Even out in the middle of America, inquiring minds may have recently picked up some of the East Coast media/art-world buzz about a now-defunct Euro-crew called the Situationist International (SI). The Situationists are the subject of a new book called Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, by pop critic extraordinaire Greil Marcus.
They are also memorialized, some would say embalmed, in a traveling museum exhibition called "On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International 1957-1972." The exhibit, like its subject, started in Paris. It spent the winter months in Boston where it was visited by yours truly and thousands of others.
The Situationists were continental contemporaries, chronologically and otherwise, of our own beloved and beatified Beats. Formed in 1957 as a loose, anarchistic collective of avant garde artists and writers, the Situationists, like the Beats, were 1950s rebels-with-a-cause, determined to bang their heads against the conformist artifice of the postwar world and plumb the depths of its bottomless inauthenticity.
Our Beats are now, of course, the stuff of transgenerational legend. By 1957 they were already becoming quite well-known. This is in no small part because, as truly American cultural populists, the Beats were in love with mass popular culture. They loved it for the sheer thrill and sensation of it all, and also for its inherently democratic potential. They were eager to have their work, their ideas, their myth, and even their lives enter and transform the popular culture.
The SI, on the other hand, was pure in its disdain of the instruments of cultural domination. It aimed to work not on the mass media but directly on the minds of its victims, i.e., Jean and Jeanne L'Doe. This they hoped to do by fostering disruptions in everyday life "situations," which, like shock therapy, could jar the participant into recognizing the reality beneath the surrounding world of spectacle.
The anarchist-tyrant and guru-founder of the SI, writer and filmmaker Guy Debord, persistently expelled from the group any member suspected of professionalizing situationism. Professionalism would, of course, have made situationism part and parcel of the spectacle. It would also have made it accessible to an infinitely broader public, though in a mutated form. So while the Beats got credit for fostering a counterculture and changing the world, the SI lived on at the margins of cultural discourse. They were like an especially disturbing family secret, much worried over but little discussed. Hence the "secret history" in the subtitle of Greil Marcus' book on the SI.
MARCUS APPROACHES THE Situationists through punk, which it turns out was one of the places where their legacy survived. In the late 1970s, Marcus, like many of us, experienced one of those revelatory "situations" when he first heard The Sex Pistols. In the course of his subsequent explorations in punk, Marcus first learned of the Situationists, who it turns out were -- through their art-school influence on the Pistols' manager, Malcolm McLaren -- the true godparents of the movement.
This discovery set Marcus off on a process of cultural archaeology in which he also discovered a lost key for understanding our popcult times. Marcus ended up contributing to the explanatory text for the SI exhibition.
Situationism's most immediately relevant contribution to understanding our world can be found in its notion of the "spectacle." More than 25 years ago, Debord, a French anti-intellectual, wrote a book called Society of the Spectacle. Debord's title phrase connoted a society in which our own real day-to-day lives are supplanted by externally imposed images of which we are spectators and never authors. The "spectacle," Debord wrote, is "capital accumulated until it becomes an image."
In the early 1960s, a few alienated vanguardists nodded sagely at Debord's critique and passed it from hand to hand. A few years later, in May 1968, situationism had its moment in official media-authorized history. That was when, in collision with the adolescent fury of the children of the Spectacle, situationist theory provided the language for the grand and famous Paris uprising.
To this day, May '68 is best remembered for the SI graffiti slogan, "All power to the imagination. " The Paris uprising was the ultimate "situation." It was a timeless moment in time in which everything was revealed, and everything seemed possible.
Today Debord's truth about capital-as-image is so self-evident that even Entertainment Tonight hosts John Tesch and Mary Hart could understand it. In our post-industrial, post-everything world, we all know that the economy has nothing to do with real products made by real workers and used by people in their real lives. It has everything to do with the flicker of data across a screen, and the plundering of real life and history for the images into which make-believe financial empires are distilled. And all for our very own infotainment.
For an example we need only look at the Paris '68 of our day in Eastern Europe. Eastern Europeans probably didn't think that their struggle of the past 40 years was only to provide an especially compelling image of the Pepsi (and Pepsico) spirit, as in the famous "chip-off-the-old-wall" spot. They probably never thought that their revolutions might need corporate sponsorship and licensing deals. But they'll learn, and fast.
Danny Duncan Collum is a Sojourners contributing editor.
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