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The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International
Over fifty years after the Situationist International appeared, its legacy continues to inspire activists, artists and theorists around the world. Such a legend has accrued to this movement that the story of the SI now demands to be told in a contemporary voice capable of putting it into the context of twenty-first-century struggles.
McKenzie Wark delves into the Situationists’ unacknowledged diversity, revealing a world as rich in practice as it is in theory. Tracing the group’s development from the bohemian Paris of the ‘50s to the explosive days of May ‘68, Wark’s take on the Situationists is biographically and historically rich, presenting the group as an ensemble creation, rather than the brainchild and dominion of its most famous member, Guy Debord. Roaming through Europe and the lives of those who made up the movement – including Constant, Asger Jorn, Michèle Bernstein, Alex Trocchi and Jacqueline De Jong – Wark uncovers an international movement riven with conflicting passions.
Accessible to those who have only just discovered the Situationists and filled with new insights, The Beach Beneath the Street rereads the group’s history in the light of our contemporary experience of communications, architecture, and everyday life. The Situationists tried to escape the world of twentieth-century spectacle and failed in the attempt. Wark argues that they may still help us to escape the twenty-first century, while we still can...
The book's jacket folds out into a poster, Totality for Beginners, a collaborative graphic essay employing text selected by McKenzie Wark with composition and drawings by Kevin C. Pyle.
McKenzie Wark delves into the Situationists’ unacknowledged diversity, revealing a world as rich in practice as it is in theory. Tracing the group’s development from the bohemian Paris of the ‘50s to the explosive days of May ‘68, Wark’s take on the Situationists is biographically and historically rich, presenting the group as an ensemble creation, rather than the brainchild and dominion of its most famous member, Guy Debord. Roaming through Europe and the lives of those who made up the movement – including Constant, Asger Jorn, Michèle Bernstein, Alex Trocchi and Jacqueline De Jong – Wark uncovers an international movement riven with conflicting passions.
Accessible to those who have only just discovered the Situationists and filled with new insights, The Beach Beneath the Street rereads the group’s history in the light of our contemporary experience of communications, architecture, and everyday life. The Situationists tried to escape the world of twentieth-century spectacle and failed in the attempt. Wark argues that they may still help us to escape the twenty-first century, while we still can...
The book's jacket folds out into a poster, Totality for Beginners, a collaborative graphic essay employing text selected by McKenzie Wark with composition and drawings by Kevin C. Pyle.
197 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2011
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About the author
McKenzie Wark
68 books447 followersMcKenzie Wark (she/her) is the author of A Hacker Manifesto, Gamer Theory, 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International, and The Beach Beneath the Street, among other books. She teaches at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College in New York City.
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Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews
August 25, 2011
Without a doubt one of the better books out there on the Situationist International. And come to think of it maybe the best overall history of the movement that wasn't really a movement at all. McKenzie Wark breaks down all the main characters in this world - and tells exactly what they contribute to the literature or the series of actions that makes up Guy Debord and his world. And speaking of Debord there are a lot of others who contribute to this living critique of our world.
I am also happy that there is great mention of Boris Vian and even my Dad shows up on these pages. Especially the fascinating chapter on the Scottish writer and the man who was always in the right place, right time and even more important - the right people, Alexander Trocchi. This is very much an essential guide to the Situationists and all the by-products of their culture that came before and even after. And the cover turned poster - is a must as well!
I am also happy that there is great mention of Boris Vian and even my Dad shows up on these pages. Especially the fascinating chapter on the Scottish writer and the man who was always in the right place, right time and even more important - the right people, Alexander Trocchi. This is very much an essential guide to the Situationists and all the by-products of their culture that came before and even after. And the cover turned poster - is a must as well!
November 27, 2011
A flawed but interesting, if somewhat indirect, account of the Situationist International which grew out of the Parisian Left Bank, as a generational reaction to surrealism, existentialism, structuralism and mainstream Marxism, and played an important role in the 'evenements' of 1968.
The problem with the book is that it is low level polemic as much as it is history. Published by Verso, it falls into the classic Verso trap of editorially permitting, indeed encouraging, both posturing rhetoric and obscurity. Verso intellectuals do like to strut and show off like peacocks.
Nevertheless, it is enlightening if only for retrieving key personalities from the movement as highly creative and in giving us at least some idea of why their anarcho-radical ideas were important then and may be even more important now.
I write 'anarcho-radical' cautiously because that is how Situationism might reasonably be interpreted as functionally useful today but, of course (and the book makes this clear), the Situationists spoke within the same standard Marxist discourse as everyone else in post-war Paris.
It is hard to believe today that Marxism held the bulk of the European artistic and intellectual establishment in thrall for much of the immediate post-war period. Its weird tight language infected culture and politics far into the 1980s but acts as a barrier to the modern reader.
To discuss issues of culture and politics required that it be done within a framework of Marxist texts that are now only of interest to specialists - an analogy might be with the necessity of discussing reality or the human condition within a strictly Christian context in earlier periods.
Nevertheless, once we adapt to this strange and ancient language of class struggle and labour value, beneath the cant these artists and intellectuals were genuinely trying to deal with an issue that Christian apologists, Marx himself and the existentialists had all struggled with – alienation.
This is where Situationism and the book become interesting. How do we as subjects of a system that is palpably out of our control regain control. The Situationist response is to emphasise playfulness and an expansive expenditure of what private resources are available to us.
Situationism is fundamentally a romantic reaction to the bureaucratic impulse in both ‘really existing socialism’ (the communism of Stalin and Trotsky) and in the post-war liberal capitalist state that would evolve later into the Hegelian lunacy of the European Federal State.
It also presents an accidental advance critique of what would later become not just a theory of commodity fetishism but an actuality in the form of the debt-fuelled, leisure-based, peasant-worker exploiting capitalism that is now going rather spectacularly through one of its periodic crises.
McKenzie Wark is polemically attempting to recover not Situationism as such but the attitude of Situationists in this context. It has to be said that his few sharp comments on rioting as a response to alienation in the last chapter really are rather good.
There is something as romantic about this book as the movement. It evidences the latter's elan and its imagination, perhaps its paradoxical role in creating the current crisis through its contribution to the post-modern impulse, but not its effectiveness on its own terms.
It is certainly worth reading for its brief accounts of the work of key figures – the novels of Bernstein (whose dissection of post-bourgeois heterosexual sexuality is magnificent), the self-destructive genius of Trocchi, the utopianism of Constant and the central artistic role of Jorn.
I am sure the account of Lefebvre would be fascinating if I cared enough about the Marxist theory of labour value (barely stifles yawn!) – but anyone who reads this book will understand the centrality of Situationist critique to our current predicament and may want to find out more.
And, flitting in and out as Master of Ceremonies, is Guy Debord himself who understands, as Stalin did, that power in any society lies with the man who is given command of the Minutes and the Membership Register. An uneven, occasionally frustrating, book, but well worth reading.
The problem with the book is that it is low level polemic as much as it is history. Published by Verso, it falls into the classic Verso trap of editorially permitting, indeed encouraging, both posturing rhetoric and obscurity. Verso intellectuals do like to strut and show off like peacocks.
Nevertheless, it is enlightening if only for retrieving key personalities from the movement as highly creative and in giving us at least some idea of why their anarcho-radical ideas were important then and may be even more important now.
I write 'anarcho-radical' cautiously because that is how Situationism might reasonably be interpreted as functionally useful today but, of course (and the book makes this clear), the Situationists spoke within the same standard Marxist discourse as everyone else in post-war Paris.
It is hard to believe today that Marxism held the bulk of the European artistic and intellectual establishment in thrall for much of the immediate post-war period. Its weird tight language infected culture and politics far into the 1980s but acts as a barrier to the modern reader.
To discuss issues of culture and politics required that it be done within a framework of Marxist texts that are now only of interest to specialists - an analogy might be with the necessity of discussing reality or the human condition within a strictly Christian context in earlier periods.
Nevertheless, once we adapt to this strange and ancient language of class struggle and labour value, beneath the cant these artists and intellectuals were genuinely trying to deal with an issue that Christian apologists, Marx himself and the existentialists had all struggled with – alienation.
This is where Situationism and the book become interesting. How do we as subjects of a system that is palpably out of our control regain control. The Situationist response is to emphasise playfulness and an expansive expenditure of what private resources are available to us.
Situationism is fundamentally a romantic reaction to the bureaucratic impulse in both ‘really existing socialism’ (the communism of Stalin and Trotsky) and in the post-war liberal capitalist state that would evolve later into the Hegelian lunacy of the European Federal State.
It also presents an accidental advance critique of what would later become not just a theory of commodity fetishism but an actuality in the form of the debt-fuelled, leisure-based, peasant-worker exploiting capitalism that is now going rather spectacularly through one of its periodic crises.
McKenzie Wark is polemically attempting to recover not Situationism as such but the attitude of Situationists in this context. It has to be said that his few sharp comments on rioting as a response to alienation in the last chapter really are rather good.
There is something as romantic about this book as the movement. It evidences the latter's elan and its imagination, perhaps its paradoxical role in creating the current crisis through its contribution to the post-modern impulse, but not its effectiveness on its own terms.
It is certainly worth reading for its brief accounts of the work of key figures – the novels of Bernstein (whose dissection of post-bourgeois heterosexual sexuality is magnificent), the self-destructive genius of Trocchi, the utopianism of Constant and the central artistic role of Jorn.
I am sure the account of Lefebvre would be fascinating if I cared enough about the Marxist theory of labour value (barely stifles yawn!) – but anyone who reads this book will understand the centrality of Situationist critique to our current predicament and may want to find out more.
And, flitting in and out as Master of Ceremonies, is Guy Debord himself who understands, as Stalin did, that power in any society lies with the man who is given command of the Minutes and the Membership Register. An uneven, occasionally frustrating, book, but well worth reading.
March 20, 2018
I can’t believe it has taken me an entire month to read such a short book. I expected ‘The Beach Beneath the Street’ to be something along the lines of the very readable Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune. While that discussed the ‘everyday life and glorious times’ of the Communards, this claims to do the same with the Situationists. I hoped to gain insight into the philosophies and practises of the somewhat mysterious Situationists and their role in the upheavals of 1968. Having finally finished the book, I do not feel hugely enlightened on this front. This is undoubtedly in part because the Situationists do not seem to have had a coherent ideology (I don’t think the word is even mentioned in the book) and frequently splintered into grouplets. Although the word praxis is quite often mentioned, the actual activities of the Situationists appear to have largely involved publishing newsletters, quarrelling, and occasionally playing practical jokes. Perhaps I underestimate them, or perhaps I simply didn’t get along with Wark’s prose style. I found the second half easier going than the first, although I was never really carried along by it. The density of references proved gruelling when I hadn’t heard of them but rewarding when I had, not surprisingly.
Nevertheless, ‘The Beach beneath the Street’ does make interesting links between the Situationists and their antecedents (the Letterists) and their heirs (psychogeographers and purveyors of internet memes?). I liked the grounding of Situationism, if there was such a cohesive concept, in the urban spatial environment. The comparison between Marx and Jorn’s concepts of value was thought-provoking, especially Jorn’s subtle idea of ‘container form’. This carries an implicit critique of progress in terms of rising quantities of goods produced, at the expense of diversity in forms. As I’ve long intended to read Critique of Everyday Life, I also found the discussion of Lefebvre’s work appealing. In particular, his take on Debord’s spectacle, which feels extremely relevant today:
Doesn’t that sound exactly like social media? On the other hand, I remain confused about the nature of détournement and increasingly convinced that such concepts may not be amenable to translation. Surely a definition in French would make more sense than this sort of thing:
Wark does end on a well-chosen note, though: ‘There may be no dignified exits left to the twenty-first century, the century of the flying inflatable turd, but there might be at least some paths to adventure. The unexamined life is not worth living, but the unlived life doesn’t bear thinking about’. Although it took quite a lot of effort and I remain largely befuddled by the Situationists, I found enough insight and novelty here to make this book worth persisting with. Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune is much friendlier to the reader, however.
Nevertheless, ‘The Beach beneath the Street’ does make interesting links between the Situationists and their antecedents (the Letterists) and their heirs (psychogeographers and purveyors of internet memes?). I liked the grounding of Situationism, if there was such a cohesive concept, in the urban spatial environment. The comparison between Marx and Jorn’s concepts of value was thought-provoking, especially Jorn’s subtle idea of ‘container form’. This carries an implicit critique of progress in terms of rising quantities of goods produced, at the expense of diversity in forms. As I’ve long intended to read Critique of Everyday Life, I also found the discussion of Lefebvre’s work appealing. In particular, his take on Debord’s spectacle, which feels extremely relevant today:
Lefebvre calls the spectacle the great pleonasm, the Thing of Things. Thought in terms of totalising tendency, ‘it would be be a closed circuit from hell, a perfect hell in which the absence of communication and communication pushed to the point of paroxysm would meet and their identities would merge.’ What is real is known; what is known is what is real. The illusion of permanent novelty occludes the possibility of surprise. It is a world of incessant redundancy. Everything is always the same, only better. It makes the same special offer to everyone, all the time: ‘the faked orgasms of art and life’.
Doesn’t that sound exactly like social media? On the other hand, I remain confused about the nature of détournement and increasingly convinced that such concepts may not be amenable to translation. Surely a definition in French would make more sense than this sort of thing:
Détournement dissolves the rituals of knowledge into in an active remembering that calls collective being into existence. If all property is theft, then all intellectual property is détournement.
Wark does end on a well-chosen note, though: ‘There may be no dignified exits left to the twenty-first century, the century of the flying inflatable turd, but there might be at least some paths to adventure. The unexamined life is not worth living, but the unlived life doesn’t bear thinking about’. Although it took quite a lot of effort and I remain largely befuddled by the Situationists, I found enough insight and novelty here to make this book worth persisting with. Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune is much friendlier to the reader, however.
October 21, 2015
If anyone can rescue the Situationist International from a descent into artistic inconsequentiality, it is McKenzie Wark. I always saw amongst their work sparks of interest, but limited sparks. Dying embers maybe. This shifted some of my thinking, and there is a lot here, I think, that continues to demand theoretical and practical work. Perhaps because it is firmly rooted in practice, written by someone who wishes to change the world. Changing the world is always where I though the Situationists fell down the most, their self-published words and collages greatly removed from the very really battles then and now shaping the dialectic between our physical environment and our lives and the shape of our thought. Where their work is useful for imagining change, you can find it here, and in a lovely selection of their own words in tom mcdonaugh's edited collection the situationists and the city. But more on that soon, with more focus on their work itself.
Before Wark I hadn't quite realised just how much thought the situationists had put into this relationship between space and life, between cities and residents.
As Guy Debord later wrote:
I don't know that their journey into art and abstraction did in fact do more, but the impulse behind it is clear. But first some situationist basics -- basics often left out of accounts of their work I find, as these were basics I did not know:
And perhaps they were a bit more on the edge of struggle than many others in the French intellectual establishment. I laughed out loud (on the tube no less) at this I'm afraid:
It was probably Derrida, the dandy-of-difference that did it. There are a few other digs at academia that I enjoyed immensely:
This also:
But I think I like with where he is headed with this low theory idea:
I also like the rescuing of the group from the great-man driven rememberings, and the placing of them in concrete moments of space and time.
Which has to go alongside Debord's particular talents for promotion:
I quite love this summing up of Debord as well,
I should probably end the blog on that high note, but no.
If you want more, read more here...
Before Wark I hadn't quite realised just how much thought the situationists had put into this relationship between space and life, between cities and residents.
As Guy Debord later wrote:
It is known that initially the Situationists wanted at the very least to build cities, the environment suitable to the unlimited deployment of new passions. But of course this was not easy and so we found ourselves forced to do much more.”*
I don't know that their journey into art and abstraction did in fact do more, but the impulse behind it is clear. But first some situationist basics -- basics often left out of accounts of their work I find, as these were basics I did not know:
The Situationist International was founded at a meeting of three women and six men in July 1957. All that remains of this fabled event are a series of stirring documents and some photographs, casual but made with an artist’s eye, by founding member Ralph Rumney.1 The Situationist International dissolved itself in 1972. In its fifteen years of existence, only seventy-two people were ever members. It was born out of the fusion of two and a half existing groups, the Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, the Letterist International and the London Psychogeographical Society (the last represented by its one and only member, Rumney). Its founding conference took place in Cosio di Arroscia a little Ligurian town where founding member Piero Simondo’s family had a small hotel. Or at least that’s the official story. Debord writes in a letter to Jorn: “I think it is necessary for us to present the ‘Conference at Cosio’ as a point of departure for our distinct organized activity.”2 From the beginning, Debord has a fine hand for the tactics of appearances. (145-146)
And perhaps they were a bit more on the edge of struggle than many others in the French intellectual establishment. I laughed out loud (on the tube no less) at this I'm afraid:
If anything, theory has turned out even worse. It found its utopia, and it is the academy. A colonnade adorned with the busts of famous fathers: Jacques Lacan the bourgeoismagus, Louis Althusser the throttler-of-concepts, Jacques Derrida the dandy-of-difference, Michel Foucault the one-eyed-powerhouse, Gilles Deleuze the taker-from-behind. Acolytes and epigones pace furiously up and down, prostrating themselves before one master—Ah! Betrayed!—and then another. The production of new dead masters to imitate can barely keep up with consumer demand, prompting some to chisel statues of new demigods while they still live: Alain Badiou the Maoist-of-the-matheme, Giorgio Agamben the pensive-pedant, Slavoj Žižek the neuro-Hegelian-joker.5 (17)
It was probably Derrida, the dandy-of-difference that did it. There are a few other digs at academia that I enjoyed immensely:
If there is one abiding purpose to psychoanalysis, it is to make bourgeois lives seem fascinating, at least to those who live them. That it is a form of bourgeois thought is attested by the status of the real in Lacanian doctrine. (216)
This also:
Reading Foucault is like taking a master class on how the game of scholarship is to be played, and with the reliable alibi that this knowledge of power, of knowledge as power, is to be used in the interests of resistance to something or other. Détournement, on the other hand, turns the tables, upends the game. (102)
But I think I like with where he is headed with this low theory idea:
What is lost is the combined power of a critique of both wage labor and of everyday life, expressed in acts. What has escaped the institutionalization of high theory is the possibility of low theory, of a critical thought indifferent to the institutional forms of the academy or the art world. A low theory dedicated to the practice that is critique and the critique that is practice.” (19)
I also like the rescuing of the group from the great-man driven rememberings, and the placing of them in concrete moments of space and time.
Even when the Situationists are treated as a movement, the supposedly minor figures often drop out of the story, or become mere props to the great men among them. Alternatively, in order to make a coherent narrative and write the biography of a movement as if it were a subject, the differences among its members are suppressed, or turned into the stakes of a mere drama of personalities.9 Here, instead, is a large cast of disparate characters, some more celebrated than others, where Guy Debord and Asger Jorn rub shoulders with Patrick Straram, Michèle Bernstein, Ralph Rumney, Pinot Gallizio, Jacqueline de Jong, Abdelhafid Khatib, Alexander Trocchi and René Viénet. Where they come together, where they create something, is a situation. But situations are temporary, singular unities of space and time. They call for a different kind of remembering. (21-22)
Which has to go alongside Debord's particular talents for promotion:
Guy Debord spent a lot of time working on how to remember situations, how to document them and keep them in a way that could ignite future possibilities. For the most part, he created legends. ” (24-25)
I quite love this summing up of Debord as well,
Debord was in search, not of the organic intellectuals of the working class, but of what one might call the alcoholic intellectuals of the non-working classes. (50)
I should probably end the blog on that high note, but no.
If you want more, read more here...
September 22, 2011
A remarkably well researched yet fresh dérive through and around the Situationists, Wark uncovers formerly found beaches that have been strangely re-covered and forgotten. The illumination of the remarkably contemporary works of Jorn, de Jong and Lefabvre, for instance, remind an awaiting generation of a remarkable unexplored place that awaits for us to throw off our shoes and come play in the sand.
Given Wark's opening preface and closing hopefulness, "Beach Beneath the Street" only leaves me encouraged that we will see further efforts from Wark moving forward from this connection, taking us into the potentiality and energy that awaits beyond these re-opened spaces. With an increasing recognition that critique is exhausted and the post-modern tradition empty of transformative potential, Wark's historical exploration of the radical aesthetic potentiality is a necessary reading for those artists and transformative thinkers who are looking for a vital, hopeful path forward.
Given Wark's opening preface and closing hopefulness, "Beach Beneath the Street" only leaves me encouraged that we will see further efforts from Wark moving forward from this connection, taking us into the potentiality and energy that awaits beyond these re-opened spaces. With an increasing recognition that critique is exhausted and the post-modern tradition empty of transformative potential, Wark's historical exploration of the radical aesthetic potentiality is a necessary reading for those artists and transformative thinkers who are looking for a vital, hopeful path forward.
May 13, 2017
Great book. Not quite a biography or a history, Wark lays out a portrait of the Situationist International using a vast combination of their own ideas, ideas that influenced them, and ideas their work would influence. The result is perhaps one of the best overall portraits of the group, their ideas, and their impact.
March 13, 2015
Wonderful. (really)
June 10, 2013
Four passages from The Beach Beneath the Street:
If there is one abiding purpose to psychoanalysis, it is to make bourgeois lives seem fascinating, at least to those who live them. That it is a form of bourgeois thought is attested by the status of the real in Lacanian doctrine. The real is always something terrible, formless, lawless, which the symbolic order tries to shield from awareness, but which keeps slithering in, unbidden. It is a modern version of the serpents that in [Asger] Jorn’s account Apollonian thought has to slay, again and again. The symbolic preserves for the ruling class, to whom it classically belongs, an order that keeps at bay the self-ornamenting powers of nature and labor, working together, writhing and worming their way into the cracks in Apollonian form.
In Henri Lefebvre the real is the fulcrum of action rather than an apprehension of terror. His vision of it comes to him while swimming against the current, the body acting on raw need to survive. “The real can only be grasped and appreciated via potentiality.” It is by attempting to transform everyday life that the contours of the real are encountered. The real is not entirely formless, even if its forms are not an order that reveals itself in the clear light of day. The encounter with the real, because it is active, informs the imaginary. From the struggle in and with the real emerges an imagining of what might be possible. The object of study for both Lacan and Lefebvre is in a sense always everyday life, but in Lefebvre study is a stage in the project of transforming it.
...
Freedom is not the opposite of necessity in Lefebvre. Freedom is born out of need, and the starting point is a theory of needs. Without the experience of need, there can be no being. Needs are few; desires are many. There is no desire without a need at its core. Need can be intense: hunger, thirst, lust. Need without desire, without play, artifice, luxury, superfluity, is no longer human. It is human poverty. Desire abstracted from need loses vitality, spontaneity, and ossifies into the mere accumulation of things. It is abstract and alienating, another kind of poverty. Lefebvre’s critique aims to bring together a presentation of needs and a determination of desires to arrive at a theory of situations, as they arrive in the everyday.
...
What forcloses the possibility of praxis is what Lefebvre, citing Debord, calls the spectacle. The spectacle makes totality visible, but only in fragments, and visible only within the space of the private. It does not make the private social as well. The spectacle is a one-way street, the public privatized. “It is the generalization of private life. At one and the same time the mass media have unified and broadcast the everyday; they have disintegrated it by integrating it with ‘world’ current events in a way which is both too real and utterly superficial.”
Lefebvre calls the spectacle the great pleonasm, the Thing of Things. Thought in terms of its totalizing tendency, “it would be a closed circuit from hell, a perfect circle in which the absence of communication and communication pushed to the point of paroxysm would meet and their identities would merge.” What is real is what is known: what is known is what is real. The illusion of permanent novelty occludes the possibility of surprise. It is a world of incessant redundancy. Everything is always the same, only better. It makes the same special offer to everyone, all the time: “the faked orgasms of art and life.”
...
“Philosophy,” says Simon Critchley, “begins in disappointment.” After the death of God, the end of Art, the failure of the Revolution, there’s nothing left but philosophy, the moment of contemplation of the ruins. For Jacques Rancière, it is not that literature arises out of failed revolutions, but that revolutions are failed literature. Certainly the high theory of the post-’68 era was born of the disappointments, not just of May but of the red decade of 1966-1976, of which May was the high water mark. If other failed revolutions gave us Hegel and Stendhal, Marx and Baudelaire, this one gave us Foucault and Deleuze, Derrida and Lyotard. Whatever interest such thoughts may once have held, they are now no more than the routine spasms of an era out of love with itself.
Low theory returns in moments, not of disappointment, but of boredom. We are bored with these burn offerings, these warmed-up leftovers. High theory cedes too much to the existing organization of knowledge and art. It is nothing more than the spectacle of disintegration extending into knowledge itself. Rather a negative theory that reveals the gap between this world and its promises. Rather a negative action that reveals the void between what can be done and what is to be done. Rather a spirited invention of genuine forms within the space of everyday life, than the relentless genuflection to the hidden God that is power. For such experiments the Situationist legacy stands ripe for a détournement that has no respect for those who claim proprietary rights over it. There is plenty of fruit to be gleaned from the vine.
.
If there is one abiding purpose to psychoanalysis, it is to make bourgeois lives seem fascinating, at least to those who live them. That it is a form of bourgeois thought is attested by the status of the real in Lacanian doctrine. The real is always something terrible, formless, lawless, which the symbolic order tries to shield from awareness, but which keeps slithering in, unbidden. It is a modern version of the serpents that in [Asger] Jorn’s account Apollonian thought has to slay, again and again. The symbolic preserves for the ruling class, to whom it classically belongs, an order that keeps at bay the self-ornamenting powers of nature and labor, working together, writhing and worming their way into the cracks in Apollonian form.
In Henri Lefebvre the real is the fulcrum of action rather than an apprehension of terror. His vision of it comes to him while swimming against the current, the body acting on raw need to survive. “The real can only be grasped and appreciated via potentiality.” It is by attempting to transform everyday life that the contours of the real are encountered. The real is not entirely formless, even if its forms are not an order that reveals itself in the clear light of day. The encounter with the real, because it is active, informs the imaginary. From the struggle in and with the real emerges an imagining of what might be possible. The object of study for both Lacan and Lefebvre is in a sense always everyday life, but in Lefebvre study is a stage in the project of transforming it.
...
Freedom is not the opposite of necessity in Lefebvre. Freedom is born out of need, and the starting point is a theory of needs. Without the experience of need, there can be no being. Needs are few; desires are many. There is no desire without a need at its core. Need can be intense: hunger, thirst, lust. Need without desire, without play, artifice, luxury, superfluity, is no longer human. It is human poverty. Desire abstracted from need loses vitality, spontaneity, and ossifies into the mere accumulation of things. It is abstract and alienating, another kind of poverty. Lefebvre’s critique aims to bring together a presentation of needs and a determination of desires to arrive at a theory of situations, as they arrive in the everyday.
...
What forcloses the possibility of praxis is what Lefebvre, citing Debord, calls the spectacle. The spectacle makes totality visible, but only in fragments, and visible only within the space of the private. It does not make the private social as well. The spectacle is a one-way street, the public privatized. “It is the generalization of private life. At one and the same time the mass media have unified and broadcast the everyday; they have disintegrated it by integrating it with ‘world’ current events in a way which is both too real and utterly superficial.”
Lefebvre calls the spectacle the great pleonasm, the Thing of Things. Thought in terms of its totalizing tendency, “it would be a closed circuit from hell, a perfect circle in which the absence of communication and communication pushed to the point of paroxysm would meet and their identities would merge.” What is real is what is known: what is known is what is real. The illusion of permanent novelty occludes the possibility of surprise. It is a world of incessant redundancy. Everything is always the same, only better. It makes the same special offer to everyone, all the time: “the faked orgasms of art and life.”
...
“Philosophy,” says Simon Critchley, “begins in disappointment.” After the death of God, the end of Art, the failure of the Revolution, there’s nothing left but philosophy, the moment of contemplation of the ruins. For Jacques Rancière, it is not that literature arises out of failed revolutions, but that revolutions are failed literature. Certainly the high theory of the post-’68 era was born of the disappointments, not just of May but of the red decade of 1966-1976, of which May was the high water mark. If other failed revolutions gave us Hegel and Stendhal, Marx and Baudelaire, this one gave us Foucault and Deleuze, Derrida and Lyotard. Whatever interest such thoughts may once have held, they are now no more than the routine spasms of an era out of love with itself.
Low theory returns in moments, not of disappointment, but of boredom. We are bored with these burn offerings, these warmed-up leftovers. High theory cedes too much to the existing organization of knowledge and art. It is nothing more than the spectacle of disintegration extending into knowledge itself. Rather a negative theory that reveals the gap between this world and its promises. Rather a negative action that reveals the void between what can be done and what is to be done. Rather a spirited invention of genuine forms within the space of everyday life, than the relentless genuflection to the hidden God that is power. For such experiments the Situationist legacy stands ripe for a détournement that has no respect for those who claim proprietary rights over it. There is plenty of fruit to be gleaned from the vine.
.
Read
May 14, 2015A lot of people I know responded to the General Election result by joining political parties; because I am fundamentally a non-joiner, I started reading a book about the Situationists instead. Yes, I'd ordered the book before the election*, but it was always obvious that any plausible result would be disappointing, too much of an accommodation with a grimly circumscribed notion of the realistic. Which said, one of the fascinating things here is the way that even Guy Debord had to compromise in the early days, simply to keep the SI together. But then, part of Wark's fascination is with situationism as a project impossible, yet none the less worth attempting for all that: "Better to tilt at windmills than pawn the lance". In some ways his wide-ranging knowledge, playfulness and flair remind me of John Higgs; he's not quite that good, but few modern cultural historians are, and Higgs has the extra advantage of dealing with territory less exhaustively surveyed. Wark is nonetheless an acute thinker, and if he occasionally lapses into theory-speak, more often he strikes the right contemplative-incendiary note: "The disintegrating spectacle in which we actually live is the most utopian world of all, because of its savage insistence that it has abolished the very possibility of utopia for all time".
*And was able to read the introduction straight away, thanks to Verso's policy of bundling a free ebook with every paper purchase. Would that this were more widespread.
*And was able to read the introduction straight away, thanks to Verso's policy of bundling a free ebook with every paper purchase. Would that this were more widespread.
January 9, 2012
Wark provides a detailed analysis of the key players and moments of the Situationist International with particular attention paid to lesser known figures like Asper Jorn and Constant Niewenhuys. Wark structures much of the book around such key Situationist's concepts such as detournement (a sort of purposeful appropriation or plagiarism of other works and texts) and derive (a combination of subjective and objective space, e.g. Hollywood StarMaps or redlight districts, etc). As Wark writes: "The Situationist's made the fateful leap beyond subjective revolt to class struggle. They were not content to play merely within the total semantic field, within the tolerable middle class dissent."
September 18, 2020
It took me forever to get through this book, not because it was bad or boring, but because I could only read about 10 pages at a time without my head feeling like it was going to explode! The best thing I've ever read on the The Situationists! I'm still not sure I followed all the philosophical arguments, but it opened up a totally different way of looking at the world and was damn entertaining at the same time!
May 12, 2016
Very engaging read, as a history of the Situationist and attendant movements, but also as an attempt to revive (reify?) certain tactics and theories born out of those times in post-twenty-first-century society. Wark seemed distracted by this sometimes but the departures were great reading. The anger and dissatisfaction are palpable. Never Work!
July 20, 2011
Never work!
I'm stalled pretty early in the book (my fault, not Wark's), but I'm pretty impressed with his take on the Situationalist International. It's fun to line this up against (my memory of) Greil Marcus's "Lipstick Traces," a fairly transformative book for me ...
I'm stalled pretty early in the book (my fault, not Wark's), but I'm pretty impressed with his take on the Situationalist International. It's fun to line this up against (my memory of) Greil Marcus's "Lipstick Traces," a fairly transformative book for me ...
June 22, 2015
so juicy & engaging! well-written, not dry. will re-read parts of it for many times to come
February 28, 2016
Deeply informational and often empathetic.
August 28, 2020
U know what? Flawed. Im very skeptical of tje situationists as a movement (so so middle class!!!) But i found some real insights into the curation and resulting death of cities. More urbanism less philosophy!
June 30, 2022
A very rich, not always easy to follow, biography of a movement. I find it amazing how, on every rereading and reappraisal of the works of the Situationists, there are new truth bombs for me, which I had not noticed, internalised, or simply noticed, before.
Below a kind-of situationist détournement of MacKenzie Wark’s text.
“The twenty first century is the culmination of two forms of individualism. In the first, individuals are all the same. In the second, they are all different. The first is classically bourgeois, the second distinctively bohemian. […] in the twenty first century, it’s the same difference.”
The collapse of bourgeois and bohemian individualism into the warm embrace of the commodity is the defining style of the middle class sensibility of today’s disintegrating spectacle.
Wark makes an observation on the Letterists, the precursors to the Situationists, which might capture the appeal both have for me: not Marxist necessity, nor Sartrean freedom, but creation is the highest form of human activity.
Wark points to the origin of Situationist ethnography lying in the close study of the Paris suburb of Saint-Germain’s delinquents, this area in Paris being at the center of critical societal, artistic, and bohemian thought after the Second World War.
As per early Situationist and Letterist thought, she places the context of the term ‘dérive’ within an aquatic connection, perhaps as a kind of ‘flow’.
“The dérive discovers psychogeography, inventing a way of being outside of commodified time, turning the city into a playing field.”
The dérive shows what cannot be done within the limits of capitalism. Or, as I see it, the dérive shows that there are alternatives to capitalism, and that capitalism only needs to be a part of our lived experiences, if at all, not the all encompassing world view it pertains to be.
In discussing the origin of the détournement, the detour, not quite originating with the Letterists, but defined by them, Wark exposes the intrinsic sell-referential nature of the French art scene after the Second World War, but, in a way, sums this up with “all culture is derivative”.
Understood by Wark, but not yet by Debord and those around him, the kind of literary communism which the Letterists strove for was a precursor to Git, the modern platform that allows everyone to build on preexisting open source software, creating collaborations, and digital détournements. A kind of software communism.
Wark: “every kid with a BitTorrent client is an unconscious situationist in the making”.
Yet, both the Situationist times and the Internationale situationniste, both periodicals, carried acknowledgements of, essentially, flavors of Creative Commons licenses.
This digital détournement also reminded me of the ancient practice of photoshop battles, where each consecutive volley was built on top of the previous pass. The richer the result the better, with no one the single owner of each consecutive step.
A chapter on Asger Jorn describes the marrying of his Imaginist Bauhaus with Letterism, to form Situationism. For him, scientific socialism embraces a materialist worldview, without a materialist attitude to life, for which he envisioned artistic materialism to fill the gap.
After the founding of the Situationist International, Debord took up the role of the organisation’s secretary, and was instrumental in developing Its theoretical framework; “the doctrine of no doctrine”; experiment as a central feature.
And, for its inner workings, a system of donation and reputation, as an alternative to conventional economics. ‘Potlatch’.
By extension, situationism pursues ‘unreturnable gifts’, which could be classified, perhaps, as ‘situations’.
Debord become influenced by the Socialism or Barbarism group.
Jorn identifies a ‘creative elite’, as opposed to the emerging term ‘power elite’, even if the term ‘elite’ was badly chosen, as it implies to not be ‘of, and by, the people’. Jorn’s socialism was experimental.
Jorn sees in capital that it abolished true wealth, as he sees Marx’ writings only as a critique of the capitalist form of value, not of value that is not created by labor, which can also provide wealth, it’s alternatives being extinguished through capital.
Jorn then concluded that the value of things is conditioned by their differences, not their quality. This dovetails with society as spectacle, value being separated from utility, as well as labor being split from creation.
Lefebvre recognised the colonisation of everyday life, as a follow up to the impossible to maintain colonisation of far away countries. By now, he would have recognised the colonisation of both public and private life.
Types of time are linear, cyclical, or ‘adventure’. This sounds a bit ridiculous, but the point is that adventure time, a kind of aristocratic time, is an ultimate form of leisure, not captured by the controllers of capital, or labor.
This opens up seeing life as a collection of contest and chance.
Jorn and Lefebvre recognise the importance of the everyday, but do not fetishize it: it is not important for what it is, but for what it can be.
Lefebvre muses: “perhaps there should be a tomb for the unknown artist”, the true creator whom no one knows.
A dense section on the difference between Lefebvre’s ‘moments’, and the Situationists’ ‘situations’ follows.
Lefebvre talks about ‘modernity’, which can be classified as ‘technology’ in today’s context: modernity is the ghost of revolution. With Debord, they see that the spectacle precludes praxis; we are prevented from exploring because we are lived by external controls. And, painfully prescient, “the illusion of permanent novelty occludes the possibility of surprise”.
They could be worrying about todays world of TikToks.
A split, the Second Situationist International, headed by Scandinavians and Jacqueline de jong, staged a few successful public interventions which could be seen as precursor to interventions by the Yes Men, and others, and brought me to a new appreciation of the Dutch Provo movement.
Trocchi, mostly on the periphery, created a kind of broad reciprocal communication he called the ‘log’, which Wark identifies as a precursor to blogging.
Wark shows a soft spot for Constant’s New Babylon, as it presupposes a different relation between production and labor, relying on surplus production through automation, freeing up time for play in a world designed for détournement.
And then, it’s May ‘68. Wark conjures up a desirable picture of the Paris revolts. Quoting its Situationist chronicler Viénet: “for the first time youth really existed. Not the social category invented for the needs of the commodity economy by sociologists and economists, but the only real youth, of life lived without dead time”.
But, Wark is a realist, pointing out that the failed revolution itself, just like criminals in Marx’ writings, providing for the livelihood of many; their consequence is reinforcing the spectacle through production.
But also, Wark recognises that, even today, the thoughts, concepts, ideas, are the gift from which also modern writers, scientists, artists, keep reaping; an eternal potlatch as the ongoing source of insight, based on Marxist, and Situationist, ideas.
Wark ends: “the unexamined life is not worth living, but the unlived life doesn’t bear thinking about”.
Below a kind-of situationist détournement of MacKenzie Wark’s text.
“The twenty first century is the culmination of two forms of individualism. In the first, individuals are all the same. In the second, they are all different. The first is classically bourgeois, the second distinctively bohemian. […] in the twenty first century, it’s the same difference.”
The collapse of bourgeois and bohemian individualism into the warm embrace of the commodity is the defining style of the middle class sensibility of today’s disintegrating spectacle.
Wark makes an observation on the Letterists, the precursors to the Situationists, which might capture the appeal both have for me: not Marxist necessity, nor Sartrean freedom, but creation is the highest form of human activity.
Wark points to the origin of Situationist ethnography lying in the close study of the Paris suburb of Saint-Germain’s delinquents, this area in Paris being at the center of critical societal, artistic, and bohemian thought after the Second World War.
As per early Situationist and Letterist thought, she places the context of the term ‘dérive’ within an aquatic connection, perhaps as a kind of ‘flow’.
“The dérive discovers psychogeography, inventing a way of being outside of commodified time, turning the city into a playing field.”
The dérive shows what cannot be done within the limits of capitalism. Or, as I see it, the dérive shows that there are alternatives to capitalism, and that capitalism only needs to be a part of our lived experiences, if at all, not the all encompassing world view it pertains to be.
In discussing the origin of the détournement, the detour, not quite originating with the Letterists, but defined by them, Wark exposes the intrinsic sell-referential nature of the French art scene after the Second World War, but, in a way, sums this up with “all culture is derivative”.
Understood by Wark, but not yet by Debord and those around him, the kind of literary communism which the Letterists strove for was a precursor to Git, the modern platform that allows everyone to build on preexisting open source software, creating collaborations, and digital détournements. A kind of software communism.
Wark: “every kid with a BitTorrent client is an unconscious situationist in the making”.
Yet, both the Situationist times and the Internationale situationniste, both periodicals, carried acknowledgements of, essentially, flavors of Creative Commons licenses.
This digital détournement also reminded me of the ancient practice of photoshop battles, where each consecutive volley was built on top of the previous pass. The richer the result the better, with no one the single owner of each consecutive step.
A chapter on Asger Jorn describes the marrying of his Imaginist Bauhaus with Letterism, to form Situationism. For him, scientific socialism embraces a materialist worldview, without a materialist attitude to life, for which he envisioned artistic materialism to fill the gap.
After the founding of the Situationist International, Debord took up the role of the organisation’s secretary, and was instrumental in developing Its theoretical framework; “the doctrine of no doctrine”; experiment as a central feature.
And, for its inner workings, a system of donation and reputation, as an alternative to conventional economics. ‘Potlatch’.
By extension, situationism pursues ‘unreturnable gifts’, which could be classified, perhaps, as ‘situations’.
Debord become influenced by the Socialism or Barbarism group.
Jorn identifies a ‘creative elite’, as opposed to the emerging term ‘power elite’, even if the term ‘elite’ was badly chosen, as it implies to not be ‘of, and by, the people’. Jorn’s socialism was experimental.
Jorn sees in capital that it abolished true wealth, as he sees Marx’ writings only as a critique of the capitalist form of value, not of value that is not created by labor, which can also provide wealth, it’s alternatives being extinguished through capital.
Jorn then concluded that the value of things is conditioned by their differences, not their quality. This dovetails with society as spectacle, value being separated from utility, as well as labor being split from creation.
Lefebvre recognised the colonisation of everyday life, as a follow up to the impossible to maintain colonisation of far away countries. By now, he would have recognised the colonisation of both public and private life.
Types of time are linear, cyclical, or ‘adventure’. This sounds a bit ridiculous, but the point is that adventure time, a kind of aristocratic time, is an ultimate form of leisure, not captured by the controllers of capital, or labor.
This opens up seeing life as a collection of contest and chance.
Jorn and Lefebvre recognise the importance of the everyday, but do not fetishize it: it is not important for what it is, but for what it can be.
Lefebvre muses: “perhaps there should be a tomb for the unknown artist”, the true creator whom no one knows.
A dense section on the difference between Lefebvre’s ‘moments’, and the Situationists’ ‘situations’ follows.
Lefebvre talks about ‘modernity’, which can be classified as ‘technology’ in today’s context: modernity is the ghost of revolution. With Debord, they see that the spectacle precludes praxis; we are prevented from exploring because we are lived by external controls. And, painfully prescient, “the illusion of permanent novelty occludes the possibility of surprise”.
They could be worrying about todays world of TikToks.
A split, the Second Situationist International, headed by Scandinavians and Jacqueline de jong, staged a few successful public interventions which could be seen as precursor to interventions by the Yes Men, and others, and brought me to a new appreciation of the Dutch Provo movement.
Trocchi, mostly on the periphery, created a kind of broad reciprocal communication he called the ‘log’, which Wark identifies as a precursor to blogging.
Wark shows a soft spot for Constant’s New Babylon, as it presupposes a different relation between production and labor, relying on surplus production through automation, freeing up time for play in a world designed for détournement.
And then, it’s May ‘68. Wark conjures up a desirable picture of the Paris revolts. Quoting its Situationist chronicler Viénet: “for the first time youth really existed. Not the social category invented for the needs of the commodity economy by sociologists and economists, but the only real youth, of life lived without dead time”.
But, Wark is a realist, pointing out that the failed revolution itself, just like criminals in Marx’ writings, providing for the livelihood of many; their consequence is reinforcing the spectacle through production.
But also, Wark recognises that, even today, the thoughts, concepts, ideas, are the gift from which also modern writers, scientists, artists, keep reaping; an eternal potlatch as the ongoing source of insight, based on Marxist, and Situationist, ideas.
Wark ends: “the unexamined life is not worth living, but the unlived life doesn’t bear thinking about”.
Read
March 23, 2019"If there is one abiding purpose to psychoanalysis, it is to make bourgeois lives seem fascinating, at least to those who live them. That it is a form of bourgeois thought is attested by the status of the real in Lacanian doctrine. The real is always something terrible, formless, lawless, which the symbolic order tries to shield from awareness, but which keeps slithering in, unbidden. It is a modern version of the serpents that in Jorn’s account Apollonian thought has to slay, again and again. The symbolic preserves for the ruling class, to whom it classically belongs, an order that keeps at bay the self-ornamenting powers of nature and labor, working together, writhing and worming their way into the cracks in Apollonian form."
p. 93-4, "The Thing of Things"
p. 93-4, "The Thing of Things"
June 20, 2013
"Low theory returns in moments, not of disappointment, but of boredom. We are bored with these burnt offerings, these warmed-up leftovers. High theory cedes too much to the existing organization of knowledge and art. It is nothing more than the spectacle of disintegration extending into knowledge itself. Rather a negative theory that reveals the gab between this world and its promises. Rather a negative action that reveals the void between what can be done and what is to be done. Rather a spirited invention of genuine forms within the space of everday life, than the relentless genuflection to the hidden God that is power." (156)
September 18, 2012
Far too confusing to read. There are at least five references on each page that you have to google to understand. Its a surface reading and you have to do all the research to be able to understand all of it.
December 2, 2025
they say there is a beach beneath the street, but i had to learn to walk by prying those stones loose myself, because no one buys you a beer on that beach they just call it “urban planning” and then sell you an office chair, multifunctional, very post revolution. the book is not a manual at all it is more like a bomb that accidentally slipped into your bag, and while you are turning its pages on the bus, the lady behind you slowly looks away, because maybe the word “dérive” sounds a bit satanic to her, or maybe just embarrassingly empty. it feels less like reading one of guy debord’s manifestos and more like reading the flirtations he failed at. that strange revolutionary tension, like when you are walking and suddenly think “what if we turn left, maybe the revolution is there,” but then the traffic light turns green and capitalism wins again. so this book does not teach you anything, but it organizes you against yourself, against waking up at 8am, against your job description, against the turnstile at the plaza entrance, against the tired but “civilized” person in the bathroom mirror (sometimes the only way to love them is to spit at them, you know). the situationists did not actually want a revolution they just wanted another city. less concrete, more hallucination. fewer billboards, more permission to get lost. because you cannot change something you have not first lost yourself in. and thats exactly where wark steps in not telling history but roughing it up, scratching at it, pretending to know everything in one moment and then shutting up like he knows nothing the next. just like our exes (history is a kind of love, after all, but the broken kind). when you finish the book, your view of the city does not really change but the city looks at you differently for the first time, almost embarrassed, because now you’re imagining what’s under the pavement, and capitalism is still terrified of looking up.
February 15, 2022
A discussion of the Situationist International (1957-1972), a primarily European (and especially French) group that began in avantgarde art circles, but which devoted itself to radical political critique and philosophy after it expelled the working artists (it's complicated). It played a role in inspiring some of the groups that set off the revolutionary events of 1968 in France that nearly toppled the Fifth Republic.
The book is primarily concerned with the development of the group's thought and the theorizing of leading members. While that may sound tedious, one should remember that the group used outrageous humor, satire, and sarcasm to promote its positions.
Unless one is very knowledgeable about avantgarde European political theory of the time, this may not be the best book with which to begin one's study of the Situationists. Greil Marcus' "Lipstick Traces" may be a better choice, even though that very long book concentrates on many subjects other than the Situationists.
The book is primarily concerned with the development of the group's thought and the theorizing of leading members. While that may sound tedious, one should remember that the group used outrageous humor, satire, and sarcasm to promote its positions.
Unless one is very knowledgeable about avantgarde European political theory of the time, this may not be the best book with which to begin one's study of the Situationists. Greil Marcus' "Lipstick Traces" may be a better choice, even though that very long book concentrates on many subjects other than the Situationists.
July 19, 2023
This book assumes some knowledge of Situationism; I would not call it a very good introduction to the topic, although it is a good book. Firstly, it is largely about the less familiar members and activities, as opposed to Debord, say. But secondly and more importantly I found that even by the book's end Wark had offered little account of what the Situationists actually did. What is Situationism? Even the derive, what it actually entails, is barely discussed. Detournement gets a paragraph or so, with scarcely an example to be found. We have to glean it from the pages rather than get a simple introductory explanation and much of Wark's language, though it is free of critical theoretical jargon, is often rather opaque. Sometimes this is a lucid and fun read, but overall I wanted a more straight forward historical account of the subject.
December 14, 2020
It does a really great job in retelling the lesser-known Situationist—though of course everyone was pretty much still connected to either Debord or Vaneigem. The part about New Babylon was really great. From a personal point of view: I expect more exploration of René Viénet's cinematic practice—moving images détournement!
January 1, 2023
This book is best viewed when separated from the narratives Wark places upon the Situationist International in what could very well be seen as her very own account of it. Instead, one should look at this work *only* as a catalogue of projects related to the SI that one should investigate. Using this as a kind of introductory guidebook at a single step of the way is the best way to do so.
February 20, 2022
One of the most important books I’ve ever read. Do not DARE skip a chapter.
November 19, 2025
Kinda in over my head here but I enjoyed
May 6, 2022
So much amazing information but I would have loved to be able to saunter instead of sprinting.
Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews