Situationism: Difference between revisions

|title = [[File:Situ.png]] Situationism

[[File:Ormarxf.png]] [[Marxism]] <br>

[[File:File:Neomarx.png]] [[Neo-Marxism]] <br>

[[File:Frankfurt.png]] [[Frankfurt Socialism]]<br>

[[File:Hegel.png]] [[W:Hegelianism|Hegelianism]] <br>

[[File:Existentialism.png]] [[W:Existentialism|Existentialism]] <br>

[[File: Ancom.png]] [[Anarcho-Communism]] <br>

|theorists=*[[File:Situ.png]] [[W:Guy Debord|Guy Debord]] (1931-1994)

*[[File:Situ.png]] [[W:Raoul Vaneigem|Raoul Vaneigem]] (1934-)

*[[File:Egocom.png]] [[W:The Right to Be Greedy|For Ourselves: Council for Generalized Self-Management]] (1974)

*[[File:Postsitu.png]] [[W:Jean-Pierre Voyer|Jean-Pierre Voyer]] (1938-)

*[[File:Postsitu.png]] [[W:Ken Knabb|Ken Knabb]] (1945-)

*[[File:AnPostleft.png]] [[Post-Left Anarchism|Bob Black]] (1951-)

=== Situations ===

The first edition of ''Internationale Situationniste'' defines the constructed situation as "a moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and a game of events."

As the SI embraced dialectical Marxism, the situation came to refer less to a specific avant-garde practice than to the dialectical unification of art and life more generally. Beyond this theoretical definition, the situation as a practical manifestation thus slipped between a series of proposals. The SI thus were first led to distinguish the situation from the mere artistic practice of the happening, and later identified it in historical events such as the Paris Commune in which it exhibited itself as the revolutionary moment.

=== Détournement ===

A ''détournement'' is a technique developed in the 1950s by the Letterist International, and consist in "turning expressions of the capitalist system against itself," like turning slogans and logos against the advertisers or the political status quo. ''Détournement'' was prominently used to set up subversive political pranks, an influential tactic called situationist prank that was reprised by the punk movement in the late 1970s and inspired the culture jamming movement in the late 1980s.

=== Anti-capitalism ===

The Situationist International, in the 15 years from its formation in 1957 and its dissolution in 1972, is characterized by a Marxist and surrealist perspective on aesthetics and politics, without separation between the two: art and politics are faced together and in revolutionary terms. The SI analyzed the modern world from the point of view of everyday life. The core arguments of the Situationist International were an attack on the capitalist degradation of the life of people and the fake models advertised by the mass media, to which the Situationist responded with alternative life experiences. The alternative life experiences explored by the Situationists were the construction of situations, unitary urbanism, psychogeography, and the union of play, freedom and critical thinking.

=== Art and politics ===

The SI rejected all art that separated itself from politics, the concept of 20th-century art that is separated from topical political events. The SI believed that the notion of artistic expression being separated from politics and current events is one proliferated by reactionary considerations to render artwork that expresses comprehensive critiques of society impotent. They recognized there was a precise mechanism followed by reactionaries to defuse the role of subversive artists and intellectuals, that 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.

=== Work, leisure, and play ===

The situationists observed that the worker of advanced capitalism still only functions with the goal of survival. In a world where technological efficiency has increased production exponentially, by tenfold, the workers of society still dedicate the whole of their lives to survival, by way of production. The purpose for which advanced capitalism is organized isn't luxury, happiness, or freedom, but production. The production of commodities is an end to itself; and production by way of survival.

The theorists of the Situationist International regarded the current paradigm of work in advanced capitalist society as increasingly absurd. As technology progresses, and work becomes exponentially efficient, the work itself becomes exponentially more trivial. The spectacle's social function is the concrete manufacture of alienation. Economic expansion consists primarily of the expansion of this particular sector of industrial production. The "growth" generated by an economy developing for its own sake can be nothing other than a growth of the very alienation that was at its origin.

=== Psychogeography ===

The word psychogeography, suggested by an illiterate Kabyle as a general term for the phenomena a few of us were investigating around the summer of 1953, is not too inappropriate. It does not contradict the materialist perspective of the conditioning of life and thought by objective nature. Geography, for example, deals with the determinant action of general natural forces, such as soil composition or climatic conditions, on the economic structures of a society, and thus on the corresponding conception that such a society can have of the world. Psychogeography could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals. The charmingly vague adjective psychogeographical can be applied to the findings arrived at by this type of investigation, to their influence on human feelings, and more generally to any situation or conduct that seems to reflect the same spirit of discovery.

*[[File:Ego.png]] [[Egoism]] - "[t]he positive conception of egoism, the perspective of communist egoism, is the very heart and unity of our theoretical and practical coherence". For Ourselves: Council for Generalized Self-Management.

* [[File:Hegel.png]] [[w:Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel|Hegel]] - Possibly even better than Marx. Immanent critique is the greatest contribution to systematic philosophy the world might ever know.

*[[File:Awaj.png]] [[Anarchism]] - The anarchists rightly criticize the authoritarian and narrowly economistic tendencies in Marxism, but they generally do so in an undialectical, moralistic, ahistorical manner...