be mediated by the commodity form, a situation which makes it impossible to provide anything for oneself or act without the mediation of commodities. A spectacle can only be watched and enjoyed at a distance, from where it appears glamorous and desirable; participation may be possible, but its form and extent will be predetermined by the context in which it appears. The promises of self-fulfilment and expression, pleasure and independence which adorn every billboard are realisable only through consumption, and the only possible relation to the social world and one’s own life is that of the observer, the contemplative and passive spectator. The commodity form places everything in the context of a world organised solely for the perpetuation of the economic system; a tautological world in which the appearance of real life is maintained in order to conceal the reality of its absence. Bombarded by images and commodities which effectively represent their lives to them, people experience reality as second-hand. Everything has been seen and done before; quests for fulfilment are always frustrated, and just as workers find no satisfaction in the products of their labour, so ‘no one has the enthusiasm on returning from a venture that they had on setting out on it. My dears,’ said Debord in one of his films, ‘adventure is dead.’The basis of this characterisation of capitalist society was already laid in Marx’s early and graphic descriptions of alienation. Performed not in order to satisfy a need but as a means of satisfying other needs, all work undertaken within capitalism is external,alien, and ‘shunned like the plague’ wherever possible. Workers are left debased, exhausted, and denied, and the individual only ‘feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home.’ Alienated from the products of their labour, their time, and their own selves, workers produce and reproduce alienated relations both between themselves and things and between each other. The relations of capitalist production are therefore reproduced in all social relations; circum-scribing social reality, alienation comes to be perceived as the necessary reality of daily life. Leisure, culture, art, information, entertainment, knowledge, the most personal and radical of gestures, and every conceivable aspect of life is reproduced as a commodity: packaged, and sold back to the consumer. Even ways of life are marketed as lifestyles, and careers, opinions, theories, and desires are consumed as surely as bread and jam. Constantly creating new markets, the commodity relations of twentieth-century capitalism extend their grasp to the very intimacy of people’s everyday lives where nineteenth-century capitalism built its geographical empires. And although Marx had also recognised that commodity relations extend the experience of alienation beyond the workplace, he retained a sense of the worker being at home ‘outside his work’. The spectre that has haunted subsequent radical theorists is that this remaining realm of free and unalienated experience is increasingly eroded by the encroachment of capitalist relations. And if alienation really does extend to both work and leisure time, there is a danger that it becomes completely meaningless, since there is nothing with which to compare it and nothing in relation to which it can be defined.

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