50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International

by McKenzie Wark

From antiglobalist activists and corporate adbusters to online hackers and guerilla street artists, the influence of the Situationist International (SI) remains visible writ large across our contemporary cultural landscape. In "50 Years of Recuperation" McKenzie Wark, the critically acclaimed author of A Hacker Manifesto, explores how our contemporary understanding of art, politics, and even reality itself has been shaped by these original culture jammers. Wark suggests not only what is still vital in the Situationist legacy but also how today’s provocateurs might pick up the thread of those who dared to negate their contemporary world as a whole and imagine it anew.

Genres: Politics, Art, Philosophy

80 pages, Paperback

First published July 4, 2008

About the author

McKenzie 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.

Reviews

[patrick jones]

The first two pages of this book are perfect examples of Wark's 'merciless prose'. After which the book takes an historical path concerning the intellectual intricacies of the key players of the Situationist International. Wark is well worth the effort. I'm going to hunt down his "Hacker's Manifesto" next.

[lou · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of the best contemporary texts on the situationists! really great read after sooo very many boring texts that say a lot of the same things.

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This essay is part of Princeton Architectural Press' new series "FORuM", which, despite it's pretentious overuse of majuscules, looks to be an interesting and handsome little set. While books/essays about SI seem more common than belly buttons these days, Wark, author of The Hacker Manifesto, manages to find a refreshing angle with an "accessible" writing style, to use just a few platitudes.
But seriously, there are some beautiful color photos in here as well that I have never come across in any other publications on SI. The other nice part of this is Wark's effort to focus instead on the members of SI that seem to have been somewhat marginalized for a) not being Guy Debord, or b) only having a brief formal "membership" in the SI. While the work of folks like Constant has been studied quite a bit, that of Asger Jorn, Michele Bernstein, Pinot Gallizio, and Ralph Rumney hasn't quite received the same treatment in relation to SI. At least as far as I know.

[Theunknownkrakr · Rating 3 out of 5]

Less dense than other books on the Situationnist International, it still develops interesting point of view. A quick read that sadly does not makes up to its title and doesn't offer enough perspectives for the future.

[gallizio · Rating 4 out of 5]

ricordati di vivere!

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a nice little book that avoids either hagiography or dismissal, and instead advocates "recuperating" the situationists, not in the name of Madison Avenue or faux-revolution, but in the spirit of their own underlying creativity.

Writing assessing the S.I. can be very ideological and dogmatic, whether pro or con, but Wark instead chooses to focus on some of the specific players apart from just Guy Debord. Sections on Gallizio, Jorn, Constant, Bernstein, de Jong, each in their own right -- and also on Debord's "game of war" board game (rather than just on The Society of the Spectacle) -- attempt to stir-up neglected dimensions of the S.I.'s activity. Overall Wark avoids the pitfalls of just assessing the S.I. within a "cultural studies" rubric (as in: "the situationists were important because..."), and more broadly advocates reviving their concerns, above & beyond getting hung up on labels and lineage/pedigree claims. In other words, Wark tries to pinpoint the dilemma of making use of the S.I. without romanticizing it as a specific movement. The irony is that in 1972 what remained of the S.I. was fully aware of the dilemma, as they in fact were throughout their existence as a group, which is why their final dissolution was understood as inevitable (cf. The Veritable Split in the International). Yet too often the rhetoric of purity can still prevent folks from moving beyond the S.I.'s own shortcomings (whether organizational, theoretical, practical, etc.), and the S.I. gets either superficially lauded or hastily dismissed. Wark concludes, "Perhaps the problem is not the recuperation of 'situationism' in the fifty years since the inception of the Situationist International, but that the recuperation is so partial and incomplete" (p. 43) -- by which I take Wark to mean that genuinely recuperating (in the sense of recovering-to-health) the S.I.'s concerns would mean reviving them beyond their original limitations, as opposed to getting too hung up on a rhetoric of purity that paradoxically only further dilutes and nullifies their founding aspirations.

A lot more could be written about the situationists, but this is a refreshing introduction.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unlike some of the other Situationism related books I have read, McKenzie Wark manages to look away from the Debord-centric aspects of the Situationist International toward the conceptual contributions of other significant founding members. In doing so, Wark lays out a case for these components of Situationist thought as providing a shadow framework for subverting the acritical stasis of the art, media, and academic realms at present. Not every piece of Wark's analysis is either original or new (that would be terribly un-Situationist anyhow), but the larger point really hit home with me: Despite the fact that Situationism's founders bit off more conceptually than they could ever chew, in this era, we ought to explore their ideas more fully because there remains much humanity can discover through their ideas.