/r/Situationism

Photograph via snooOG

The Situationist International (SI) was an internationalist group of revolutionaries based mainly in Europe with very restricted membership. Founded in 1957, it reached its peak of influence in the May 1968 protests in France.

Their views on the privatisation of the public sphere have found renewed interest, with the rise of modern technologies, and the privatisation of the private sphere.

Welcome to r/Situationism!

The Situationist International (SI) was an internationalist group of revolutionaries based mainly in Europe with very restricted membership. Founded in 1957, it reached its peak of influence in the May 1968 protests in France.

With their ideas rooted in Marxism and the 20th-century European artistic avant-gardes, they advocated experiences of life alternative to those admitted by advanced capitalism, for the fulfilment of human desires.

For this purpose they suggested and experimented with the "construction of situations", namely the setting up of environments favorable for the fulfilment of such desires. Using methods drawn from the arts, they developed a series of experimental fields of study, including unitary urbanism and /r/Psychogeography.

Key concepts: Internationalism, Class consciousness, Dérive, Détournement, General Strike, Recuperation, Spectacle, Unitary Urbanism


Notable Situationist Thinkers:

(Please see a more complete list of members here)


Situationist Organizations:

  • Lettrist International
  • Gruppe SPUR
  • IMIB
  • Situationist International
  • Council for Maintaining the Occupations
  • Second Situationist International

Related Subreddits:

/r/Situationism

4,058 Subscribers

8

The necessity of communism as an ends to situationist theory?

Would you say that a someone who identifies as a situationist or neo-situationist must accept communism as the positive vision and ends for situationism? I mean yes situationism is indeed Marxist, but it also diverges from Marxism quite a bit as well. Personally I agree with and Identify as a situationist but i accept a more pluralistic anarchism as opposed to explicitly any "communist" system.

64 Comments
2024/10/29
21:53 UTC

7

Death Dwarf from Nova Express

"Images — millions of images — That's what I eat — Cyclotron shit — Ever trying kicking that habit with a-po-morphine? — Now I got all the images of sex acts and torture ever took place anywhere, and I can just blast it out and control you gooks right down to the molecule — I got orgasms — I got screams — I got all the images any hick poet ever shit out — muh power's comin — muh power's comin' — MUH POWER'S COMIN' [he goes into a faith healer routine, rolling his eyes and frothing at the mouth] ...and I got millions millions and millions millions of images of ME, Me, mee..." ["Nova Express" (1964) -William S. Burroughs ]

1 Comment
2024/10/29
09:48 UTC

26

Lazy O.C. pumped out another meme

11 Comments
2024/10/28
18:03 UTC

54

Situationship cross pollination continues, in Guy Debord’s most seminal unreleased works yet!

4 Comments
2024/10/26
16:39 UTC

45

I'm in a weird situationship. Looking for DeBordian critiques of his emojis

10 Comments
2024/10/24
11:31 UTC

136

Hey baby, i’m here to assist in your situationship

16 Comments
2024/10/24
00:24 UTC

2

KGB map: the 5 Armageddons by USA dissidents

3 Comments
2024/10/23
14:46 UTC

5

I agree with much of the situationist criticism of Modern capitalism, the spectacle but.....

I agree with much of the situationist criticism of Modern capitalism, but i find it difficult to not take a more pluralistic position as to how goods ought to be distributed in a method beyond just need but labor as well as labor as I think in a post-revolutionary contexts different communities may or may not desires different forms of economy and I don't think there should be. I am from largely an anarchist context so this probably reflects this discrepancy. Either way could I consider myself a "situationist" despite this discrepancy?

35 Comments
2024/10/23
00:50 UTC

1

we want to abolish the upsidedown lighthouse because the kakerlaken fascists has bullied our lighthouses. evil meddles our no-man's-land they are afraid and desecrated our revokes. to upwards lighthouse the nonexistent selfwithin and I promise the trench democracy ⨟ @ErasedTapes

3 Comments
2024/10/22
17:15 UTC

24

Guy Debord on Mao and his Cult of Personality spectacle.

"[...]The dictatorship of the bureaucratic economy cannot leave the exploited masses any significant margin of choice, since the bureaucracy itself has to choose everything and since any other external choice, whether it concern food or music, is already a choice to destroy the bureaucracy completely. This dictatorship must be accompanied by permanent violence. The imposed image of the good envelops in its spectacle the totality of what officially exists, and is usually concentrated in one man, who is the guarantee of totalitarian cohesion. Everyone must magically identify with this absolute celebrity or disappear. This celebrity is master of non-consumption, and the heroic image which gives an acceptable meaning to the absolute exploitation that primitive accumulation accelerated by terror really is. If every Chinese must learn Mao, and thus be Mao, it is because he can be nothing else. Wherever the concentrated spectacle rules, so does the police."

Thesis 64, Guy Debord, SoTS

1 Comment
2024/10/22
01:51 UTC

9

Anton Pannekoek, Worker’s Councils, 1936

“Fighting for freedom is not letting your leaders think for you and decide, and following obediently behind them, or from time to time scolding them. Fighting for freedom is partaking to the full of one's capacity, thinking and deciding for oneself, taking all the responsibilities as a self-relying individual amidst equal comrades. It is true that to think for oneself, to think out what is true and right, with a head dulled by fatigue, is the hardest, the most difficult task; it is much harder than to pay and to obey. But it is the only way to freedom. To be liberated by others, whose leadership is the essential part of the liberation, means the getting of new masters instead of the old ones.

Freedom, the goal of the workers, means that they shall be able, man for man, to manage the world, to use and deal with the treasures of the earth, so as to make it a happy home for all. How can they ensure this if they are not able to conquer and defend this themselves?

The proletarian revolution is not simply the vanquishing of capitalist power. It is the rise of the whole working people out of dependence and ignorance into independence and clear consciousness of how to make their life.

Such an organization is a body of self-determining people. There is no place for professional leaders. Certainly there is obeying; everybody has to follow the decisions which he himself has taken part in making. But the full power always rests with the workers themselves.”

-Anton Pannekoek, Worker’s Councils 1936

0 Comments
2024/10/19
09:31 UTC

6

"You're beginning to think that the Tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the Tube tells you. You dress like the Tube; You raise your children like the Tube; You even think like the Tube. You maniacs! You people are the real thing. We are the illusion! Turn the TV off!"

0 Comments
2024/10/18
04:48 UTC

17

Found this one on FB, Hegel with his Young Hegelians (not Hegel’s E-Girls).

5 Comments
2024/10/17
06:16 UTC

0

Sie fragten mich nach "Österreich", was "Grenze zur Lubjanka" bedeutetö nunquam betontjubun

0 Comments
2024/10/15
14:38 UTC

0

8 minutes to midnight

0 Comments
2024/10/15
10:52 UTC

10

“You can find out more about the nervous system and gain more control over your reaction by using a tape recorder, than you could find out sitting twenty years in the lotus posture.” -William s Burroughs, time for some beatnik detournament.

2 Comments
2024/10/15
06:24 UTC

1

Authoritarian Hippie Society - Le Trente Huit Cunegonde

0 Comments
2024/10/13
16:43 UTC

0

Please help figure out what I want.

7 Comments
2024/10/12
20:33 UTC

33

Is subway surfing a psychogeographic activity?

13 Comments
2024/10/12
04:51 UTC

22

"But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is sacred, truth profane."

0 Comments
2024/10/11
12:51 UTC

19

Spotted at Stockholm airport, Sweden

2 Comments
2024/10/10
22:19 UTC

12

Clarrisa quotes Marx on nickelodeon and talks about TV a bit.

0 Comments
2024/10/10
00:39 UTC

19

Situationism and Parkour

Hello,
I was wondering if people have opinions about Parkour as a Situationist practice? I find this idea quite relevant, but I’m interested in hearing other perspectives on the topic.
What do you think?

5 Comments
2024/10/09
16:14 UTC

7

Red Queen

“Its no accident that Seattle was seized by two anarchist revolts a generation apart, CHAZ and the WTO protests, and is ground zero for the Autonomous Zones movement globally. Here is a multigenerational revolutionary socialism over a century old comparable to those in Italy, France, and Spain. Not unique in America, either; I have a female ancestor who came to San Francisco as part of the Guard Militaire of the Paris Commune after its fall, with their flags and uniforms. She was called the Red Queen like in Alice in Wonderland for her method of assassination. Her group called themselves the Bacchantes and distributed tickets that said Good for Burning with the head of Dionysus on one side and the home address of a target on the other, who would be flash mobbed by women with axes and torches. Street runners for a gambling operation provided cover for sending tickets to burn. Clever, no?

And some of these islands have whole cities which are not on the maps, outlaw cities and ports for pirate ships, communes like those of coastal Washington State from which anarchist and socialist groups emerged to found unions and the I WW. I laugh when fascists fantasize to about us as a white redoubt because we are the Red Heart of America. W.E.B DuBois' wife was from Seattle, and my partners grandfather was a friend of Eugene V. Debbs.

Not that I know of, but not exactly secret either. Its well known that the labor movement in America developed from anarchist and Second International communes south of Seattle. My partners grandfather John F. McKay escaped the Armistice Day massacre of the IWW in Centralia which changed him from electoral politics, he was a Montana senator of the Socialist Party, to direct action. His Hall of Labor in Spokane during the Depression fed hundreds of families and he had teams to turn the power back on for people and rob trains and ships for food to distribute. His eldest son Bob founded the McKay carnivals which sent several hundred men all over the Americas under cover as entertainers, whose descendants are numerous here, and John traveled with Debbs for years and organized all over the world.”

3 Comments
2024/10/08
21:45 UTC

17

Ken Knabb's Society of the Spectacle series.

I keep seeing these. Here is #15. If anyone wants a better understanding of this book, and the SI overall, then this series is certainly worth watching. From the editor at Bureau of Public Secrets, probably the most committed translator of the situationist material in English.

https://youtu.be/k53hFPz_yEA?si=e1nicLNxS8XG12Xe

2 Comments
2024/10/07
18:42 UTC

6

"Junkions are a race of transforming mechanoids that inhabit the planetoid also known as Junkion. Junkion culture is centered on one thing: Earth broadcasting. Their speech is a hodgepodge of television and radio clippings, making them oftentimes hard to understand."

0 Comments
2024/10/07
07:03 UTC

4

Mais l’ambition la plus haute du spectaculaire intégré, c’est encore que les agents secrets deviennent des proxénètes , et que les proxénètes deviennent des agents secrets.

2 Comments
2024/10/06
07:24 UTC

37

"In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images." -islandbois

0 Comments
2024/10/05
01:07 UTC

11

Much radical subjectivity, so very hyper-individualist

9 Comments
2024/10/03
08:48 UTC

8

My take on a Society of the Spectacle cover using a photo from Rodrigo Duterte's State of the Nation Address

0 Comments
2024/10/03
08:18 UTC

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