Situationist International

Situationist International (SI) was a group of artists and thinkers whose aim was to eliminate capitalism and its alienating effects through the revolution of everyday life. Formed in 1957, the SI were a conglomeration of several already existing art groups from different European countries—Lettrist International from France; Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus in Denmark; COBRA, the Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam Surrealist design collective; and the London Psychogeo-graphical Committee from England. Instead of focusing on traditional sites of economic and social change, such as the factory or the worker, the SI argued that a revolution would take place in the realm of everyday life because one experiences capitalism in all aspects of life, not just at work.

As consumer culture became more dominant in Europe after World War II, modernization and new standards of living based on the consumption of luxury products such as automobiles, refrigerators, or washing machines encouraged people to think of themselves as consumers. The SI believed that a society organized around consumption induced boredom while it shaped people's desires, desires that could only be fulfilled through purchasing consumer goods. In this type of society, the freedom to choose how to live is replaced by the freedom to choose what to buy.

The SI focused on systematically breaking from a world that required submission to the commodity. They developed methods of critique that articulated both the repression of a consumer culture and the liberating practices in which one could participate as a means to demolish this type of society. One method was detournement. Detournement takes preexisting images and mixes them together to highlight the underlying ideology of the original image. The SI identified film as being the most effective medium for detournement. René Viénet's Can Dialectics Break Brick? takes an already existing Hong Kong martial arts film and replaces its dialog, changing the meaning of the original story. The “new” detourned film is about the politicized proletariat training to liberate themselves and society from the strict organization of life by capitalist and bureaucrats. Can Dialectics Break Brick? is an excellent distillation of the revolutionary ideas of the SI, taking aim at sacred institutions of the bourgeoisie, such as marriage, religion, and private property.

The two other methods of critique took aim at the built environment. The SI identified the design of the urban environment as being directly shaped by the needs of capitalism to separate people not only from others, but from their own desires. A rationalized urban design stresses efficiency and utility over leisure and imagination. The SI developed the idea of the derive (drifting, wandering) as a practice of aimlessly walking throughout the city to discover and record its more alluring ambiances. Derives could last hours, an evening, or several days. They would use the information they collected to reconstruct another type of city in which spontaneity and imagination triumphed over the mind-numbing rationalization of space. They argued that a city that reflects desire would undo the crippling effects that a highly organized urban terrain has on the human mind, such as Baron von Hausmann's reconstruction of Paris into a grid, and Le Corbusier's (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret) plan to demolish sections of Paris to build aesthetically sterile high-rise apartment buildings. Derives produced discontinuous maps of the city, which were considered a psychogeography of social space. Derive [Page 1289]is the practice of psychogeography, the study of the effects of a city's geography on one's emotions.

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