The Situationist International C/D?

http://www.art-for-a-change.com/blog/images/april06/situationist.gif
http://www.bopsecrets.org/images/hello.gif
http://www.uncarved.org/music/apunk/graphics/sitoon.jpg

revive
why because situationism be intersting

what say you. has adbusters ruined detournement etc GO

Will there ever be a time when Situationism can be genuinely shocking again

Was Situationism ever geniunely shocking

Can we talk about Situationism without somebody conjuring up Fight Club as an excuse not to take it seriously

fuck off cult studs fucks

seriously so bored now

you stopped being interesting when you changed your name, rique

sorry dude graveyard shift, am cranky

WOW MIND BLOWN WOMEN IN ADS != REAL WOMEN

THANKS SITUATIONISTS, LOVE TOGTQ

c+

speaking of changing name, BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, I seriously think you should change yours especially before you start another thread that is about the subject of rape in one way or another. thanks ? that was cocaine speaking.

go eat a dick, cunto

http://imagecache2.allposters.com/images/pic/CLASS/186-020~PMS-Posters.jpg

Vaneigem OTM about everything fornever.

were they an art movement or a political movement?

they deny categories!

they were an art movement.

They wound up Stalinists = Win

That their critiques of authoritarian politics are much more interesting/useful than any positive praxis they might've offered is probably truer tho.

Very big in the 60's.

they gave the world some excellent slogans

I like to practice the derive:

By definition, psychogeography combines subjective and objective knowledge and studies. Debord struggled to stipulate the finer points of this theoretical paradox, ultimately producing Theory of the Dérive in 1958, a document which essentially serves as an instruction manual for the psychogeographic procedure, executed through the act of dérive ("drift").
In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there…But the derive includes both this letting go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities [4].
In the SI’s 6th issue, Raoul Vaneigem writes in a manifesto of Unitary Urbanism, “All space is occupied by the enemy. We are living under a permanent curfew. Not just the cops – the geometry” [5]. Dérive, as a previously conceptualized tactic in the French military, was “a calculated action determined by the absence of a greater locus,” and “a maneuver within the enemy’s field of vision” [6] To the SI, whose interest was inhabiting space, the dérive brought appeal in this sense of taking the “fight” to the streets and truly indulging in a determined operation. The dérive was a course of preparation, reconnaissance, a means of shaping situationist psychology among urban explorers for the eventuality of the situationist city.

"By definition, psychogeography combines subjective and objective knowledge and studies."

please to unpack? i think derive -- or "having a wander" -- is probably the weakest situationist meme. their view of architecture reminds me of john betjeman.

"The dérive was a course of preparation, reconnaissance, a means of shaping situationist psychology among urban explorers for the eventuality of the situationist city."

they did a job on that score, it must be addmitted.

no, "having a wander" is crucial and it goes back to the surrealists - breon's nadja being the significant document

breton's, i mean

goes back to the "flaneur", surely

yeah, but why do you see it as a "weak meme"??

1) old
2) british middle-classes have always, always worshipped those naughty parisians
3) lack of political efficacy
4) lack of efficacy within the limited field of urban planning and architecture
5) fey

tru dat

what in the hell has been an example of "good political efficacy," then? fuck political efficacy. let the shit crumble on its own.

the idea of nadja being old or fey is absurd

what in the hell has been an example of "good political efficacy," then? fuck political efficacy. let the shit crumble on its own.

-- Tim Ellison, Saturday, June 23, 2007 11:33 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

i couldd be wrong but iirc both the surrealists and the situationists presented themselves as, you know, a bit left-wing.

re. crumbling on its own: no. they were activists, voluntarists. the historical process would not just "unfold" for these guys.

surrealists got involved with the party later on. situationists i don't know, but again, what's an example of their political efficacy?

i mean, it seems to me that by calling the derive their weakest meme, you're saying that their stronger memes were in their art or their advocacy and i'm questioning the idea that these efforts were more effective toward accomplishing much of anything or the idea that drifting through the urban environment - which is more about LIVING than doing something geared toward the hope that maybe you'll be able to live in the future, is a significant act that should not be judged by its "efficacy."

well their efficacy was not great.

all the same, seriously, you have to be kidding if you weren't aware they were marxists.

uh i never said that

more so that i don't give a damn whether or not they were marxists

also those cartoons posted above are whiny and pedantic. it's funny how "manhood" is put in parentheses in that second one - why?

in quotes, i mean

it is was important to them that they were marxists! and it permeates their views in umpteen ways. one of their big things was fighting the maoists, the trotskyists... read any of their stuff and it's all about marx, frequently directly about marx's personal involvement in the labour movement. you can't escape all that stuff. i think those cartoons are bad, too, but a lot of things about them was.

it's quite easy to "escape all that stuff" - don't read their literature. but i still like the derive very much.

A depoliticised Surrealism/Situationism seems pointless tho.

what? non-political art is pointless? actions (such as the derive) that are not directly, pointedly political are pointless?

First there's a whole "all art is political in one way or another" argument. But that's a boring argument, agreed.

But with those 2 movements in particular, so much of what drove them was political that to ignore that element seems to be missing the point. In many ways Surrealism is a bunch of attempts to create a non-Utilitarian Marxism, a Marxism that doesn't seek to negate individual subjectivity. Situationism worked on the same themes. An apolitical derive isn't a derive at all.

i don't know that this line of argument is useful at all, it's quite possible to enjoy marat without evaluating our stance on jacobinism

Fair enough, I concede that it's possible to look at ideas in different contexts, tho not in no context at all. It does seem weird to me, when Breton, Bunuel, Debord or Vaneigem are so explicitly political so much of the time, to want to ignore that altogether.

my analogy is sorta bad because situationists were more literary than visual, but there's not a whole lot of important french literature that *isn't* avowedly political in one way or another, it just goes w/ the turbulent political history of the last 200 years

it's just distance and space that makes us so much less keenly aware of the politics in, say, stendahl or balzac or huysmann or celine or breton

i guess that and the fact that there's clowns running around at this very moment identifying themselves as situationists, doing that is obviously dudder than dud dud dud but let's not judge an arresting piece of collage art like "naked city" on the merits of latter-day street art dudes putting up bad sticker art everywhere.

the major exception to what i just said is the strand running through flaubert -> proust but whatever

xpost

I hear that. And if I remember right, the original members of the SI refused the idea of referring to themselves as Situationists.

(Politics is still visible and important in, say, Voltaire or Rousseau tho so it needn't become completely obscured.)

with those 2 movements in particular, so much of what drove them was political that to ignore that element seems to be missing the point.

if you're identifying that point as marxism, i'd say there are plenty of reason to ignore it (not ignore it in terms of understanding the movements historically - though who cares about that, really? - but ignoring it as far as what it's inspiration can nevertheless be to you personally) but if you're identifying the point as freedom and a general desire to see society crumble regardless of your political affiliation, then i'd agree with you.

and i agree that the derive is by nature political.

xpost to noodle: yeah, i absolutely agree!! of course, politics is visible in the fiction i mentioned, too, but we can certainly read voltaire and rousseau with more of an eye towards just appreciating the ideas and rhetoric in a more, i dunno, neutral way than people manage with current stuff. i guess the smaller battles are always fiercer?

or hell, i guess the SI obviously just doesn't have as much to offer as stuff that's lasted 200, 300 years ...

but still, it's dope right? where would 90s math rock flyer design be without that gem?

vaneigem speaks

:D

Shine on, you lucid diamond.

yeah much love