Situationism

[Cain]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist

Situationist refers to a member of the Situationist International (SI), a very small group of international political and artistic agitators with roots in Marxism, Lettrism and the early 20th century European artistic and political avant-gardes. Formed in 1957, the SI was active in Europe through the 1960s and aspired to major social and political transformations. In the 1960s it split into a number of different groups, including the Situationist Bauhaus, the Antinational and the Second Situationist International. The first SI disbanded in 1972.

The first issue of the journal Internationale Situationniste defined situationist as "having to do with the theory or practical activity of constructing situations. One who engages in the construction of situations. A member of the Situationist International". The same journal defined situationism as "a meaningless term improperly derived from the above. There is no such thing as situationism, which would mean a doctrine of interpretation of existing facts. The notion of situationism is obviously devised by antisituationists."

Situationist ideas have continued to echo profoundly through many aspects of culture and politics in Europe and the USA. Even in their own time, with limited translations of their dense theoretical texts, combined with their very successful self-mythologisation, the term 'situationist' was often used to refer to any rebel or outsider, rather than to a body of surrealist-inspired Marxist critical theory. As such, the term 'situationist' and those of 'spectacle' and 'detournement' have often been decontextualised and recuperated.

In political terms, in the 1960s and 1970s elements of Situationist critique influenced anarchists and other leftists, with various emphases and interpretations which combine Situationist concepts more or less successfully with a variety of other perspectives. Examples of these groups include: in Amsterdam, the Provos, in the UK King Mob, the producers of Heatwave magazine (who later briefy joined the SI) and the Angry Brigade. In the US, groups like Black Mask (later Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers), The Weathermen and the Rebel Worker group also explicitly employed their ideas.

In the 1980s and 90s, Situationist ideas were taken up by 'second wave' anarchists. These theorists, such as Bob Black, Hakim Bey, Fredy Perlman and John Zerzan developed the SI's ideas in various directions, but all attempted to remove the perspectives and proposed practices of the SI from a Marxist theoretical context. These theorists were predominantly associated with the magazines Fifth Estate, Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed and Green Anarchy, in which they developed these perspectives. Some hacker related e-zines, which like samizdat were distributed via email and FTP over early internet links and BBS quoted and developped ideas coming from SI. A few of them were N0 Way, N0 Route, UHF, in France; and early Phrack, CDC in the US. More recently, writers such as Thomas de Zengotita in "Mediated" wrote something which holds the spirit of situationism, describing the society of the "roaring zeroes" (i.e. 2000-).

Most recently, more politically heterogeneous radical groups such as Reclaim the Streets and Adbusters have respectively, seen themselves as 'creating situations' or practicing detournement on advertisments.

http://www.nothingness.org/SI/

[LMNO]

Please, please tell me you made this up to jake wikipedia.

[Cain]

Nope.  This is all totally true.

[LMNO]

Srsly?  "One who creates situations"?



Hmmm.  Upon reflection, that seems like it has potential.

[Cain]

Yep.  I thought you may like it, and so threw it up for discussion.  I mean, I've already mentioned how Modernism, Surrealism and the most famous protestors in Paris in 1968 may have influenced or shared ideas with Discordianism.

[LMNO]

Yup.  I've always thought the Dadaists were completely in line with our kinda stuff.

[Cramulus]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist
Examples of these groups include: in Amsterdam, the Provos, in the UK King Mob, the producers of Heatwave magazine (who later briefy joined the SI) and the Angry Brigade. In the US, groups like Black Mask (later Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers), The Weathermen and the Rebel Worker group also explicitly employed their ideas.

That's really interesting, I didn't know King Mob had roots in reality. (and was a group, not a person) I was only familiar with the King Mob character in Grant Morrison's comic the Invisibles.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Mob

some graffiti from King Mob:

Same thing day after day - tube - work - dinner - work - tube - armchair - TV - sleep - tube - work - how much more can you take? - one in ten go mad - one in five cracks up

"I don't believe in nothing - I feel like they ought to burn down the world - just let it burn down baby."

[Jenne]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist
Examples of these groups include: in Amsterdam, the Provos, in the UK King Mob, the producers of Heatwave magazine (who later briefy joined the SI) and the Angry Brigade. In the US, groups like Black Mask (later Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers), The Weathermen and the Rebel Worker group also explicitly employed their ideas.

That's really interesting, I didn't know King Mob had roots in reality. (and was a group, not a person) I was only familiar with the King Mob character in Grant Morrison's comic the Invisibles.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Mob

some graffiti from King Mob:

Same thing day after day - tube - work - dinner - work - tube - armchair - TV - sleep - tube - work - how much more can you take? - one in ten go mad - one in five cracks up

"I don't believe in nothing - I feel like they ought to burn down the world - just let it burn down baby."

The roof!  The roof!
The roof is on fire!

We don't need no water
Let the motherfucker burn!
Burn, motherfucker!

The Dadaists were the first thing I thought of when I read this.  The French seem uniquely capable, as a culture, to field this sort of thought relatively easily.

[Cain]

I've been reading much of the literature lately, I thought I'd through in some of the better parts for further discussion.

FIRST OF ALL, we think the world must be changed. We want the most liberating change of the society and life in which we find ourselves confined. We know that such a change is possible through appropriate actions.

The shattering of modern culture is the result, on the plane of ideological struggle, of the chaotic crisis of these antagonisms. The new desires that are taking shape are presented in distorted form: present-day resources could enable them to be fulfilled, but the anachronistic economic structure is incapable of developing these resources to such ends. Ruling-class ideology has meanwhile lost all coherence because of the depreciation of its successive conceptions of the world (a depreciation which leads the ruling class to historical indecision and uncertainty); because of the coexistence of a range of mutually contradictory reactionary ideologies (such as Christianity and social-democracy); and because of the mixing into contemporary Western culture of a number of only recently appreciated features of several foreign civilizations. The main goal of ruling-class ideology is therefore to maintain this confusion.

One of the contradictions of the bourgeoisie in its period of decline is that while it respects the abstract principle of intellectual and artistic creation, it resists actual creations when they first appear, then eventually exploits them. This is because it needs to maintain a certain degree of criticality and experimental research among a minority, but must take care to channel this activity into narrowly compartmentalized utilitarian disciplines and avert any holistic critique and experimentation. In the domain of culture the bourgeoisie strives to divert the taste for innovation, which is dangerous for it in our era, toward certain confused, degraded and innocuous forms of novelty. Through the commercial mechanisms that control cultural activity, avant-garde tendencies are cut off from the segments of society that could support them, segments already limited because of the general social conditions.

Opposing an apparently irrational society in which the clash between reality and the old but still vigorously proclaimed values was pushed to the point of absurdity, surrealism made use of the irrational to destroy that society,Äôs superficially logical values. The very success of surrealism has a lot to do with the fact that the most modern side of this society,Äôs ideology has renounced a strict hierarchy of factitious values and openly uses the irrational, including vestiges of surrealism.

The crisis of modern culture has led to total ideological decomposition. Nothing new can be built on these ruins. Critical thought itself becomes impossible as each judgment clashes with others and each person invokes fragments of outmoded systems or follows merely personal inclinations.

We should not simply refuse modern culture; we must seize it in order to negate it. No one can claim to be a revolutionary intellectual who does not recognize the cultural revolution we are now facing. An intellectual creator cannot be revolutionary by merely supporting some party line, not even if he does so with original methods, but only by working alongside the parties toward the necessary transformation of all the cultural superstructures. What ultimately determines whether or not someone is a bourgeois intellectual is neither his social origin nor his knowledge of a culture (such knowledge may just as well be the basis for a critique of that culture or for some new creative venture), but his role in the production of the historically bourgeois forms of culture. Authors of revolutionary political opinions who find themselves praised by bourgeois literary critics should ask themselves what they,Äôve done wrong.

OUR CENTRAL IDEA is the construction of situations, that is to say, the concrete construction of momentary ambiances of life and their transformation into a superior passional quality. We must develop a systematic intervention based on the complex factors of two components in perpetual interaction: the material environment of life and the behaviors which it gives rise to and which radically transform it.

The most general goal must be to expand the nonmediocre part of life, to reduce the empty moments of life as much as possible. One could thus speak of our enterprise as a project of quantitatively increasing human life, an enterprise more serious than the biological methods currently being investigated, and one that automatically implies a qualitative increase whose developments are unpredictable. The situationist game is distinguished from the classic notion of games by its radical negation of the element of competition and of separation from everyday life. On the other hand, it is not distinct from a moral choice, since it implies taking a stand in favor of what will bring about the future reign of freedom and play.

The construction of situations begins beyond the ruins of the modern spectacle. It is easy to see how much the very principle of the spectacle ,Äî nonintervention ,Äî is linked to the alienation of the old world. Conversely, the most pertinent revolutionary experiments in culture have sought to break the spectators,Äô psychological identification with the hero so as to draw them into activity by provoking their capacities to revolutionize their own lives. The situation is thus designed to be lived by its constructors. The role played by a passive or merely bit-part playing ,Äúpublic,Äù must constantly diminish, while that played by those who cannot be called actors, but rather, in a new sense of the term, ,Äúlivers,,Äù must steadily increase.

Obviously, there are problems in removing the Marxist parts of the works, but even so....

[The Littlest Ubermensch]

I'm something of a fan of Situationism (aside from the Marxism), though I definitely need to read more of their stuff. A lot of their ideas on society as spectacle is really interesting. There's an audio reading of the essay Thoughts On the Society of Spectacle on the Audio Anarchy podcast, if anyone's interested.

[Cain]

I am, set us up the link?

[The Littlest Ubermensch]

Havent a clue where the actual website is. Just look in the iTunes store for it. Or the magical powers of Google, if you hate Apple.

[Cain]

Found it: http://www.audioanarchy.org/spectacle.php

[The Littlest Ubermensch]

Most excellent. I love that podcast to death. "Against the Logic of Submission" is a fantastic one too, especially for deprogramming anarcho-n00bs who think anarchism is the destruction of organized government and nothing else.

[Cain]

Well, the urge for destruction is a creative one....