Situationism: Difference between revisions

== Foundations and Beliefs ==

Situationists philosophized about post-war modernity from a framework that Marx got it right with class but missed a few things, and assert that capitalism is beyond just materially viscousvicious, but also philosophically insidious. It has sown alienation, commodification, and isolation of community in favor of fetishized corporate brands and a conception that excessive spending on consumption will bring the cure to that isolation. Their solution was to subvert the culture by sowing the seeds of what may be arguably called prototypical Post-Modernism.

The two seminal books to come out of the movement were Debord's Society of Spectacle and Raoul Vaneigem's book, translated literally as "Treatise on Manners for a Younger Generation". Debord's book was written as a set of aphorisms, a subversion of the Tao Te Ching that critiqued capitalism's emphasis on spectacle as replacing representation with reality and essentially gutting the cultural fabric that was the working classes' last respite. Whereas Vaneigem's book, possibly sarcastically titled, takes a more pro-active critique of how people fail to truly communicate with each other, encouraging the youth to engage bein being more socially open.