Reprinted from the May, 1998 issue of The Economist
Of all the ideological "isms" competing for Parisian
students' attention in the heady days of May 1968,
none was more pervasive than situationism
MAOISM AND TROTSKYISM were trendy in the Quartier Latin; and
hedonistic anarchism prevailed at the newly-built University of
Nanterre where Daniel Cohn-Bendit and his group of enrages
threw tomatoes at fashionable left-wing professors and laid
siege to the female students' residences.
LIKE MOLIERE'S Monsieur Jourdain, who spoke prose without
knowing it, Mr Cohn-Bendit and his pals were all situationists
without quite realising it. According to Guy Debord, around
whom the fragile movement circled, a situationist is "one
who engages in the construction of situations". When students
turned the boulevard Saint Michel into a lecture hall or invited
workers into the Sorbonne to set up Workers' Councils, they
were being situationists.
SITUATIONIST GRAFFITI scrawled on the Sorbonne walls (which
were copied down by members of the staff and are now in print:
"Sorbonne 68: Graffiti", Editions Verticales; FFr68) proclaimed
"Ne travaillez jamais" (Never work) and "Il est interdit d'interdire"
(It is forbidden to forbid). In his essay "Guy Debord ou la beaute
du Negatif", Shigenobu Gonzalvez writes: "The situationists were
funny, provoking, irreverent.They offered a refreshing contrast
with the gauchistes.
SITUATIONISM EMERGED as a movement in the mid 1950s and
rapidly went into decline after 1968. Members were expelled
almost as fast as they joined and never amounted to more than
a few dozen. Its artistic roots lay in surrealism, its philosophical
ones in existentialism, even though Debord spat on both. He had
little patience with Sartre and other intellectuals who adopted
anti-establishment poses while enjoying the perks of fame. He
dismissed a top film maker, Jean-Luc Godard, as an "offspring
of Mao and Coca Cola".
PERUSAL OF L'INTERNATIONALE SITUATIONNISTE, a periodical
written by Debord and a clutch of friends between 1958 and
1969 (which is now available in a single hefty volume from
Fayard; FFn80), shows how situationism appealed to the
students of 1968. A key idea was subversiveness. Everything
could be subverted: authority and its representatives, of
course, be they politicians, parents, trade unions or trendy
intellectuals, but also behaviour and art forms.
ANOTHER NOTION dear to the situationists was derive
("drifting"), which they explored essentially in terms of
urban landscapes. People like AsgerJorn, a Danish artist,
proposed to redesign cities so that they had separate
bizarre, happy, sinister, tragic and useful quarters
that people could drift in and out of.
THIS SITUATIONIST "psychogeography" is enjoying a
revival among architects who are using derive as a
means of investigating urban space. An American
architect, Libero Andreotti, traces the situationists'
influence in structures such as the Paris Pompidou
Centre. Bernard Tschumi, who designed the Parc de
la Villette on the site of Paris' old slaughterhouses,
claims situationist affiliations. And a recent exhibition
in Vienna celebrated the situationists' dynamic approach
to architecture.
DERIVE INFORMS the style of Debord's autobiographical
"Panegyriques" in which he retraces his Parisian youth
in the early 19505 in the company of poets, rebels and
the odd murderer. Born in 1931, Debord inherited a
small income from his father and never had a job in
his life--he would have been outraged at the idea.
Mostly he sponged on wealthy fellow situationists
such as Gerard Lebovici, a French publisher who
was mysteriously murdered in 1984.
IN 1952 DEBORD provoked a scandal with "Hurlements
en faveur de Sade", a patchwork film of black and blank
screens with a soundtrack that alternated silence and a
"collage" of quotations. But he was essentially a theoretician
who wrote and lectured extensively. Some of his slogans
were taken up after he committed suicide in 1994 by a
few far-right French writers and British singers who
briefly posed as situationists. But Debord's finest hour
was in May 1968 on the streets of Paris when for a
brief moment his philosophy suited the situation perfectly.
May 1968 . . .
Tricky Situations