Tales of the City: Applying Situationist Social Practice to the Analysis of the Urban Drama

One thing is for sure, . . . every word uttered by every single academic expert on any subject whatever during the present age is nothing more than a lie paid by a publisher, policed by professors, and fortunately not even read by anybody with any other expectation. ¹

For those familiar with the brief but turbulent history of the Situationist International (SI), or those acquainted with its publications, artwork, and films, Mike Peters's words introducing the work of Guy Debord come as no surprise. Indeed, the attempt to link radical social practice (particularly that of the SI) with academic pursuits may appear to be, at very best, an attempt to co-opt and undermine the vibrancy and independence of an intellectual and creative critique outside the traditional systems of power and knowledge. Perhaps this is so. But while much of the spirit and substantive critique of the SI is kept alive outside the academy in the work of Peters, Bill Brown, and other "pro-situs," ² the argument presented here is simple: by understanding and applying the Situationist critique of urban space (specifically that put forth in the "first phase" of the group—from 1957 to 1962) to motion picture analysis and practice, new roads of understanding and criticism are opened for debate, and the experience of both cinema and the urban milieu may be significantly enriched.

From its beginnings, the SI explicitly positioned its work outside the academy and in opposition to established practices of art and cultural criticism: "Vanish, art critics, partial, incoherent and divided imbeciles! In vain do you stage the spectacle of a false encounter. . . . [You] are in this market to parade one of the aspects of Western commerce: your confused and empty babble on a decomposed culture." ³ The core argument was simple: life—and especially "everyday life" ⁴ —was something to be lived, not studied; critical engagement was to exist at the level of interaction and experience, not analysis.

Even the term "situationism" was explicitly decried as meaningless, implying "a doctrine of interpretation of existing facts," thus "obviously devised by anti-situationists." ⁵ However, as much recent pedagogical focus has shifted from the traditional lecturer/learner model to that of integrated theory and practice, the work of the SI begins to have a certain resonance. The group's warning to itself—not to let its revolutionary program slip into the obscurity of theoretical debate—has much in common with the academy's shift toward a critically informed, active engagement of the world.

Background of the Situationist International

Known for its visibility, if not its leadership, in the Paris uprising of May 1968, the SI is perhaps best described in Guy Debord's own words (and flagged as an apt description of the group by Peter Wollen), as "[The] passage of a few people through a brief period of time." ⁶ At its inception, the SI was the union of several small avant-gardes, or perhaps more accurately, factions of small avant-gardes—in many cases simply individual representatives—who, after first meeting at the "First World Congress of Free Artists" in September 1956, reassembled in Cosio d'Arroscia, Italy, in July 1957, to form the Situationist International. They were, at the founding meeting, a grand total of eight.

The two principal groups represented were the Lettrist International (led by Parisian Guy Debord, who was to become the central figure of the SI), and the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus (or IMIB, led by Danish artist Asger Jorn). A radically political faction of Jean-Isidore Isou's Lettrist Movement, the LI broke with Isou following his castigation of their public action against Charlie Chaplin's Paris press conference in support of Limelight (October 1952). The IMIB was an offshoot of the COBRA (Copenhagen-Brussels-Amsterdam) group of artists and writers, who revolted against the "official styles" of both socialist realism and abstract modernism. ⁷

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