Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents - Media - Book Review

Tom McDonough, ed.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002

"First of all we think the world must be changed." Such was the war-cry of the Situationist International (SI), established in Italy in 1957 and comprising an array of disparate members. Having inherited revolution from Marx and nihilism from Dada, the SI's means of affecting change was disruptive. It involved "situations" or, in the late Guy Debord's words, "the concrete construction of temporary settings of life and their transformation into a higher, passionate nature." ""

The "situation" stood in opposition to the "spectacle," the latter promising the world, while necessarily failing to deliver and concomitantly inducing passivity. By disrupting the status quo, the SI meant to substitute crass consumption with creativity, and so free the individual from the stultifying effects of advanced capitalism. As it is, argued the SI, the individual is estranged from experience, and only capable of participating in life as a consumer. Even leisure and love are commodified and sold back to us.

Guy Debord and the Situationist International is a revised and expanded version of the 1997 special-issue of October journal. The first part of the book reproduces (translated) primary texts, in order to provide a "more representative range of the SI's writing." For, while the most familiar textual legacies of the SI are Guy Debord's The Society of Spectacle (1967) and Raoul Vaniegem's The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967), the collectively edited journal Internationale Situationniste delivered 12 issues in 12 years. Tom McDonough's selection from this journal (and Potlatch) is, for the most part, dominated by Debord. And, as Greil Marcus notes in his excellent essay, much of it is "strange stuff."

In a polemical introduction, McDonough claims the purpose of the publication is to position Debord as neither saint nor "solitary paranoiac," but to enable scholars to "pass from the phase of spectacular (i.e. laudatory or deprecatory) reception of his works, to another, the phase of interpretation." Perhaps to show us how, the second section of the book reprints a number of hard-to-find essays from the 80s and 90s that critique the SI. There is, too, a fascinating interview with Henri Lefebvre, full of anecdote--"we drank tequila with a little mezcal added"--and ambivalence. It is, however, the evocative language of the Situationists that delights the most: Vaniegem "sniff[ing] the urban planner with suspicious insistence;" Rene Vienet spitting on "those students-turned-grassroots-militants, with their 'groupuscules' that intend to become mass parties."

What makes the Situationists fundamentally different from postmodern philosophers (i.e. Jean Baudrillard) is their insistence that alienation in advanced capitalist society is neither inevitable nor invincible. And, while it might be difficult to sustain the theoretical stance of the SI--that is to say can "a society organized as appearance...be disrupted on the field of appearance?"--the sheer number of people who spend their time voluntarily incarcerated in shopping-malls, makes these incendiary texts pertinent if flawed. As ex-Situationists T. J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith opine in their truculent essay, "the history of the SI will someday be of use in a new project of resistance."

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