Activist Desire, Cultural Criticism, and the Situationist International

Abstract

In the world of Anglo-American criticism, Situationism was once the province of hip theorists, progressive art historians, and a few scattered Marxists. No more, for the nineties have seen Situationism come from obscure movement to the defiant avant of our cultural-critical-garde. Not only has the past decade seen the publication of a dozen books, countless articles, dissertations, and both academic and activist web-sites, the Situationists have moved right into the main line of pop-culture. Situationist graffiti turns up as the epigraph for gen-xer Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Bitch: In Praise o f Difficult Women, and, with Rolling Stone darling Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces: A Secret History o f the Twentieth Century, it has become the official prototype of punk aesthetics. However, there is more at stake in our specifically academic recuperation of Situationism than the disinterring and popularizing of yet another corpse to feed the machine with books, articles, and conference papers. Rather, Situationism’s reception is dominated by a will to make the political desires of cultural criticism coincide with immedi­ ate material practice. In this paper, I will first situate our reception of the SI in the context of cultural criticism, demonstrating how contemporary critics mobilize the SI to underwrite their activist agenda. Second, I will consider the tense relation­ ship between theory and practice that constantly frustrated the SI itself. Finally, taking Debord’s and Jom’s Memoires as a specific example, I will suggest that our current reception of the SI has occluded the vital role of