The avant-garde group whose slogans covered the walls of France in 1968
The Situationist International lasted only from 1957 to 1972, but its ideas escaped the group. Blending libertarian Marxism with the rebellious spirit of Dada and Surrealism, it argued that modern capitalism had turned life into a spectacle of images, and during the French uprisings of May 1968 its phrases were daubed everywhere.
At the heart of situationist thinking sat the spectacle: the idea that social relations were increasingly lived through images and the buying of commodities rather than through direct experience. The members, a mix of artists, intellectuals and political theorists, held that Marx's analysis of capitalism still stood, but claimed alienation had now seeped into every corner of culture and daily life. Technological progress and higher living standards, they insisted, could never make up for that damage.
Their remedy gave the group its name. A constructed situation was a deliberately arranged moment of life, set up collectively to reawaken genuine desires and a sense of adventure. The founding manifesto of 1957, Report on the Construction of Situations, framed this as a way to free everyday life from manufactured wants. Guy Debord rejected the label situationism outright, calling it meaningless, since the group opposed every ideology as a mask for economic interests.
The movement grew out of Lettrism, launched in 1940s Paris by the Romanian-born poet Isidore Isou. A younger, more radical wing staged public outrages, including a stunt at Easter Mass in Notre-Dame where Michel Mourre, dressed as a monk, announced that God was dead. In 1952 that wing, Debord included, split away to form the Letterist International after disrupting a Charlie Chaplin press conference, which Isou thought disrespectful. It was there that psychogeography and the dérive, an aimless walk through a city guided purely by feeling, took shape.
The group's high point came in 1967, when Debord published The Society of the Spectacle and Raoul Vaneigem released The Revolution of Everyday Life. A year later those books helped shape the thinking behind the May 1968 revolt in France, and fragments of situationist writing turned up on posters and graffiti across the country.
Source: Situationist International
