Joyce Karine de Sá Souza1
I. “Now, the Situationist International”2
In September 1956, the First World Congress of Free Artists took place in the city of Alba, Italy. It was organized by the Mouvement international pour un Bauhaus imaginiste, MIBI, and attended by members of other artistic groups who agreed that merely disapproving of Functionalism was no longer a sufficient criticism of urbanism. It was necessary to develop a totally new unitary urbanism, which would make it possible to build a different atmosphere in the cities – referring particularly to the cities of the Global North in the middle of the twentieth century. At the same time, according to Anselm Jappe,3 one of the leading proponents of unitary urbanism, these artists aimed at creating “new ambiances,” capable of fostering new types of behavior and opening the way to a civilization founded on play. Also, in the last issue of Potlatch,4 some of the artists who met at Alba referred to the Conference of Cosio d’Arroscia, due to take place the following year, in 1957, and ended with the decision to fully unite as one the various groups represented at that meeting, namely: the Lettrist International, the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, and the London Psychogeographical Committee.5 On that day the Situationist International was founded.
The journal Internationale Situationniste was the main platform for disseminating the ideas born from that union. There were 12 publications between the years 1958 and 1969. Unlike Potlatch, the journal of the Lettrist International, in which authorship was collective, several of the Situationist texts were signed by the respective author. Nevertheless, the animus of each remained collective. In this regard, the editorial stance of the journal is clear, and in all its issues there was a presentation with the following warning: “All texts published in INTERNATIONALE SITUATIONNISTE may be freely reproduced, translated or adapted, even without indication of origin”.
The Situationist International (SI) was also characterized by ruptures and expulsions throughout its existence, until its dissolution by Debord in 1972. Guy Debord, Pinot Gallizio, Constant, Asger Jorn, Raoul Vaneigem, Michèle Bernstein, Mohamed Dahou, among others, like German and Scandinavian painters, composed the Situationist International. During the period of its activities, the group had no more than 70 members (never more than 12 at the same time), nineteen of whom left and forty-five of whom were expelled. Similar to the Lettrist International, Debord demanded total commitment and discipline from his members, and the characteristic of reducing the group to a minimum number of people met this purpose. During the early years of the Situationist International, its activities centered around the collaboration between Debord and Jorn. But as the influence of the SI grew, its sphere of activities grew to compass work by other members, including Constant and Gallizio (in architecture and painting) and Vaneigem and Khayati (in conceptualizing Situationist ideas). Hence culture and everyday life as well as urbanism and alienation became central themes in Situationist discussion.
II. Guy Debord’s Report on the Construction of Situations
In the Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organization and Action,6 Guy Debord outlines the provisional platform for the Situationist organization. Resuming some of the criticisms previously raised by the Lettrist International while refining them with the categories of Hegel’s dialectic, this text both demonstrates the influence that Hegel and the young Marx had on Debord, and offers the earliest systematic presentation of his ideas.
According to Debord, the main concern of the Situationist International is to use certain existing means of action, the existing repertoire of class struggle, and develop new tactics that might precipitate revolutionary transformations. This perspective aligns with the notion that capitalism engenders forms of struggle that, in fact, conceal class oppositions. For Debord, following Marx, such contradictions compel capitalists to innovate while maintaining the wage relation, without any commitment to the social and political transformations needed to eradicate the oppression they constantly reproduce and perpetuate. In this regard, the efforts to uphold capitalism are nothing but alibis to cover up the alienation of other activities, whether within culture, everyday life, or even within the very consciousness of every human being.
Inspired by Marx’s observations in his analysis of the relationship between base and superstructure, the Situationists find it crucial to undertake a critical analysis of culture to understand how it both reflects and foreshadows the consequences of collective action within a society. In his work A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx analyzes capitalist society through topics such as commodities, money, the relationship between production and distribution, exchange, and consumption, thereby establishing the basis for understanding political economy. He also re-tools Hegel’s dialectic so that the material basis of capitalist society can be analyzed in a systematic way and through solid theoretical bases. In the preface, Marx explains that legal relations, politics, and the forms of the State cannot be comprehensively explained on their own. It is necessary to understand that such relations are rooted in the means whereby people meet their needs for food, shelter, clothing, companionship, and so on. He observes that human beings, regardless of the manifestation of their will, engage in relations marked by relations of production that correspond to a certain degree of development of their material productive forces. Marx defines as base the totality of the economic relations of production that would condition the superstructure of a society, that is, the processes of social, political, and intellectual life.
In contrast to “orthodox” Marxism, Situationists understand that delays in the transformation of the superstructure, and, in particular, culture, are what hold up change at the base of society. Thus, there is an inversion of the Marxian conception, wherein it’s postulated that without changing the base, that is, the economic relations of production, it would not be possible to transform the superstructure, wherein culture is inserted. Debord concludes that the necessary transformation of the base is slow because of the mistakes and weaknesses produced in the superstructure. Therefore, it is necessary to strengthen the battle in the field of idleness and leisure, viewing them as the new arena of the class struggle.
In this context, the role of culture become crucial if the decomposition that leads cultural production to a merely economic and alienating aspect is perceived. Debord refers to the avant-garde movements that emerged in the post-war era, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Lettrism. These movements faltered in their endeavors to advance in actions for severing ties with bourgeois rationality. In reality, these movements were absorbed by the market’s logic, and their creations were converted into private property.
The Situationists do not adopt an anti-cultural attitude but stand on the “other side of culture”. This is how they explain it:
We are against the conventional form of culture, even in its most modern state; while obviously not preferring ignorance, the petit-bourgeois common sense of the local butcher, or neo-primitivism. There is an anticultural attitude that flows toward an impossible return to the old myths. […] We place ourselves on the other side of culture. Not before it, but after. We say that one must attain it, while going beyond it as a separate sphere; not only as a domain reserved for specialists, but above all as the domain of a specialized production that does not directly affect the construction of life — including the very lives of its own specialists.7
The Situationists understood that the so-called “liberation” of modern culture within a bourgeois society was nothing more than a tactic to neutralize its potentiality as a revolutionary practice. As long as art remains confined to merely expressing the passions of the old world, it will be condemned to be preserved as a tradable commodity. And bourgeois society was acutely aware of this: after all, the neutralization of artistic avant-gardes had thus become one of the principals aims of bourgeois propaganda, for example, through their institutionalization within museums.
For Debord, by the same token, would-be revolutionary movements such as Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism were self-defeating because they were confined to the realm of art. As they are assimilated into the webs of the capitalist structure, they become counter-revolutionary weapons.8
Futurism, which was characterized by the subversion of bourgeois cultural norms in literature and the arts, reproduced a puerile optimism toward technology and industry, lacking a more complete theoretical perspective of its time, leading to its eventual disintegration. In the end, it collaborated with fascism. Dadaism, constituted by refugees and deserters from World War I who rejected all the values of bourgeois society through manifestations of the destruction of art and writing, dissolved due to its purely negative and non-propositional actions. On the other hand, Surrealism, by betting on the unconscious as a great vital force, ended up experiencing an ideological collapse. That collapse, per Debord, was all the more severe because of the spiritualist suppuration of its leading voices and the mediocrity of its epigones. Debord’s critique of Surrealism and its heirs thus demonstrates that mere formal fidelity to technical innovation in the arts eventually leads to their antipode: traditional occultism.
Situationists followed suit, arguing that the cultural movements that previously protested the emptiness of bourgeois society ended up becoming a positive affirmation of that emptiness. The blunting of artistic critiques of bourgeois culture in museums thus reproduces an aesthetic incapable of having a revolutionary ideological position or of creating something new. This reduces the novelty of avant-garde experiments to the bourgeois logic of art pour l’art tamed by the reins of capitalist rationality. Considering this observation, Debord defended the distinction between aesthetic-commercial culture and revolutionary creativity, demonstrating the need to overcome art as a separate sphere of collective activity alienated from social struggle. In this sense, in one of his inverse phrases, so much to Marx’s taste (“weapons of critique” and “critique of weapons”, “philosophy of misery” and “misery of philosophy” etc.), it wasn’t a matter of organizing the spectacle of refusal, rather, it was about of organizing the refusal of the spectacle.
The decomposition in the dimension of culture is a total decomposition. When the criteria of cultural creation become elements of advertising activity, the exercise of “critical” judgments ultimately creates pseudosubjects of cultural critic. The traumatized consciousness of modernist critics and modern artists would be a consequence of the shipwreck caused by expression in the art as an alienated dimension and as an absolute end. For Situationists, decomposition is the
Process by which traditional cultural forms have destroyed themselves, as a result of the emergence of better means of ruling nature, making superior cultural constructions both possible and necessary. An active phase of decomposition, – the effective demolition of the old superstructures (which ended around 1930) – must be distinguished from a repetition phase, which has prevailed since. The delay in the transition from decomposition to new constructions is linked to the delay in the revolutionary annihilation of capitalism.9
According to the situationist analysis, the appearance of other dimensions of cultural activity, even if slowly, would trigger a process that commercial aesthetics could not drive. Therefore, a radical opposition against decomposition could not be restricted to the ruins of a system that develops a bourgeois critique but should articulate revolutionary action with an effectively critical cultural practice, that is, one that aims a radical transformation of life. Overcoming the merely plastic aspect of the previous avant-gardes, which were intertwined with capitalist cultural practices, is the first attempt to respond to the demand for a definitive rupture from aesthetic-commercial culture.
The Situationists argued, by cultivating amazement, in the philosophical sense of the word, that the passivity and conformity seen in bourgeois life should be replaced by the perplexity of entirely new desires. The fascination and passion for commodities should be abandoned when experiencing an authentic life, that is, one not alienated by the consumption characteristic of a spectacular-mercantile society. In this regard, according to Debord, a revolutionary action in culture should not aim to translate or explain life, but to prolong it. Once again, Debord notes that revolution is not simply an objective matter of political economy, but also one of subjects and their desires, because the exploitation of human beings in a capitalist context also causes their passions, desires, and affections to die. And what would be the role of the Situationist International in this scenario?
Firstly, it should be recognized that the problems regarding cultural production cannot be solved in themselves, in a closed circle of creativity and repetition of defeated aesthetics. Thus, it is not about restoring credibility or esteem for art. Instead, it is about placing culture in relation to a new advance of the world revolution, accomplished through organized collective work that recognizes the need to overturn the deadening routines of everyday life by building new environments and elaborating desires that are the result and instrument of new behaviors. Secondly, we should understand that the central task of the Situationist International is the construction of situations and fostering environments capable of realizing those desires, rather than merely describing or representing them via techniques destined for advertising copy and the museum. For this purpose, art should be denied as a privilege of the ruling class and as a commodity. We should recognize that it has become a principal source of alienation. If the bourgeois world maintains cohesion through advertising propaganda, culture cannot be at the mercy of the consumer market, thus, avoiding dissolution into the current aesthetic commerce.
The Situationists desired the end of the spectacle world by rejecting the spectacle of the end of the world.
III. The spectacle as heir of religion
Critique and Religion
In his famous Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’, Marx notes that the critique of religion is the presupposition of all criticism.10 It’s worth noting that when Marx develops the critique of the fetishist character of the commodity in Capital, he states that ‘a commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.’11 Furthermore, Marx notes that the process of commodification of human labor traverses social relations in such a way that it reached the point of transforming the social relationship between objects, external to the producers, into the predominant form of socialization. This is the central aspect of the criticism developed by Debord in The Society of the Spectacle. If for Marx ‘the commodity-form is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things’,12 for Debord ‘the spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relation among people mediated by images.’13
As is well-known, the Marxian influence on Situationist philosophy is evident, especially in Guy Debord. For this reason, it can be stated that the spectacle also presents itself as a form of religion, and its wretchedness constitutes the expression of the metaphysical subtleties of the image. For the situs, image is the assertion of appearance, of separation, of alienation that has taken over not only human or social relations, but life. Giorgio Agamben revisited this theme in his dialogue with Debord, highlighting that the Situationist critique of the spectacle serves as a field of action that makes it possible to think on the profanation of separation. According to the Italian philosopher, only developing theoretical propositions that overcome obsolete theories that perpetuate the reproduction of alienating structures of domination would it be possible to pave the way for a future towards a new use of the world. But what is the relation between spectacle and religion?
Cult and Guilt
In §20 of The Society of the Spectacle, Debord demonstrates that the capitalist economy is the realm of the separate and the realm of the separate always finds its origins in religion. Religion embodies the concept of total separation which previously alienated the power and perfectibility of humankind to the afterlife. Now, as spectacle, it consummates a fracture within the human being while it affirms the appearance of paradise on earth in the guise of the commodity. In the spectacle, as in religion, every moment of life, every idea and every gesture only find its meaning outside of itself. Debord states that the elimination of the limits between true and false through the repression of all truth lived under the real presence of the lie is ensured by the organization of appearance. In §10 of The Society of the Spectacle, Debord also states that ‘considered in its own terms, the spectacle is the affirmation of appearance and the affirmation of all humans, namely social life, as mere appearance.’
It is worth noting that Walter Benjamin, in his powerful fragment Capitalism as Religion,14 similarly demonstrates that capitalism is a pure religious cult, sans rêve et sans merci. Every day is a worship day that does not aim at atonement, but blame. Capitalism, for Benjmain, is a cult of extreme exertion of worship that engenders ‘an enormous feeling of guilt not itself knowing how to repent, grasps at the cult, not in order to repent for this guilt, but to make it universal, to hammer it into consciousness and finally and above all to include God himself in this guilt, in order to finally interest him in repentance.’ Even more, ‘therein lies the historical enormity of capitalism: religion is no longer the reform of being, but rather its obliteration.’
If Benjamin had survived the Nazi persecution, he would likely concur with Debord and the Situationists, since his lucidly prescient theses accurately observe the reality into which capitalist society evolved after WWII: an ongoing cult of the spectacle. In the Society of the Spectacle, God is not dead, as Nietzsche famously proclaimed. He is drawn into the fate of consumer. Spectacle is a purely cultic consumption, metaphysics of appearance, is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion.
The Unprofanable
Drawing from Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben demonstrates how capitalism, not only as economic but also as religious phenomenon, operates through separation, a typical trait of both religion and, undoubtedly, the spectacle. According to him, ‘not only is there no religion without separation, but every separation also contains or preserves within itself a genuinely religious core.’15
Analyzing how Roman jurists distinguished sacred and profane, Agamben notes that sacred were things, places, animals, or people that belonged to the gods and, therefore, were separated from the free use and commerce of humans, since they were consecrated (sacrare), withdrawn from the sphere of human law. Profanation, on the other hand, denoted to the process of returning these things, places, animals, or people to free use of humans once they were desecrated from their divine sphere. This is why there exists a particular distinction between ‘sacred’ and ‘profane.’ Nevertheless, for Agamben, as the religion of commodities, capitalism turns this distinction indifferent, which means that capitalism is a religion that operates the pure form of separation, where all use becomes impossible, once placed in a separate sphere:
This sphere is consumption. If, as has been suggested, we use the term “spectacle” for the extreme phase of capitalism in which we are now living, in which everything is exhibited in its separation from itself, then spectacle and consumption are the two sides of a single impossibility of using. What cannot be used is, as such, given over to consumption or to spectacular exhibition. This means that it has become impossible to profane (or at least that it requires special procedures). If to profane means to return to common use that which has been removed to the sphere of the sacred, the capitalist religion in its extreme phase aims at creating something absolutely unprofanable.
Situationist theories and practices only became possible through acts of subversion and rebellion that denied the economic relations of contemporary capitalism. It is within this context that Debord’s ideas are outlined. The Situationist International represents an attempt to go beyond the artistic vanguards that came before it, being, in itself, a proposal that denies the separation between life, politics and art. Debord clearly perceived the limitations of preceding movements, no matter how radical they may have been during their time. All ended up submerged in bourgeois society and were transmuted into cultural commodities for consumption. The situationist project does not revolve around constructing an artistic avant-garde, but rather revolves around a social praxis that make it possible to think outside the dominant values. It involves taking the proletariat struggle to all aspects of life by denying the contemporary conditions of capitalism. Whether it was successful or not is another question. Debord wanted an organization that, by blending life with politics and art, would deny the spectacular consumption of these spheres. Living politically also entails living artistically, thus, a new use of life would be combined with a novel profanatory praxis.
Hence, the Situationists.
Thanks to Tim Kreiner for his insightful comments, which significantly improved the text.
- Ph.D. in Law and Justice (Federal University of Minas Gerais, UFMG, Brazil). Law Professor at Nova Faculdade of Contagem (Brazil). In 2023, she was a Visiting Research Scholar at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, during which time she dedicated herself to research in the original archives of the Situationist International and Giorgio Agamben. ↩︎
- This is the title of the text that opens the nº 9 of the Situationist International. VV. AA. “Maintenant, L’I.S.”, in Internationale Situationniste, nº 9, August 1964, p. 3. The author translated the quote from French to English. ↩︎
- Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1999). ↩︎
- ‘Potlatch: bulletin d’information de groupe français de l’Internationale lettriste, later Potlatch: bulletin d’information de l’Internationale lettriste was a periodical of the Lettrist International published in 29 numbers (27 issues) from 22 June 1954 through 5 November 1957. It appeared weekly for the first 12 numbers, then monthly through the number 24, afterwards occasionally. The editors were André-Frank Conord (1-8), Mohamed Dahou (9-18, 20-22), Gil J Wolman (19), and Jacques Fillon (23-24). Several members, including Guy Debord, Michèle Bernstein, Mohamed Dahou, and Gil J Wolman went on to form the Situationist International.’ See Monoskop: https://monoskop.org/Potlatch . ↩︎
- Guy Debord, ‘Encore un effort si vous voulez être situationnistes : L’I.S. dans et contre la décomposition,’ in Potlatch, nº 29, November 5th, 1957. ↩︎
- Guy Debord, Rapport sur la construction des situations et sur les conditions de l’organisation et de l’action de la tendance situationniste internationale, June 1957. See: https://monoskop.org/images/d/df/Debord_GE_Rapport_sur_la_construction_des_situations_1989.pdf ↩︎
- VV. AA. “L’avant-garde de la presence”, in Internationale Situationniste, nº 8, January 1963, p. 21. The author translated the quote from French to English. ↩︎
- Guy Debord, Rapport sur la construction des situations et sur les conditions de l’organisation et de l’action de la tendance situationniste internationale, June 1957, IV-V. ↩︎
- VV. AA. “Définitions”, in Internationale Situationniste, nº 1, June 1958, p. 14. Translation from French to English by Ian Thompson. See: https://isinenglish.com/1-8-definitions/ ↩︎
- Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’. Trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). ↩︎
- Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1990), 163-164. ↩︎
- Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1990), 165. ↩︎
- Guy Debord, The Society of The Spectacle. Unauthorized Trans. Black & Red (Detroit: Black & Red, 1970), §4. ↩︎
- Walter Benjamin, Capitalism as Religion. Fragment 74, Vol. 4 of Benjamin’s Gesammelte Schriften. Trans. Chad Kautzer (New York: Routledge, 2005), 259-262. ↩︎
- Giorgio Agamben, ‘In Praise of Profanation’, in Profanations. Trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 74. ↩︎
JOURNAL OF THE FIRST OUTERNATIONAL 