Situating situationism/supporting its legacy: reply to Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen.

• Date: 22 June 2006
• Author: Hunter, Simeon
• Published date: 22 June 2006
• Author: Hunter, Simeon

IN REPLYING TO RASMUSSEN'S ANALYSIS OF DEBORD'S 1957 "RAPPORTSUR LA construction des situations et sur les conditions de l'organisation et de l'action de la tendance situationniste internationale" and its implications for Situationism, it seems necessary to recognize that in choosing how to attribute value to an idea or a practice, the critical framework against which we measure the work is crucial to the outcome of our analysis. Rasmussen has chosen to work out an argument around an early Debord text and to generalize this to reflect upon the visibility and value of Situationist practices in history. I do not propose to object to Rasmussen's exposition. Rather, I wish to suggest that his account is overly pessimistic and that the value of Debord's text lies less in its argument and more in the possibilities that it opens despite itself. If we are to measure these possibilities, we need to focus our attention on those tangential visual practices and evidences that Debord seeks to close off, but which his thinking nevertheless propagated and indeed continues to propagate.

Rasmussen limits his discussion to Situationist practices that unfolded between 1957 and 1962. This decision masks moments of real success that did not emerge fully until the May 1968 movement in France and that were still under discussion by what remained of the group as late as 1972. The questions they raised spawned a plethora of related--if not directly connected--ideas and practices that, for a generation increasingly disconnected from the kind of power structures observed by Marx, would have been unthinkable without Debord's re-reading of Marxism at the level of the symbolic.

Historical specificity plays a role here, as the culture in which Debord found himself was different; the influence of Existentialism's post-World War II critique is strongly present in his thinking, if not his rhetoric, because he ultimately describes the media's distribution of spectacularized social seduction as a tool for the maintenance of alienation without revolt, thus conjoining his observation of the visual with at once a Sartrean understanding of social responsibility and a philosophical Marxist interpretation of the structures of power through commodity exchange. The form in which this was suggested was riddled with paradox, but that was not its failure; its failure was in trying to behave like philosophy, to close the questions it opened, to deny the paradoxical poetic within its own thinking and practice. Even this flaw may be overlooked if we consider that the legacy of this movement is still active, still providing a highly useable model for a transformative analysis of, and through, the visual world from which it is derived.

Rasmussen uses Burger's (1984) theory of the avant-garde as a strategic measure of Situationism's worth. While he acknowledges certain criticisms of Burger's methods, he does not offer any alternate rhetorical structure for framing the avant-garde itself. Burger wrote in a specific context, valuing praxis above all other potential measures, not only as a good Marxist, but also as a means of defense against the dominance of formalist thinking about the value of abstraction promoted by New York art critic Clement Greenberg. [On Greenberg and the influence of formalist art criticism, see Tekiner in this issue.--Eds.] The selection of Burger's framework facilitates a particular understanding of Situationist rhetoric partly because it matches the ideological underpinnings of that rhetoric. However, if we recognize that filters (photographic, or critical) matching the color of their subject render that subject invisible, then such a strategy may be problematized. Poggioli (1968) offers us an alternative framework for understanding the avant-garde, which Burger dismisses as too concerned with semantics, too open, too literary. Poggioli's arguments are at the level of language and therefore fail to meet Burger's standard for achieving value--praxis. However, if we approach the question from a Derridian position and accept post-structuralism's assertion that actions at the level of language are "real" because language itself is the level of experience, then a quite different filter becomes available to us.

By operating within a discourse alien to the subject of our analysis, we will be able to examine objects--both visual and verbal--inadmissible within Burger's framework or indeed Debord's. Violence will be committed to a certain logical rigor, but we may be able to evade the paradoxes of Debord's initial project, rightly exposed by Rasmussen in his conclusion, and look instead at Situationism's effects, both short term and subsequent, and consider their value without repeating his theoretical conundrum. In short, by engaging at the level of the semantic instead of the pragmatic, it may be possible to evade the redoubling of a philosophy that in its own terms may ultimately be said to have disappeared in a puff of logic, and consider instead the transformative effects of its legacy.

Beyond exploring Situationism's relationship to the avant-garde, Rasmussen relates the movement to a number of other practices, both prior and concurrent. Earlier movements he dismisses as ineffectual within Burger's rhetoric; those that emerge in parallel with Situationism he undoes with the same tools. Such movements have been marginalized in art history using a number of strategies, of which Burger's is only one example, yet they continue to merit our attention, not only because they establish a context for the question in hand, but also because they are much more closely aligned with Situationism's cultural project than Rasmussen's dismissal of them would suggest. Significant practices of the period have been almost omitted from many accounts of that history since they fit into neither Greenberg's formalist framework nor Marxist art histories concerned with valuing visual culture as a document of social change, in total denial of the poetic voice that may connote such change through form. Thus, a whole school of work known in France as...