The construction of situations and the spectre of "situationism"

Phil Edwards

Revised version of a paper given at Beauty? (the Association of Art Historians' 22nd Annual Conference, Newcastle, 12th-14th April 1996)

Ongoing construction: situations and situationists

What is a situationist? It's a big question, but an initial answer would be: someone who constructs situations. And what's a "constructed situation"? Helpfully, the first issue of the Situationist International provided us with a glossary in order to resolve that question: it's a "moment of life, concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organisation of a unitary environment and a game of events". Constructing a situation thus implies collective construction of a moment - collective involvement in and modification of all the aspects of a moment in time, from the decor to how those involved are acting.

A situation in this sense is somewhere between - more precisely, somewhere beyond - art and politics. Where art is predicated on a division between art work and spectator, the situation demands total involvement in its construction and cannot allow spectatorship. At the same time it is a political phenomenon: what is at issue is the collective construction of one's own life. Hence the construction of situations could be interpreted both as the supersession of the arts and as a revolutionary supersession of politics. The latter was more and more how the situationists themselves came to understand their project in the late 1960s, and underlay their involvement in the events of May 1968 - the occupation of the factories was a step on the way to the construction of situations on the scale of society as a whole.

"There is no such thing as situationism": history of a denial

So, what's "situationism"? In this case there isn't a simple definition: the word can only be understood in its historical contexts. In the glossary cited above the noun "situationist" was defined as "one engaged in the construction of situations; a member of the SI". The entry for "situationism", on the other hand, reads: "Meaningless word, improperly formed by derivation from the previous term. There is no such thing as situationism, which would imply a doctrine for the interpretation of existing facts." The argument was that, while there was such a thing as situationist theory, "situationism" would imply an ideology, an off-the-peg body of ideas which devotees of the SI could fall back on rather than using ideas creatively. Ideology, of course, was the stock in trade of political discourse as the SI saw it; the SI came not to practise politics but to supersede it.

The SI's attitude to Marxism may help clarify the theory/ideology distinction (derived from Karl Korsch). The group once posed itself the question whether its members were Marxists. Their answer was: "We are Marxists in the same sense that Marx was when he said, 'I am not a Marxist'". Marx wasn't a Marxist - he was doing the thinking, generating the ideas. Theory, for the SI, represented that level of involvement with ideas - being in charge of one's own thinking rather than being a passive adherent to an immutable body of thought.

By defining "situationism" as a grammatical back-formation, the SI firmly ruled out the ideological back-formation whereby, for example, one becomes a Maoist by adhering to Maoism. This raises the interesting question of how a situationist, inside or outside the SI, could validate his or her status as a situationist so as to gain admission or avoid exclusion. This question is illuminated by another occasion on which the question of "situationism" came up; the year was 1960 and the place was London.

The ICA had put on one of Guy Debord's films; the programme stated that Debord was involved in "International Situationism". The SI duly intervened, stating: "There is no such thing as situationism - no doctrine of that name. What we call situationist is a practical experiment organised in a disciplined international movement." There are two criteria here: situationist ideas are involved in practical work, guaranteed by practice; they are also guaranteed by the discipline of the movement. As a situationist, you are judged by the collective opinion of the SI as to whether you come up to the mark; you are also judged by whether you were active as a situationist.

The interesting thing about these formulations is that neither of the two criteria - practical activity and membership of a disciplined movement - would militate against the existence of a "Situationism" considered in art-historical terms. Surrealism, to take the obvious example, wasn't in any obvious sense an ideology in the SI's terms - a body of thought exacting passive allegiance rather than active involvement. Surrealist ideas were grounded in practical activity and in an international movement, from which it was possible - not to say easy - to get expelled. At the same time, however, Surrealism did represent a body of more or less formalised approaches and methods, underpinned by an approach to the production of art: surrealism was involved - crucially - in the practice and modification of art forms rather than insisting on their supersession. The invention of something called "situationism", whether it were a political ideology or as an artistic movement, would represent the confinement of the situationist project to the limits of the disciplines which it aimed to transcend.

The kind of confusion which would be involved in appreciating "situationism" as an art movement does not have to be guessed at. In 1989 the SI returned to the ICA in the form of a collection of its artifacts; the New Statesman for unknown reasons sent along an art critic, Philip Core. He wrote: "Before Pop and after Abstract Expressionism there was a still-born movement, based in continental Europe ... Called 'Situationism', this movement expressed a rebellious need to counterpose the creative and irreverent with the anticipated [sic] homogeneity of media society. Essentially a non-starter as art per se the movement had, nonetheless, an influence on French cinema and architecture". The SI would, of course, have rejoiced in the status of "non-starter as art per se".

These points are of more than merely pedantic interest. "Situationism" was not (or not only) a spectre to be kept at bay by repeated comminations. In its artistic variant it was a genuine threat, at least in the early years of the SI. There was always a danger that the artistic and architectural work of SI members would be appreciated in its artistic or technical context, rather than as a facet of the SI's overall project. The result would be a group, a school, a practical doctrine which could only be called "situationism" - despite being effectively unmoored from the SI's own aims.

Situationists and situationisms, 1957-61

The SI's battle with potential proponents of an artistic "situationism" began early: shortly after the organisation had been formed in 1957 half of the Italian section was expelled on the grounds that their "experimental" approach equated to a rejection of rational analysis and of the possibility of value judgments. In the same year Ralph Rumney, the SI's English founder member and sole proprietor of the "London Psychogeographical Committee", was excluded following - unspecified - shortcomings revealed in the course of his psychogeographical exploration of Venice. "The Venetian jungle has triumphed, has closed behind a young man, full of life and promise. He is lost; he dissolves into our many memories".

These were minor disagreements compared to the confrontation with the artistic element of the SI's membership which was brewing. An unsigned article in the SI journal stated the position: "We are the first to discover a new source of excitement, tied to the present and the near future of urban civilisation, which it is not for us to interpret (to take as a new theme for old forms of artistic expression) but to live and investigate directly, to transform". This required "a leap into a superior sphere of action", in the absence of which "artistic lumber must needs carry the day within the SI".

However, at this stage practical artistic activity was not excluded, as a statement on "unitary urbanism" agreed by Debord and the Dutch artist turned architect Constant demonstrates. ("L'urbanisme" translates directly as "town planning"; "l'urbanisme unitaire" would cover ludically inspiring architecture and its associated behaviours). On the need for situationist activity: "No one may consider their membership of the SI as a simple agreement in principle". On the nature of that activity: "The creation of surroundings favourable to [unitary urbanism] is the immediate task of today's creators."

The question of defining these surroundings called forth widely different responses. The Italian artist Pinot Gallizio experimented with "industrial painting" - painting produced by artisanal methods but on long rolls of canvas, which could thus be sold by the metre and used as tapestry, furnishing fabric or clothing. Constant himself proposed the "covered city": "a continuous construction on pillars, or rather an extended system of different constructions", with traffic running either below or above. "The different levels will be divided into neighbouring and linked spaces, artificially conditioned, which will offer the possibility of creating an infinite variety of atmospheres, facilitating drifting and frequent chance meetings among its inhabitants". The alienating and disempowering effects of so completely artificial an environment would surely outweigh its ludic possibilities.

Early in 1960 two of the four members of the Dutch section of the SI were excluded on the grounds that they had agreed to design a church; a third left. Gallizio, together with the other two remaining members of the Italian group, was excluded in June, on the grounds of associating with an Italian art critic whose reading of Gallizio's work the SI had already criticised. In the same month Constant, now the Dutch group's only remaining member, requested a temporary release from SI discipline; as this was not forthcoming, he then resigned. In effect Gallizio was too consistently an artist, Constant too committed to his work as an architect: the official announcement of Constant's resignation contrasted his preoccupation with structures for unitary urbanism with the view of "other situationists" that in the current stage "it was necessary to put the accent on its content (play, free creation of everyday life").

Another straw in the wind was Debord's essay "For a revolutionary judgment of art". Taking issue with a favourable appraisal of the films of Godard, Debord argued that the most a film could do would be to stage the incomplete and dissatisfactory nature of contemporary life, and this within "its function as spectacle" (as in the "cinéma discrépant" techniques of his own films) rather than as the subject matter of a work imposing a false coherence on life. The conditions within which art could itself become revolutionary did not yet exist, and could not be brought about through artistic means. This judgment was echoed the following year in the context of "unitary urbanism", now completely redefined (and voided of any practical content): "It is pointless to enter into discussions with those who ask us to what point [unitary urbanism] is realisable, concrete, practical or written in cement".

One major obstacle remained to the remaking of the SI which was now under way: the great majority of its members, including the flourishing Swedish and German sections, were themselves artists. Resolution was not long coming. Disagreements with the Germans, avant-garde artists who had already expressed a preference for working in the art world, came rapidly to a head: with a single exception, the group was excluded in February 1962. These exclusions were denounced by Jörgen Nash of the Swedish section; at the same time Nash founded a "Situationist Bauhaus" - committed to the production of situationist art work - and a group which took the name of "Second Situationist International". The SI - which, briefly, took Nash's group seriously enough to style itself the "First Situationist International" - responded by declaring Nash and all his followers enemies of the SI. (Contacts were subsequently resumed between the German group, reconsituted outside the SI, and Nash's Second SI).

Personal differences and organisational manoeuvres apart, the main result of the regrouping of the SI was that the scope of the task of constructing situations was redefined. It was no longer possible to construct a situation by halves. The new line was summed up in 1961: "There is no such thing as situationism, as a situationist work of art, or for that matter as a spectacular situationist. Once for all". ("Spectacular" here refers to the situationist concept of the spectacle, a model of social relations predicated on spectatorship and passive allegiance; a "spectacular situationist" would have been a contradiction in terms at any time). The implication was that it wasn't possible to intervene as a situationist here and now: the construction of situations could only be a process of revolutionary upheaval on the scale of society as a whole. The task of the situationist in the mean time was to prepare the ground: to identify and clarify the contradictions and blockages of spectacular society and the forces capable of projecting or initiating a situationist revolution. The practical result was a much smaller group, concentrating almost exclusively on the production of theoretical texts, whose practical interventions in society were minimal and whose ideas were to play a major role in the near-revolutionary events of May 1968.

Successes and failures of the SI

As we have seen, this whole process of anathemas and exclusions stemmed from the perceived need to preclude the development of "situationism" as an ideology or an artistic practice. The final irony was that the process culminated in the development of the SI, after 1968, into an organisation occupied with the contemplation of its own theoretical and practical achievements. Indeed, given that the social conjuncture of May 1968 was unlikely to recur in the near future, and given that practical attempts to construct situations had been definitively ruled out, the group had little alternative to resting on its collective laurels. The result was a passively contemplated, ideologised version of the situationist project: situationism was ultimately born of the fear of situationism.

Looking back on the history of the SI, two balance sheets can be drawn up. On one hand, it is easy to identify weaknesses in the arguments against "situationism". The distinction between theory and ideology is easier to define than it is to apply: considered as a matter of fact rather than a polemical device, the charge of passive adherence to a system of thought can only be made to stick in the most extreme cases. Likewise, within the vocabulary of the art world, there is no intrinsic reason why the overall practice of artists or architects who stress the construction of situations should not be referred to as "situationism" - nor, more to the point, has art history proved incapable of absorbing groups with no "ism" to their name (from the Bauhaus to Fluxus).

Chimerical as it was, the spectre of situationism had many adverse effects on the SI: the abandonment of much of its original practice, the fostering of rhetorical polarisation, the self-contradictory final state of the group and its subsequent ignominious implosion. Viewed in this light, the history of the SI from the moment an artist was first excluded is a history of what might have been: partisans of Nash's Second SI are prone to argue that this group represented the fulfilment of the SI's programme.

On the other hand, it is impossible to ignore the positive effects of the SI's vigilance against "situationism". The situationists never allowed themselves to be absorbed into any of the classifications of contemporary society. It's worth remembering that the very word "situationist" is formed on the same basis as "physicist" (or "artist"): the construction of situations was to be a practice in its own right, rather than a subdivision of either art or politics - fields which it would supersede. Although the work of the SI never reached this level, the movement's defences held. Pace Philip Core, the situationists did not enter art history; Constant's covered cities were not built; and the SI disbanded in 1971, after a brief but fierce process of internal critique initiated by Debord, thereby putting paid to the incipient ideology of "situationism". In between 1961 and 1971 came the Strasbourg University events of 1966-7 (the resultant pamphlet On the poverty of student life has never been out of print) and, of course, the events of May 1968. Reading situationist literature, particularly from around 1961, one sometimes longs for a less defensive, less rhetorical, more pluralistic approach - but it is hard to see how such an approach could have matched the results actually obtained.