At Dusk

Capitalism inherits all the defeats of revolutionary movements. In demonstrating an ability to withstand recent challenges to their authority, in evidencing a certain resiliency in the face of social emergency, the current brokers of political and economic power in advanced societies have gained a temporary victory even as they confront a new social crisis emanating from the intensification of economic contradictions in international capitalism. One of the secondary consequences of this new historical situation is that what were formerly considered to be the most “modern” theses about capitalism now appear outmoded while those previously judged to be “archaic” seem most pertinent. What must be explained is how the most innovative attempts to provide a radical theory of modern social development—and modern social revolution—were overtaken by the very history which made such a project necessary. If in attempting to provide such an explanation our analysis centers around the situationist movement, this obsession is quite admittedly a consequence of our previous involvement with—or rather, commitment to—this movement and the present exigency of confronting our “situationist” past through an examination of the theory and practice which inspired it. But however arcane such a topic may appear in the light of current issues, it is not unrelated to contemporary reality: although the actual formation of the Situationist International lies outside the radicalization process described in the previous section, the history of the situationist movement encapsulates modern social history, both as the most advanced expression of past opposition to advanced capitalism and as the summarized defeat of this opposition. The study of the origins and implications of this movement leads only in the direction of larger and more “relevant” questions.

The unplanned obsolescence of a radical critique which proclaimed its centrality within the “modern proletarian movement” cannot simply be measured by its external recuperation (the gratuitous appropriation of its terminology and formulations by dominant ideology), but by the progressive diminution of its critical effect. In its displacement from subject of revolutionary critique to object of ultra-leftism’s complacent speculation, the extremism that was anticipated by the experimental activity of the Situationist International lost its scandalous aspect, its ability to disturb the world. The collapse of both its pretensions to practical consequence and its immediate theoretical perspectives marked the retreat of the world situationist movement and revealed its newly acquired status as an historical relic.

In view of this, the present failure of the situationist movement is more important to comprehend than its past success; if the critique which emerged from the provisional insights of the S.I. is to go beyond its current paralysis, it must first of all criticize itself, i.e., come to terms with its origins, and through this, become reconciled to its transcendence. The fundamental theses of situationist analysis are no longer directly applicable to contemporary experience, and this irrelevance is not merely due to the fact that the situationist critique of modern capitalism is out of date, but must rather be understood in relation to the weakness of situationist concepts themselves. Moreover, even though the situationist critique had achieved a certain conceptual integrity during the “high period” of its development, and not uncoincidentally, of its influence, theory which does not continually seek to surpass itself as theory, to overcome its critical detachment, loses any effective significance. A lack of such effectiveness proved to be the S.l.’s downfall: it was only in its inability to practically unite its ideas with their assumed medium—the modern proletariat—that the situationist movement acquired an historical specificity, one quite different than intended. The particular status attained by the S.I., that of the most radical example of intellectual opposition to contemporary society, was at once its conspicuous strength and its intrinsic weakness. This contradiction, which characterized the entire attempt of the situationist movement to realize its aspirations to revolutionary practice, was never resolved, and it can only be understood in relation to the precise developmental context of modern revolutionary formations. Situationist activity represented a specific radical intersection of history: in traversing a specific course of historical transformation, it was conditioned, like any similar phenomenon, by external factors.

According to situationist theory, the social “spectacle” of modern capitalism is to be understood, as, inter alia, the “historical moment which contains us” (Debord, Society of the Spectacle);the spectacle would necessarily therefore enclose the field of its opposition and, in particular, the situationist movement. In fact as well as in theory, the critique of spectacular society developed both within and against the complex of relationships it described. As it attempted to establish its own base of opposition to advanced capitalism, the situationist movement was as much a product of the spectacle whose actuality it sought to disclose as it was an implicit antithesis of “spectacular” thought, and this duality, however much it may appear as a truism, must be grasped in order to explicate the history of the situationist project. The fundamental connection between advanced capitalist development and its situationist interpretation is made in the sphere of culture—considered in its broadest sense as social representation and as activity constituting, or constituted by, that representation—and this explains both why a critique of advanced capitalist culture should lead to a critique of the spectacle and why opposition to modern capitalist society should emerge from its cultural sector in advance of other sectors. But advanced capitalist culture and its avant-garde opposition cannot once again be abstractly separated, as if the first (capitalism) were a proposition which simply called forth its other; to a certain extent, they represent two aspects of the same historical movement. The transformation of traditional capitalist culture corresponded to the rise of advanced capitalism—and the post-war avant-garde. As a part of this avant-garde, the situationist movement was less ahead of historical trends than coincident with them, and however much it later distanced itself from other avant-gardist tendencies, it initially shared all their ambiguities.

To be avant-garde is to be a prisoner of circumstance. Initially, adversary culture appears on the intellectual perimeters of bourgeois society, but it eventually becomes assimilated and made integral to cultural representation as its official criticism. Thus, for the avant-garde, opposition only begins with the struggle against its own deformation, with the abandonment of “apolitical opposition”and the consequent beginnings of self-recognition: an awareness of its equivocality. Critical apprehension of the objective vantage-point of this radicalism formed a precondition to its possible objective expression, and the exact social position occupied by the avant-garde—a position only partially appreciated by its own theorists—revealed the problematic nature of cultural radicalism; the avant-garde’s unique status is the result of a general division of labor which places extremist tendencies in the vanguard of cultural transformation without the means to revolutionize such change. Whatever its particular form, intellectual radicalism is always still-born. Its permanent residence is the space separating ideas from their effectuation, their material significance. While demonstrating the continued relevance of this hardly novel observation, the radicalization of the modern intelligentsia also included a critical effort to overcome the limits imposed by social stratification. In criticizing their origins, i.e., in understanding themselves specifically as part of the intelligentsia, a conscious minority of extremist culture revealed the critical vacuum in which they operated; in exclusively recognizing a goal of revolutionary practice, this radical faction placed its critique beyond the traditional avant-garde.

Unlike its contemporaries, who in embracing leftist politics sought to influence or divert advanced capitalism’s intellectual order into “radical” channels, the situationist movement openly declared its intention to enter the intelligentsia as a force against it. The failure of avant-gardist repudiations of bourgeois culture to extend themselves into revolutionary activity marked the limits of a purely intellectual disengagement from capitalism. In trying to revitalize the avant-garde project, even while consciously aware of the previous inadequacies of such a project, the S.I. sought to realize a transcendent synthesis of the cultural and political traditions represented by the avant-garde, and the radical fusion attempted by the S.I.—involving a politicization of extremist culture and a totalization of extremist politics—was meant to signify a rupture with all “specialized opposition.” By formulating a critique of the “servility” of intellectuals vis-à-vis dominant thought, and from this, of the social function of the intelligentsia as a whole, the situationists, themselves already defectors from the intellectual class, supplied a theoretical program for historical agents that the “submissive” intelligentsia could only passively address. The joining—in principle—of radical intellectual theory with forces objectively exterior to it formed the dialectical nexus of modern revolutionary perspectives. This conjunction, which although presumed ineluctable remained only a hypothesis, was concretely expressed in the situationist declaration that “the only important task of contemporary thought must revolve around the question of the organization of the theoretical and material forces of the movement of opposition.” (Domination of Nature, Ideology, and Classes, Internationale Situationniste #8) But the situationist attempt to delineate a theory of social opposition resulted in an axial contradiction: as it sought to provide a conceptual unity to a diffuse movement that could only be construed as “revolutionary” by inference, such criticism also aimed at its own self-destruction as an intellectual system. The significance of this qualitative predicament was explicitly recognized: “The revolutionary intelligentsia will not be able to realize its project except by suppressing itself; the party of intelligence cannot exist effectively except as a party which supersedes itself: here, victory is at the same time a fall.” (Domination of Nature . . . )

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Theory is practice. Interpretation is itself a kind of intervention, a form of agitation; radical thought, if it is to be anything, must affect consciousness, change reality. Ideas lose their neutrality when they are directly applicable to life, and as a construction of experience, criticism becomes a material force when it communicates a vision of the world which is useful, and thus, capable of implementation. The real practical contribution of the Situationist International was its critique, its ability to name its adversary in describing modern society in precise, but not necessarily thorough, terms. But the theoretical significance of the situationist critique also revealed the real extent of the S.l.’s significance; it ultimately appeared as an intellectual current within the society it contested. And this must be understood in two senses, as a theoretical movement and as a movement of intellectuals; thus, the situationist movement must be explained both in terms of its cultural origins and the intellectual traditions from which it emanated. With respect to the latter, to recognize the situationists’ debt to past theory is not to accept the official version of a situationist “lineage” (Marxism, surrealism, etc.), but rather, to insist upon the synthetic character of situationist perspectives: the social criticism elaborated by the Situationist International must be explicated with reference to its critical antecedents, and thus, in terms of the previous theoretical positions which it incorporated. The unoriginality of the S.l.’s theses consisted primarily in their appropriation of ideas from Socialisme ou Barbarie (whose contributions have not been fully recognized), but more fundamentally, the direction of the S.l.’s theoretical research was largely predetermined by the intellectual climate in which this inquiry took place. Here, it is not a question of the relation of situationist concepts to other theories (which will be discussed later), but of the general orientation of the situationist project towards certain issues, an orientation which it shared with other tendencies of the period. The situationists inherited a Marxist legacy by default, and this heritage involved the Marx which emerged from the historical polemics of anti-Stalinism. The reconstitution of a theory of capitalism—specifically, of a theory of social alienation—provided the immediate impetus for the radicalization of that cultural sector which would later become the situationist movement. This critical wellspring, however much it remains unexplained in situationist theory itself, nonetheless forms the key to an understanding of the intellectual origins of the situationist “phenomenon.”

Marxist theory announced the secret of historical change to be class conflict. But when the first proletarian revolutions of the twentieth century failed, one of the casualties was historical materialism. The Marxist dialectic collapsed not only as a result of its bureaucratic mutilation at the hands of the Third International, but as a consequence of its formalization, its reduction to a series of methodological principles by those who sought to advance Marxism independently of Bolshevism. This “rehabilitation” of the Marxist critique was identically its embourgeoisification, its incorporation within official ideology as a respectable academic discipline. With the exception of a few ultra-leftist councilist tendencies, whose theoretical concerns were those pertaining to the immediate question of a practical reorganization of the workers’ movement in Europe, and isolated figures like Korsch, the only significant radical contributions to emerge in the wake of the pre-World I current of “re-Hegelianized Marxism” were those of the Frankfurt School. The speculative inquiries undertaken in the name of “critical theory” resulted in a comprehensive analysis of modern capitalism in which, following History and Class Consciousness, the concepts of totality and reification occupied a central position, and in which psychological criticism and social criticism were fused for the first time in a theory of alienation in modern capitalist society. Even more importantly, in terms of its contemporary relevance, the Frankfurt School directly confronted the problem posed by the “displacement” of class conflict in developed industrial states; however confusedly, it did attempt to offer an explanation for the apparent weakening of proletarian opposition to capitalism in its modern period, specifically, in the most advanced capitalist country, the United States. But the inability of this school to convert its tentative conclusions into a revolutionary theory (theory of the proletariat, of social contradiction and its dynamics) was a crucial factor in its ideologization, its accommodation to the domesticated leftism of bourgeois academia. While the theses of Adorno and Horkheimer prefigured a critique of “spectacular society,”(2) they described a closed universe, a world of absolute fetishism which precluded, in the Freudian language adopted by the Frankfurt School, a “return of the repressed” against capitalist authority. The worldly despair of the European intelligentsia found its justification in critical theory of the post-war period; as the Frankfurt School’s negative dialectics passed into mere pessimism, its critique, like the pseudo-Marxism it opposed, congealed into pure method, becoming a construct with no possibility of realization in the world it described.

The Frankfurt School arrived at a sophisticated understanding of the alienation of consciousness in late capitalism, but these insights were surpassed by others who were able to prove the reality of a consciousness of alienation, the existence of a possible radical antithesis to capitalism in the dissatisfaction of the members of a supposedly “one-dimensional” society. Situationist theory was certainly not alone in placing the Marxist problematic of alienation at the very center of its critique; however, it did not simply pose the question of disalienation heuristically, as simply a principle for critical investigation, but considered it as a “concrete reality,” as already being present within the active contradictions of capitalist society. Again, the situationists were not the only tendency to do so, and it is perhaps only the way the S.I. made this assertion that distinguished it from other ultra-left currents. Nonetheless, if only because of its influence, the situationist movement takes precedence over others. This new historicization of dialectical thought not only openly restated the relation of theoretical categories to historical movement, but asserted the primacy of class antagonisms within modern society. The theoretical derivations of the situationists were primarily concerned with discovering the negative possibilities located within present social practice, with liberating the discontented forces hidden behind the modern social contract, the unwritten laws which ensure mass compliance with capitalist power. While outlining a topography of modern alienation in sketching the contours of “other-directed activity” in contemporary society, these critical findings anticipated a general breakdown of social authority in advanced capitalism. By insisting upon the presence of ongoing resistance to the final realization of capital in its authoritarian perfection of a commodity society, the situationist critique predicated (and was itself predicated upon) the emancipation of repressed consciousness; it posited a subjective awareness that would become objectified as historical consciousness. In the words of the S.I., “we have founded our cause on almost nothing, dissatisfaction and the irreducible desire for life” (The Avant-Garde of Presence, IS #8): the qualitative immiseration of the modern proletariat represented the essential premise of situationist theory. Concomitantly, this postulate also delimited the terrain of combat in “spectacular” society: modern class struggle was understood as a struggle for the recovery of the human powers surrendered to capitalism in daily activity, and commensurately, as a search for a redefinition of social relations. The situationists were prepared to undertake a reform of consciousness only to the extent that this implied a reform of practice. In generalizing Reason, in communicating a critique of spectacular irrationality, this project sought to generalize “purposive activity.” Situationist theory conceptualized an interface of negativity and its opposite: the structures of reinforcement and of routinized self-alienation underlying “spectacular” collectivity. Social activity was made intelligible as activity which was explicitly contradictory, encompassing mass submission to capitalist authority, the unconscious transfer of social power from those who constitute it to those who command it, and covert mass defiance, which expressed the desire to consciously repossess this power on a radical basis. This demarcation of social contradiction indicated areas of open and potential conflict and of congruence (the margins where opposition was most easily neutralized), which corresponded to the shifting points of stress within modern capitalism. In seeking to establish itself within a new “movement to suppress existing conditions,” the situationists placed themselves within a continuum of previous radical theory and saw themselves as the theorists of contemporary society and its opposition. To the extent that this tendency emphasized its own centrality to an as yet amorphous current of opposition, it was confronted by its real status within the world it criticized.

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At the same time that it described the “space-time” of capitalist society— the particular social universe bounded by the institutions of advanced capitalism—the situationist critique outlined the space-time of its positive articulation. The situationists, like all other revolutionary tendencies, located the potential base of their operations within the occupied zones of modem capital and discovered this “terrain of the positive” not as a repository of latent opposition, but as a constantly changing tactical front which became tangible only through the conscious intervention of revolutionary practice. The specific locus of the situationist project was on the qualitative periphery of developed bourgeois culture, as part of a marginal yet vital—in terms of its importance to a pluralistic culture—experimentalism. This sector incorporated modernist cultural tendencies, joining them as an avant-garde—irrespective of whether the more radical expressions of these trends already pointed beyond culture. The prestige conferred upon this cultural vanguard by official publicity was (and is) primarily one of influence, a privileged access to communication within, and thus to, a certain sphere of the existing intellectual order; it was precisely this ability which was seized upon by the S.I. as a potentially radical means of leverage against cultural criticism organized on capitalism’s terms. The situationists sought to initiate a systematic sabotage of modern culture by desanctifying its techniques, in employing them as subversive methods and turning the prerogatives enjoyed by its intellectual elite—whose essential luxury is the free disposition of creative time—to their own advantage, and thus, towards supposedly radical ends. The devaluation of bourgeois culture was to a large extent already a fait accompli: its demise was presaged in the self-proclaimed “death” of its traditional aesthetic forms. But to go beyond mere post-mortem examination and to affirm what bourgeois culture could no longer affirm, namely, the possibility of a total emancipation of sensory experience, entailed the actual de-privatization, or secularization, of imaginative capacities in the revolutionizing of social praxis. In attempting to accelerate such a development, the situationists saw themselves as comprising an “avant-garde of presence” in direct opposition to those who could only retrace the desultory progress of the “modern spirit” through the various cul-de-sacs of nihilist culture. But the conscious assumption of this putative “forward position” was necessarily an assumption of its inherent ambiguities.

If the situationists rendered all other avant-gardes impossible, simply by exposing the limited vocabulary of artistic innovation, they remained within the ranks of intellectual opposition to “bourgeois values.” By revealing the politicized arena in which cultural activity takes place, the situationists demonstrated the fundamental incompatibility of radical culture with its patronage and with the particular social environment in which it flourished. In showing to what ends culture could be put by advanced capitalism, the situationists indicated the means—in a socially-oriented program of agitation—by which the most radical faction of contemporary culture could make its critique effective, an efficacy which would begin from extra-cultural premises. The distance from cultural to social revolution was the distance traversed theoretically by the situationist movement in its formative period, and this transition marked the limits of the situationist project of a supersession of traditional avant-gardism. Whatever their occasional, limited participation in the social upheavals of the time, the situationists accomplished the transition from cultural to revolutionary criticism in thought only. The situationist movement posed the essential dilemma confronting the radical intelligentsia, and thus, the one confronting the situationists themselves: consciousness which is unable to assert itself practically is placed in an untenable position, where it can either prematurely exhaust its radicalism in an immediate assault on bourgeois culture, an assault which is invariably both superficially scandalous and notoriously superficial, or else resign itself to the anonymity of peripheral opposition. And it was this precarious condition, involving alternate forms of paralysis, which the S.I. both described and ultimately fell victim to.

The situationists’ attempt to totalize their critique can be conceived both as a critical endeavor to elaborate a theory of capitalist totalization, a comprehensive analysis of the structural development of advanced capitalism and of global social development in general, and as a practical effort to link their activity with a totalized class, the “modern proletariat,” the salaried work-force (and those excluded from this work force by capital), which the situationists saw as capable of assuming the “world-historical task” originally set by Marx for the industrial working class. However, in seeking to externalize their activity, to project it outward as an inciting force, the situationists encountered their own externality, their objective removal from the proletarian movement whose “unknown theory” they claimed to provide. By taking their déclassé status literally, the situationists addressed the proletariat from a position of at least theoretical strength, in other words, without any illusions as to traditional proletarian “qualities.” But at the same time, they acquired new illusions concerning the advantages of their own anomalous social position: thus, during the orientation debate of 1969-1971, a situationist could say, “We are at the intersection point of all classes, and thus, we are no longer in any class.” This itself reflected the vestiges of a certain cultural outlook in the situationists’ position; the situationists appeared as the concentrated unification en avance of the proletarian struggle. Moreover, despite the situationists’ intention to effect a “radical separation from the world of separation,” their critique itself became separate from the society it criticized and from the history it sought to enter into. But while the situationists were finally unable to actually organize an expansive revolutionary practice, to enlarge the field of their agitation after the brief generalization of situationist activity during May 1968, they nonetheless understood what historical direction any attempt to “realize” their ideas would take. For the S.I., the determining situation of their project, one from which all other situations could be created, was embodied in the necessary encounter (necessary from the standpoint of the situationists, not from that of history) between modern radical theory and modern proletarian activity.

Now that this effort of situationists to become revolutionaries rather than theorists of revolution is a thing of the past, and thus can be viewed retrospectively, from a secure position after the fact, the essential error, the one from which all other errors would follow, appears in the situationists’ understanding of consciousness, and more precisely, of how consciousness would be acquired by the proletariat. The paradox of a revolutionary intelligentsia was reflected in the S.l.’s perspective on the possible radicalization of modern society, a perspective which contained an inherent contradiction: on the one hand, the situationists maintained that their ideas were already in “everyone’s minds”—that the elaboration of situationist theory did not depend on the existence of an S.I., but would be developed independently by workers themselves—while on the other, they proposed an activist role for theory, whose introduction into proletarian struggles would contribute to the formation of revolutionary class consciousness. This contradiction between spontaneism and activism in situationist theses was never resolved. Even during the post-May period, when the situationists had begun to sense, without fully recognizing, their distance from the class to which they ascribed fantastic powers, they still maintained that their theoretical program coincided with the changing realities of proletarian practice, and that the task still remained, purely and simply, the fusion of radical ideas with the workers’ “movement.” This self-deception, which was prolonged by certain delusions of an already-lost situationist grandeur, had its inevitable consequences: when the acute discrepancy between a subject conceived as the living negation of capitalist power and the living actuality of this subject became so apparent that no one, even the most intoxicated veterans of May ’68, could ignore it, the opportunity for a critical redirection had already been lost.

Debord and Sanguinetti’s statement in 61 Theses on the S.I. and Its Time that “it is not a question of the S.l.’s theory, but of the proletariat’s theory” showed how far they still were from resolving the problems that had led to the break-up of the S.I., a dissolution that was less the consequence of its internal disputes than of its external (collective) failure. By a theoretical sleight-of-hand, the situationists reduced the question of a proletarian theory to a matter of a theory belonging to the proletariat. Instead of an elaboration of the real tendencies (not simply the general direction) of modern social conflict, a process which implied an understanding of the precise context in which social practice was then evolving and the exact forms it assumed, the situationists saw their central task to be that of perfecting a situationist practice, of popularizing radical ideas by making them an actual, rather than theoretical, part of the “class struggle.” If this exigency was imposed by historical circumstances, the situationists nonetheless derived their solution to the problem posed by agitation (or lack of same) less from history than from their preconceptions as to how the workers should meet the revolutionary program of the S.I. This meeting would take place on theory’s own terms: the workers were to come to their avowed partisans, and not the other way around. In refusing to subordinate their demands to those of other potentially revolutionary elements, even when certain struggles posed the essential demand of an assumption of social power by the proletariat, the situationists nevertheless attempted to chart a possible “terrain of communication” where their project and that of the radicalized elements of the proletariat would converge. Critical speculation about such an eventuality revolved around two crucial aspects: the need to devise new means of theoretical communication, to transmit theory in such a way as to effectively transcend the politics of constituencies, and the determination of the basis on which this dialogue would proceed. The search for a common ground with the proletariat was based on the premise that the formation of a revolutionary movement would occur on the level of the “qualitative,” that total opposition to capitalist power would rise above exterior definition and determine its own course as a force already “autonomous” even as it moved towards its realization of revolutionary autonomy. Given this scenario, nothing would inhibit the penetration of situationist ideas into proletarian sectors; the possibility that certain objective constraints (such as the virtual class barrier separating the situationists from their proletarian followers, a barrier which still existed despite all situationist efforts to surmount it) could prevent the initiation of an authentic practice was excluded from the realm of situationist possibility. Once these limits had indeed become insuperable obstacles to the situationist project, the S.I. could only resort to illusory resolutions of its crisis: in a supreme act of theoretical will, the separation between intellectuals organizing themselves around a proletarian theory and a class organized on the basis of capitalist production was merely abolished by fiat. Having been frustrated in their hopes of conducting a successful agitation in the “worker milieu,” the situationists simply cut the Gordian knot presented by practice and artificially subsumed themselves under a general proletarian “movement,” where the S.I. became only a particular aspect of this whole. By means of such a reversal of perspective, the question was no longer that the workers would become dialecticians, but whether the dialecticians would become, or already were, workers.

For all the situationists’ concern with the practical accomplish a positive supersession of political militantism. While demonstrating the hierarchical relationship implicit in the proselytizations of even the most libertarian leftist sect, these anti-politicians practiced a kind of rigorous, ultimately irrelevant abstentionism. In purposely withdrawing from the “spectacular” arena of legislative and economic demands, they posed a radical alternative, represented in the “total subversion” of existing society. But with occasional exceptions—such as the Strasbourg “scandal” and the situationist interventions in May ’68, both of which seem much less important now than they did at the time—the situationists were unable to implement their subversive program, even on a tactical level, and these revolutionaries without a revolution came to occupy a depoliticized vacuum in which a purist disdain for “activism” was substituted for sustained revolutionary activity. Real consideration of a situationist practice was deferred until such a time as an autonomous current appeared within the proletariat, and specifically, among the “workers.” But when, after May 1968, workers did manifest their autonomy in advanced capitalist countries, in ways and forms quite different than the S.I. had imagined (as, for example, in Italy, where the workers’ group Autonomia Operaia formulated a councilist program and practice while retaining a Leninist conception of the need for a vanguard party), the situationists, who awaited the international extension of the days of May, were not in a position to communicate directly with them, much less estabish a “common project” with them. However much it would later be dismissed by its initiators, the success of the S.I. in the universities was not immaterial as to where its real effect was, and would be, felt; the intellectual prestige enjoyed by the situationists was not only an indication of the celebrity status they had acquired, but marked the actual practical orientation of the S.I. The S.I. chose its audience as much as its audience chose the S.I., and the means which the situationists used to express their ideas led to inevitable conclusions. The concentration of situationist propaganda within the intelligentsia was no mere accident: situationist theory, in spite of all its protests to the contrary, remained a theory of a radical intelligentsia.

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When Raoul Vaneigem said in The Totality for Kids that “we accept the hierarchical framework in which we are placed, waiting impatiently to abolish our domination of others, others we can only dominate on the grounds of our criteria against domination,” he openly confronted the dilemma of a new International originating in the intelligentsia, but even this candor did not prevent the situationists from becoming a de facto hierarchy, exerting authority over the modern revolutionary movement by virtue of their “advanced” theoretical position. After May ’68, the increasingly widespread dissemination of situationist theory only reinforced the S.l.’s exclusive status within the “modern revolutionary movement” it proclaimed. The situationists’ exclusivity can be understood both in terms of their absolute defense against all “ideological” approximation of situationist theory and, more importantly, with respect to the S.l.’s external relation to radicalized sectors of the proletariat. This relationship was determined by and formalized in the organizational role which the S.I. ascribed to itself, that of being a theoretical representation of the forces opposing the spectacle. If the situationists disavowed speaking on behalf of others as a leadership, they nonetheless “represented the interests of the movement as a whole,” speaking for (and to) others from a position of theoretical superiority. The much-discussed “elitism” of the S.I. (which was a convenient target for its enemies and an aspect of its history conveniently overlooked by its apologists) was thus not simply imposed by existing social stratifications, but was a necessary consequence of the S.l.’s own perspective of power. While distinguishing itself within the modern revolutionary camp on the basis of a polemic with its perceived adversaries, the S.I. also differentiated itself from the proletarian movement in general by virtue of its possession of theory. And by doing so, the S.I. tacitly presented itself as a repository of radical consciousness within a world systematically deprived of such perception, and thus became the “intelligence of a world without intelligence.” Through this, the S.I. placed itself on a qualitatively different plane of understanding from the proletariat, on a level to which the latter would have to ascend. An avant-gardist posture was forced upon the situationists, but it was an attitude to which they rapidly grew accustomed and, by default, eventually accepted. The desire to universalize the situationist project provided the raison d’être for a new revolutionary directorate, which would be all the more powerful because it would have none of the appearances of power. Like previous radical vanguards, this informal leadership would exercise a certain monopoly, in this case, a theoretical one: under the benign guidance of masters who were “without slaves” but who did have a “unitary critique,” the proletariat would exist in an objective state of tutelage as it progressed towards self-consciousness.

An organization is able to function effectively as an international revolutionary force when it is sustained by and contributes to the development of international currents of opposition to existing social authority. But however much it may emphasize the necessarily global character of modern class conflict, an organization only becomes an International to the extent that it becomes a means to the internationalization of revolutionary struggles, and thus establishes itself at the practical epicenter of class warfare in its various contemporary forms. An obvious precondition to the attainment of such a position is the internationalization of the organization’s or tendency’s theory, and through this, the achievement of a definitive victory in the realm of current ideas about the world. This process, however, is distinct from, and far less ambitious than, the further requirement of the internationalization of radical practice and the actual formation of a worldwide revolutionary movement. Of these two criteria, the S.I. was only able to fulfill the first; having successfully proliferated its theses as revolutionary theory, as ideas which revolutionized, in however limited a context, contemporary social consciousness, in such a way as to ensure their maximum effect, the S.I. began to disintegrate both when it seriously attempted to transcend the traditional geographic boundaries of situationist activity, the inherent bias towards France as the center of its membership and hence, its operations, and even more importantly, when it attempted to overcome the social boundaries that confined its influence to an intellectual milieu.

However incapacitated the S.I. may have been, the dissolution of the situationist movement cannot be explained solely in terms of a subjective failure. The S.l.’s internal dissensions notwithstanding, the collapse of situationist practice at this time must be viewed in relation to the evolution of social crisis in modern capitalism. During this period, the contradictions within advanced capitalist society intensified in certain areas and diminished in others, and this specification of social conflict did not conform to the predictions of situationist theory, which heralded an epoch in which student rebellion would give way before proletarian revolt. Reality is always more complex than any such expectations, however; even when a specifically proletarian stage of radical activity was inaugurated in Italy (and there only under specific circumstances which were not to be found elsewhere at that time), the “obsolete” student revolt in fact expanded in other countries as the issues that defined it remained relevant. And when the international youth rebellion did collapse, it did not do so in the face of an even more radical movement. The dissipation of the radical social currents in which the situationist movement had flourished was the real cause of the decline and fall of the Situationist International. The changing nature of modern social conflict altered the conditions under which a practical agitation such as that conceived by the S.I. could be conducted, and the situationists proved unable to fully accommodate themselves to this shift in historical movement. From this point on, the history of the S.I. appears as only one specific aspect of recent social history, and not, as the S.I. would have had it, the concentrated expression of that history. Situationist practice was predicated on the open and direct manifestation of class struggle in advanced capitalism, and it was paralyzed both when this class struggle did not appear and when it did appear in forms not anticipated by the S.I. The inability of the situationists to formulate, much less implement, a theoretical program commensurate with the new realities of class struggle left them outside of history, that is, outside the terrain of social change in the modern world. The real break involving the S.I. was less a matter of its organizational scission than one of a definitive rupture between the situationists and social reality. From an initial radical convergence, both were to go their separate ways.

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The revolutionary events of 1968 were at the time correctly seen as an historical vindication of the situationist critique; with these developments, as the S.I. itself maintained, “theory (was) confirmed. It (was) immensely reinforced.” (Rene Vienet, Enrages et Situationnistes dans le mouvement des occupations) When situationist practice found its content for the first time conclusively substantiated in contemporary social practice, in the actions of individuals who themselves announced the appearance of a modern revolutionary movement, the S.I. attained a genuinely historical status, one with a concrete significance. In demonstrating its objective truth, the situationist critique entered irreversibly into social history, achieving an independent existence outside of the S.I. Here, however, the victory of an autonomous situationist theory coincided with the defeat of the S.I. itself; having made history, the S.I. (and its theoretical perspective) became history, and thus became subject to historical representation as well as to historical corroboration. In retrospect, May 1968 appears as the ne plus ultra of the situationist movement, as the completion of the theoretical project embodied in the S.I., and that it could be completed in such a way revealed its fundamental limitations. But if the movement of occupations represented the high-watermark of situationist activity, it is necessary to understand why it broke off at that level.

Far from having been propelled to a real (as opposed to hypothetical) forward position in the proletarian currents which materialized in the wake of the revolutionary crisis in France, the S.I. was literally left stranded by the May tide: when this particular wave of radicalization in European society receded, the immediate assumptions of situationist practice no longer obtained. If, after May, “nothing could go on as before,” the situationists understood that it was last of all the S.I. which could do so, and yet it was precisely such a continuation which took place. In this period, the S.I. remained unchanged in its structure (a fact which indicated a certain failure to perceive the necessity of developing the new organizational forms required by the increasing tempo of social conflict) and more importantly, its function as a theoretical avant-garde. The S.I. believed that it would encounter the new revolutionary elements on a theoretical level, i.e., on the basis of its critique; what would change would not be the content of situationist theory, but the context in which this theory would be communicated. Any subsequent theoretical development on the part of theS.I. would be predicated on the transposition of its activity to a new social plane. This time, however, the S.I. did not appear as the intellectual precursor of an as yet unformed revolutionary movement, but as the interpreter of a proletariat which it saw as already “in revolt.” When this “objectively” revolutionary class displayed a remarkable immunity to situationist analysis, remaining largely unaffected by the S.I.’s post festum commentaries about the “revolt against work,” the real extent of the S.l.’s influence became known. Situationist practice was confined, as before, to the outer fringes of radical activity; whatever impact the S.I. had on the post-68 radical tendencies was based exclusively on the residual effect of its previously elaborated theses. Situationist theory had become a static force.

The historical impasse which the S.I. had reached by 1970 forced it to resort to extreme measures—ones, however, which only parodied the radical extremism on which the S.I. had founded its activity. In compensating for its isolation from the social forces on which it had made its project dependent, the S.I. displayed an untypical naivete by more or less overtly appealing to the “workers” to assume their historical responsibilities as the sole agents of revolutionary transformation. This recourse to an already archaic form of ouvrierisme was reflected in the situationists’ increasing obsession with the strategic location of industrial workers in the capitalist economy, a fixation which not only placed them in the miserable company of the Left they despised but which grew in direct proportion to the S.l.’s increasing isolation from this stratum. Finding an unlikely inspiration in Lenin, the S.I. crudely viewed productive sectors as the “motor” of the proletariat, and thus necessarily the driving force of modern class conflict; this simplistic conception was compounded by the situationists’ panegyrics to the industrial working class, whose actions, whatever their immediate form or content, were invariably acclaimed as the opening rounds of the Social Revolution. However, these advanced symptoms of “radical” autosuggestion merely revealed the inability of the S.I. to extend the objective base of its practice beyond the exclusive confines of its readership, and when this failure became manifest, the S.I. turned its critical wrath on itself and its constituency.

The decisive importance which the critique of its camp-followers—the pro-situs—was to assume for the S.I. in its later period was itself an indication of a terminal stage in the development of situationist theory. Far from being an “infantile disorder” of the situationist movement, the appearance of the pro-situs was merely an exaggerated sign of the accumulated contradictions of the S.I. In encountering the pro-situs, the S.I. confronted the positive as well as negative aspect of its success: it encountered its own determinateness, its social origins, and hence, its specific character as an historical formation. If the pro-situ was a barrier to the further progress of the S.I., it was only in the sense that the contemplation of the S.I. signified, along with other quite different phenomena, the qualitative barrier to the development of the situationist project. The S.I. recognized the existence of the pro-situ as a necessary result of the radicalization of specific social strata in advanced capitalism, but not as a necessary result of the situationist project itself. In effect, the S.l.’s despising of the pro-situ, stripped of its polemical content, appears as self-despisement: the S.I. could only reproach the pro-situs for being everything the S.I. had made them, for existing as a consequence of the particular manner in which situationist ideas had been diffused within modern history. The existence of an essentially passive mass of partisans to the situationist cause was an inevitable product of this diffusion, which was confined largely to cultural, professional, and educational sectors {a fact which provided the objective basis for the pro-situ “regression”) and in which the S.I. appeared implicitly as a model of revolutionary superiority (a role which determined the subjective character of the pro-situs’ adherence to the S.I.). The pro-situ “stratum” was thus defined both by its social position and by the ideological program which served as the “consciousness” of this pseudo-class. In attempting to account for its “progeny,” the S.I. wished to deny any organic connection between itself and what were, in a real sense, its disciples; the S.I. sought to distance itself from the pro-situs, not only on a necessary critical level, but also historically and socially. But when, in the 61 Theses . . ., the S.I. made such an obvious display of its contempt for students and for the entire pro-situ “milieu,” it only drew attention to the situtationists’ own origins within the radical intelligentsia. Moreover, the pro-situ phenomenon was recognized by the S.I. as a superficial aspect of a larger crisis, but this fundamental crisis of the S.I. was still not perceived in its full dimensions, as a socio-historical crisis.

While the S.l.’s criticism of the pro-situ was explicitly a self-criticism of the S.I., its real value lay in what it unintentionally revealed about the critical power of the S.I. at this point. 61 Theses marked the stagnation of the S.l.’s conceptual progress, and this arrestment of theoretical development would eventually appear as a definite regression, indicating the collapse of the situationist critique into itself. The descent of situationist theory from a plane of historical analysis was already evident in its treatment of the subculture surrounding it: the S.I. considered the pro-situ (in the words of 61 Theses . . . ) as a “sociological phenomenon” and went on to construct in abstracto a typology of the social origins and behavior of the pro-situ. By isolating the subject of its analysis from historical causation, such a methodological procedure lent itself to a rigid separation between “subjective” (those provided by the situationist movement) and “objective” (those provided by history) determinants of situationist activity, and ultimately between that activity and its real foundation. What was lost in this distinction was precisely an understanding of the dynamic unity of the internal and external aspects of the S.l.’s crisis. Ultimately, this connection was made for the S.I. by history: the disintegration of the situationist movement occurs as part of historical movement, coming at the conclusion of a specific phase of radical opposition enclosed within the post-war period, that is, after what were then the “modern revolutionary currents” had reached the zenith of their development. Ironically, it was precisely at this moment that the S.I. chose to proclaim its “victory” and to affirm the concrete relationship of the situationist movement to historical transformation, the S.I. being an advanced expression of the radical aspect of such change. In this context, the S.l.’s theoretical introspection, far from preparing the way for a superior stage of situationist activity, occurs as a critique in extremis, but one which did not even succeed in achieving a certain lucidity “before the grave.”

During its declining period, the S.I. was certainly not unaware of the increasingly prevalent ideological deformation of its theses, and the critique of the pro-situ was in its very essence an attempt to account for the manifestation of a situationist ideology within the intellectual culture of modern society. Debord and Sanguinetti were even prepared to admit the complicity of the S.I. in its own “recuperation'”: however, what they faiied to see was that the ideologization of situationist theory did not stop at their door either, or end with the exclusion of an “ideological” tendency within the S.I. For quite expedient reasons—to do so would have undermined the whole basis of Debord and Sanguinetti’s imposture that the S.I. after its “purification” could continue on a new course—the late S.I. did not describe its own participation in the degeneration of its theory. In fact, 61 Theses . . . indicated that situationist theory had already become an ideology for the S.I. itself; by tacitly declaring that the S.I’s theoretical work had essentially been completed, and that what remained was the implementation of an already-elaborated program, Debord and Sanguinetti disclosed that the S.I. could no longer undertake the “critique of existing conditions.” It would be erroneous to attribute this relinquishment of a historical task to a “subjective failure” since it was not so much the insufficiencies of certain past theorists that concluded the theoretical development of the situationist movement, but the general insufficiency of situationist theory itself. Furthermore, the S.I. was not alone in its inability to explain the real basis of its crisis: all the various remnanis of the situationist movement were united by virtue of the collective impoverishment of their proposals to supersede the S.I. Vaneigem. for instance, could only exchange the complacency of the S.I. for an extremist despair, as evidenced in his Postscript to the second French edition of his Treatise. While Vaneigem’s analysis of the recuperation of situationist ideas retains no illusions as to the revival of the situationist project in any of its previous forms, his rejection of a theory without practice ends up in an abstract renunciation of theory itself in favor of an equally abstract notion of the “revolutionary deed.” In the end, both Vaneigem, in his pathetic caricature of his previous style, and the official S.I., in its hyperbolic description of its real impact on the world, became the equivalent of the “anti-historical man” vilified in 61 Theses . . . The idle boast that “the more famous our theses become, the more obscure we ourselves will be” was more accurate than the S.I. ever imagined—in fact, the S.I. achieved obscurity in its unimportance, its irrelevance to social development in the period following its collapse. The inglorious end of the S.I. has not left its “famous” theses unscathed—the failure of the S.I. in May 1968 and afterwards can only be understood in terms of the deficiencies inherent in situationist theory.