ACFM - ACFM Trip 63: Situationism

Episode Date: September 13, 2026

What did the Situationists actually achieve? Nadia, Jem and Keir look back on the antics and manifestos of the socialist revolutionaries who gathered under the banner of the Situationist International. With ideas from Debord and Khayati and music from the KLF and Negativland, the gang chart the SI’s influence on politics and media theory, from the central concept of the Spectacle to their lingering influence on pop music, psychogeography and political organising. Find the music and books mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters Follow our playlist on Spotify by searching ‘ACFM’. Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Hello, welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. My name's Keir Milbin, and I'm joined as usual by my good friend Nadia Idol. Hello. And my other good friend, Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And today we are discussing situationism. Or are we? Are we discussing situationist ideas and the situationist history?

For those of you who haven't got a clue what I'm talking about, the situationists were a group of artists, political theorists who are influential on radical politics and culture, especially punk and post-punk scenes through the 70s, 80s and 90s. So what do you think, Jeremy? I think it's a really interesting topic. I mean, partly we want to do it this week, because Rao Vanim, one of the great situationist thinkers,

just passed away last week. and it's the idea of situationism or the activities of the situationist international and its constituent members, which is an important distinction. It's had a significant effect on various aspects of culture, radical culture, and it's provided a vocabulary in a set of ways of thinking about things

which has been quite important for certain kinds of avant-garde practice and attempt to theorise the nature of capitalist power and culture in the late 20th century and subsequently. So there's a lot to look out there. There's a lot to draw on and get engaged with. I guess, like a lot of people will have been situationist adjacent or curious at some point in their lives. And I definitely was, like, as a teenager. So I'm looking forward to talking about that.

What about you, Nadia? Yes, all of that is super interesting. I think there's a direct link to our last couple of episodes about why we're talking about this now, the famous quote attributed to, but maybe actually not created by, but the situationist or situationist ideas of beneath the street, the beach. We've just been talking about the beach, and that's kind of one of the famous slogans associated with some of that thinking. But also in general, I think situationist ideas are kind of fresh at the moment in the sense, they talk to some very ACFM topics perhaps, like desire, the spectacle, recuperation,

and kind of that critique being something that we're interested in in terms of how it's related to some stuff that might be quite alive for us now, ideas of capitalist realism, algorithms, meme warfare, and that sort of thing. So I think that's a good reason why we should be talking about situationism or the situationists at this moment in time. What about yourself, Keir? You know, I read quite a lot of situationist theory in my early 20s. In fact, before that, I'd sort of like come across situationist ideas

because it was quite a big influence on the sort of like the post-punk anarchist sort of milieu I grew up in. One of the ways I come across situationist ideas was through these little small pamphlets which were released under the title, Spectacular Times by this guy, Larry Law. There were like little pamphlets where he made the, ideas of the situation is sort of digestible to a sort of punk rock audience I think and are they

just the the collection of these spectacular times pamphlets have just been reprinted and I've been issued as a collection basically I think by Seth Wheeler I'm not sure a friend of the show probably not very frequent listener well I found it really interested actually going back and looking at my situationist books I've got quite a lot a large collection and like reading my annotations and stuff like that because it reminded me of my relationship with like situationist ideas because around about that time in the early 20s I was coming out of a sort of situationist inflected sort of class struggle anarchism into a much more Marxist sort of political position I think primarily through reading like autonomists basically autonomous Marxists and these sorts of

characters at that sort of time you could almost read the history of autonomy of is starting with a critique of councilism that's belief in workers' councils. Critique of that in 1950s is the birth of like operismo really. So yeah, we could get into a bit of that, a bit later on, I think. But it's almost like it is tied up with my own biography, I think. And so it's an interesting thing to go back to and rethink. And like you, Nadia, I was thinking when I went back, I'd sort of like given up on situationism a long time ago or situationist ideas.

Partly because like their conception of like, of subjectivity seemed pretty naive after I'd started reading more Marxist theory and then into post-structures theory like Foucault and Deleuze and Guatari etc but going back and reading some of that stuff it made me think I actually this has quite a lot of purchase on on the contemporary world of Instagram social media and perhaps even AI and stuff so I think it'd be interesting to read them through current problems and see what's of use basically that's my relationship to those so let's get into it then but before we get into it we always do our little iDense. First off, we should mention our newsletter, the ACFM newsletter that goes out once a month.

I wrote a little piece about my favourite bench in the world yesterday, which is near a beach. You won't want to miss that. So go and sign up to the newsletter at navara.media forward slash ACFM newsletter. The converse, of course, is that we always play music on this show. and if you want to just listen to the music, you can search for the ACFM playlist on Spotify. We want five-star reviews and comments of encouragement, perhaps, but also suggestions of ideas that we could follow, etc., etc.

So you can leave them on whatever platform you listen to. And you can support us financially by supporting our host body that we parasite on. Navarra Media. You can support Navarra for a little. little as a month a pound a month by going to navara.media forward slash support, right? As the parish notices out the way. Where should we start with this? We should probably just say a little bit about people might not have any clue what the situation is, who the situation is, were, you know,

what we're talking about. So we should give a little, just like a couple of sentence, positioning statement, perhaps. Who wants to do that? I mean, I can say something really briefly, which is, you know, there's one way of looking at it, which is that, the Situationist International, I think we're going to, we're going to complexify that and explain that it's not necessarily the same thing as the situationist or situationism. But in a way, it could be said that they emerged from the wreckage of data and surrealism in a way, right? And so there's some kind of genealogy that you can see, genealogy that you can see there. And another way

of also describing them is this is a kind of small, shifting group of avant-garde artists and theorists, right? About 1950s. I think to 72. So it's a small group of people. Almost everybody was expelled except two people. It doesn't say very good about left cohesion, and not very good things about left cohesion, but also very interesting in terms of the ideas that came out of that.

So that would be my very kind of short statement trying to give an idea of who these people are. But I'm sure Jeremy, you've got a lot more to expand on on that. No, I think that's good for a start. There are a bunch of artists who had been involved in the late stage of surrealist derived avant-gardeism in the 50s. And we're trying to think about, well, what did that mean? And how did they fit into the wider world?

I think that's adequate to begin with, before we get into any more details. Okay, the scene is set. Now we must introduce the main characters before the play begins. The main main character definitely had main character syndrome. Is Guidey Bohr, who is like the chief sort of theory of the Situationist International. Probably, you'd say,

is their leader, although you'd definitely be expelled from a Situationist International if you said that. So, Gedea Bohr, he's really, I suppose he's a political theorist, and then he makes films, as his other main activity is making films.

He was also like a chronic alcoholic had drunk himself to death. We should not forget that, basically. And sort of like the chief organiser of the Situationist International. And we'll go, we'll talk a little bit more. all about his history and the ideas that he produced.

He wrote definitely the main text of a situationist, which is the Society of the Spectacle, which is published in 1967, I think. There's a lot of people who are at pains to basically highlight the fact that the situationists were not just about Guideborg, because Society of the Spectacle is kind of like the famous book, which from a 21st century perspective,

kind of crosses into the mainstream, in a way. And I mean, maybe that's something to debate as well about whether these ideas, a lot of which are about trying to fight against the co-opted, sorry, by capitalism, was in fact co-opted by the mainstream. So I think there's like a meta idea there we can discuss later. But one of the problems is that there's this association of the situationist with just Guy de Bourg. But there are some other Keith characters like Michelle Bernstein, who was also one of the co-founders. She's often reduced to being mentioned as Guideborg's wife, but she's got her own contributions and she wrote a lot for various publications. Obviously, you guys mentioned Raul Vanyim, or Vanim,

I'm not sure how to pronounce it, who's the author of the other book, not as famous as Society of the Spectacle, The Revolution of Everyday Life. It's the Situationist International's, I guess, other major texts, and it's focused on, what can I say, subjectivity and desire a bit more, I suppose, than media spectacle. And then there's Jacqueline de Jong, who's the Dutch member who found her own kind of publication after she was expelled. And we should say that, like,

people getting expelled is like a big thing that's happening in the situationists. This mostly starts in France. Is this right? Is this the site at which this kind of activity starts? It's important to understand. Their model is basically the surrealist. and the Surrealists had organized themselves into a sort of semi-formal organisation,

led by Andre Breton. And we talked about all that when we did the episode on Surrealism. Breton had his manifestos, and Breton was very fond of expelling people from the Surrealist organization, like for being insufficiently dedicated to communism or for some other kind of philosophical or theoretical infraction. But even with the Surrealists, one reads, all this stuff and it's often quite difficult to get a handleable.

What were they actually doing? What were they doing? And mostly what they were doing is they would have little magazines where they would write essays in them. And then if somebody thought your essay had been particularly wrong, then they would tell the others that they thought you should be now no longer allowed to be part of this organisation and then you were not formally part of it. What it actually meant to be formally part of it, it's not that clear. I mean, a lot of it is just like who gets invited to.

somebody's house for a sort of salon and who doesn't and like who who gets to appear in this little magazine who or who doesn't and you can make an argument that the whole thing is sort of ridiculous that it's kind of absurd it's a sort of absurd it is itself a sort of absurd spectacle like pretending that your little your little network of artists and critics is somehow like equivalent to a revolutionary party that has to maintain revolutionary discipline for some purpose or or other and So that's already going on with the surrealists, like before the war. I mean, some of the people who get expelled from the surrealists, like Salvador Dali gets denounced for being a kind of lackey of the Francoist regime, which is...

Let's, hang on, I'm in it. He should have been expelled. I'm with Bretta. No, I know. That's my point. That's my point. My point is, that's sort of fair enough. That was true.

But then the situationists, I mean, they start calling themselves the situationist in the late 50s, Before that, most of them are in this group called the letterists. Because one of the things they're into is sort of language poetry. And it's always important to remember. It's true, the surrealists as well. Like a lot of the people who were kind of involved, like we're not producing like visual art, which is the thing that gets most often remembered. They were doing various kinds of writing, which very, very few people have ever read.

And the situationists as well, all the people we, again, the people we think of as the situationist, the people who called themselves the letterist and then the situationist international who were mostly a network of people in places like Belgium, France, Britain. And often when you're talking about a network of like it's not even dozens of people. It's like, you know, at any one time

it might be like a dozen a lot of the time. It's like two people in Belgium or whatever, right? It's like not even that many. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. I remember reading at one point, like there was one time and there was a London cell of the situation, it's international.

and it was like three people or something. No, I think there was only one. Ralph Romney was the English member of the situation. It's International. Okay, okay. I get mixed up with the surrealist, because I remember, you know, people like George Melly was officially a surrealist at one time.

So I get mixed up between them. We should talk a little bit more about the Lettress International, though, because they sort of set up a, because you're right, like the Retis International, they're all about, like, you know, writing, etc. And in fact, there's like, footage of like a couple of members in Paris, drunk in Paris with like slogans all over their all over their clothes basically, all down their legs, etc.

Fucking precursor to punk, do you know what I mean? So they're into that, but there are also artists there, like their most famous actual artist is this guy, Aske Yorn, who is sweet, yeah, Swedish, I think. Aske Yon is like a fairly famous, successful painter. One of the things he's most famous for is invented a machine which could, like, does automatic painting and used to sell paintings by the yard as a critique of the idea of genius and in fact who was the companion to jacqueline di jong i'm pretty sure but the other thing that the letterist international do is they do like interventions or stunts and that's another thing

that's associated with like situationists activity the most well-known stunt they did was a couple of members sort of dressed up as priests and went into notre dame on a Sunday like, and went up onto the, um, uh, uh, what's it called where the priest does the talk from? The pulpit. The pulpit. He went on to the pulpit and then started, um, delivering a lecture on how God is dead, basically. In the, they got attacked by the congregation and nearly lynched and, uh, etc, etc. So they used to do like bits, bits and pieces like that, basically.

And even a Letters International, they were doing these things, Derives before the situation is. The situation is form, as in their whole this meeting. which is like the Letcherist International, the movement for a new Bauhaus, I don't know how many, the English Psychogeographical Society, which is Ralph Romney, this artist in London. And so, yeah, it's like they all get together, they probably get drunk and they sort of say, right, we're going to do this, we're going to do this thing, basically. Yeah, I think the architecture of this stuff is actually worth, you know, spending a little bit of time on, because for the lay person who's not been a member of a left group or a small or an avant-garde group or whatever,

one thing that the big vanguardist parties have in common with small groups, and maybe this is like basically one theory is that what it is to be on the left is that there is some kind of sectarianism or there has to be a line. Even if it is, you can't be in my salon anymore. I don't want to hang out with you versus like you are expelled from a kind of formal membership on a party level. But there has to be some kind of line that says you cannot come in no longer. Like your idea, your idea, is, you know, do not belong or, you know, in a less democratic sense, or I guess it can also not be democratic at all, but you, if it's about personality or behavior, your persona non grata, whereas I suppose one of the things that the right is very good at doing is kind of co-opting, in a sense, is like buying you in. And because the left can't buy you in with money is often, it's often, you know, expelling or creating those boundaries, which for someone who's not been members of political groups, like this idea of expulsions and how groups are formed and ideas kind of coalesce in those spaces might be completely alien.

No, actually I think it is interesting that thing of the expulsions. And like you can explain it with the situation as international in that like they don't want to be a mass, mass organisation. In fact, they are against parties. They are against any form of mediation, basically, between people. And so like what they want is like a total critique basically and a total like, you know, separation from the sort of dynamics of capitalism. So like anybody who's an artist who exhibits in a gallery, you're out, basically. But it's also a little bit like this is part of their art in a way. There's a guy called Stuart Holm, who's just written a book called a fascist yoga.

He's like a notorious person who was really into situationist sort of post-situationalist sort of movements, etc. I used to write these novels based on Richard Allen novels, etc. And like he used to go on about like feuding is an art form and that's what he does. He falls out with people of feuds in the most vociferous way and it's part of his practice. Do you know what I mean? There's like an art practice, this expulsion and feuding sort of thing, which takes it a bit far, but like, yeah, that's sort of interesting. I think it's also a sort of psychosocial reaction formation, like to the situation they find themselves in, because partly, I think as we already said at the start, I think you can't really overestimate this in terms of how important it is

to them. The thing they're really reacting to is the institutionalisation of the avant-gards after World War II. So a lot of their practice, you can trace all the way back to the kind of absurdist theatre of Dada and associated groups, even in the 1910s. But what they're really responding to is this sense that, well, like in the 30s, like it was pretty much normal to think that if you were involved in one of the avant-garde art movements, you were affiliated to some broader, like, revolutionary political movement, whether it was fascist or communist or some kind of anarchist.

And then they find themselves in this situation in the 50s, but like a whole bunch of things have happened that they weren't really expecting. Like one is the kind of consolidation of the so cold war and the kind of consolidation of Stalinism in the Soviet Union, creating this situation where it feels like the sort of immediate revolutionary energy has gone out of the Soviet project,

as well as the out of capitalist society. But at the same time as that, you've got the institutionalization of modernism, like especially in the States, in the 50s. I mean, this is something like I've talked about before on the show, and it's something I've never, I have not ever found actually an academic source that I feel really nails down this story properly, which is surprising given how much is written on this subject.

And I think it might well be because I've missed it, like I haven't, or haven't looked hard enough. But I think there's this very specific role played by institutions like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which basically comes along after World War II and it says we are now going to make New York the home of world modern culture because in the way that Paris was

for a long, for decades before the Nazi occupation and in order to do that we're going to tell everyone that all these people who were very controversial like before World War II like Picasso, like they're not controversial anymore they're just widely to be accepted as like complete geniuses and we're going to we're going to

we're going to bundle together all these different artistic movements and tendencies, like from Impressionism to Cubism, including DADA. And we're going to bundle them all in with this, under this term, that previously had only really been used for like architecture or some kind of writing, and that's modernism. And that partly means detaching them from their political commitments and just making them not like communist art movements, but just sort of modern art movements.

They're in favour of like progress and the future. And that, I mean, all that all culminates in like the CIA, like literally giving loads of money to sort of fund exhibitions by people like Jackson Pollitt because they're trying to create a kind of American modernism and kind of American avant-gardism. And, you know, they really try and appropriate jazz as like a symbol of American liberalism as somehow sort of anti-communist. It all becomes part of the Cold War. This is really, obviously, it's really, really traumatic to a lot of these as sort of artists to their whole kind of identity and their whole relationship to the world. is predicated on the understanding that the avant-garde were sort of politically revolutionary and not just sort of aesthetically progressive. And that's an important distinction.

And I think partly they respond to it with this kind of this sort of mad parody of like revolutionary of the revolutionary organization, which is always, you know, can never be revolutionary enough. I mean, it's the trouble with DeBoer, isn't it? It's like you can, you want to be revolutionary. So what?

So what are you going to have? You're going to have like a revolutionary? revolutionary party. No, that's not revolutionary enough. The form of the revolutionary party has been compromised by Stalinism and by electoral mass politics and the hated Communist Party of France, like becoming an electoral party. So therefore, we're going to do some other thing. Well, what is the other thing, Guy? Well, it's basically whatever I say it is today. And like, and if, and if, and if, and if, and maybe it's what you say it is, but if you say a thing that annoys me, I'll say, I'll denounce you and say that, and say it's not that thing. And of course, the logic of it, in the case of

De Bois, is that Guy De Boer by, you know, by the 70s becomes this sort of ridiculous figure. Like, it's pretty self-evident that basically the consistent position he has is that only he, Guy, De Boer, really understands what the hell is going on in the world and no one else properly understands it.

And the only way you can claim to properly understand it is by completely agreeing with Guy De Boer and every single thing. And it becomes this sort of, it actually becomes this sort of mad parody, like the thing that it is, it sees itself, critiquing. But I think it is all a reaction formation to this genuine trauma, which is

understandable. And I think it's worthwhile us, like from our vantage point in history, like, really understanding. You can well imagine a world in which that didn't happen. Like, the American middle class decided to just appropriate the art, the art practices of the, of the European, like, into war avant-gards and institutionalise them. and turn them into just the sort of material of their own elite culture. Like you can well imagine that not happening and it is still, you know, we should be sort of shocked

that it happened. Like we should be shocked at like James Joyce's Ulysses which is banned, literally banned in Britain because it's considered too shocking because of this masturbation scene in it. You know, by the late 50s, it's been institutionalised in the American Ivy League English Literative Department as like the great,

like, iconic reference point for the whole idea of like literature as an objective academic study, that we should be shocked by that, sort of. The way this works out for the situationists is that, like, one of the big lines into their theory from, like, the avant-garde art movement is that, like, there's a line that runs right through

surrealists and, like, post-serreelist groups, which is, like, should art be an active, a specialised activity for a specialised group of people called artists, basically. The line is that, no, it shouldn't, you know, there should not be a, there should not be a division between art and art practice and everyday life. One of the big sort of slogans that the serenists are really into

is by Laudremont, this idea that like, you know, poetry must be made by everyone, basically. And so, like, in a way, that's sort of like the sort of conception of freedom that they get from avant-garde art practice and that line of avant-garde art from the early 20th century, a conception of freedom which is, like, really bound up with, like well what are the constraints that prevent people expressing creativity basically something like that what's the what's the constraints that that prevent people from being you know to make

everybody to make poetry in in whatever form that doesn't mean just writing poems obviously it's all sorts of like forms of creativity and like free activity basically that sort of idea and so you can understand a lot of their practice in that sort of way they're trying to work out you know the that you know the um work out and overcome the the the the the the thing that that prevent us from living life directly, as they would put it, basically. So they have all sorts of practices, practices such as the derive that we've talked about before. You know, that's an art practice in everyday life, but trying to break the sort of, like when you walk around the city, trying to break the rhythm or the, or the structuring of the, of your

movement around the city, which is usually around work or consumption, basically, the two sort of functions of capital, etc. These sorts of, these sorts of ideas. And I think that is what, it's like, it's a battle over who could own or who could structure that conception of freedom basically. Will that be associated with the US and the West basically? Or will it be associated with anti-capitalist politics, basically? That was the thing that structured post-the post-war world, which is struck into two worlds, of course. And I think there's something important to say about going back to like the context in which they're operating, which is that none of these people had any problems.

job. I'm saying this, sounding like a conservative here. But like, you know, it was anti-work politics in a way, and they were able to survive on odd jobs and not, you know, have to have a nine to five or kind of like fit into that kind of Fordist kind conceptualization of what work was, but that was only possible, I suppose, under certain conditions. We haven't talked about Lefevre, maybe somebody wants to say a little bit more than I would, but I kind of like understanding as well, like the lineage and how some of people like DeBoer get their ideas. Going back to what Keir was saying, this idea of if we're going to talk about, you know, freedom, which I think is a really important topic or, you know, thread to be thinking about,

throughout talking about the situationist's work and their ideas. But this idea of alienation not being something that is just happening in the workplace, which, of course, in the 21st century is a critique of capitalism, like, is really important to, you know, us here at ACFM. So this idea of daily existence being that site or the politics of every day and thinking about boredom, thinking about routine and thinking about consumption and leisure, which are of course really, you know, really important kind of sites for us to be having the discussion today. I mean, those kind of ideas had an effect on Guide de Bour and some of the other ones. And then, of course, they all have to fall out and accuse each other.

of lifting ideas from one another. So Lefevre is a French, he's spelled L-E-E-F, oh hang on, where's the B, L-E, L-E-S-E-E-F-R-E. Yeah. That's a good Anglo-Saxon spelling. So Henri Lefevre is French thinking, you know, he's an academic, in France he sometimes described as a philosopher, sometimes as a historian, his most famous in the academic world

for promoting the study of everyday life and also for his famous book The Reproduction of Space so he's interested in thinking from a broadly historical materialist perspective of Marxian perspective he's interested in thinking about things like indeed like how do power relationships

get institutionalised in architect or in town planning or even in rural planning and the idea that the way in which we expect space is all informed by power relationships. This does end up having a big impact on Foucault, for example, which doesn't get acknowledged as often as it probably should. And Lefevre was also an associate, he was associate of some of the surrealists,

like before the war, and afterwards, so he's interested in questions of subjectivity, of sort of personal experience and aesthetic experience, which it was still relatively unusual for Marxists to be interested in those questions. very attentively. And I think he ends up being a very important influence on people like David Harvey,

the great Marxist geographer of our times and people are interested in all those sets of issues. And it's got to be said, from the point of view of an interest in sort of academic theory, and I don't mean academic just in a bad sense. I mean academic in the sense of, you know, it's got proper footnotes and it's based on research in the archive and reading all the books and not just saying what you recognize.

which is a bit more the De Boer and Vanim style really. Like in those terms, you know, he's a much more, he's a much, much more kind of significant figure. It's like a much more kind of weighty a figure. He's also connected a little bit to people like Fernand Bridell and that school of French social historians who are becoming interested in the idea that the way you should study histories

is to look at the way people have lived their lives on a daily basis over centuries and the way those things change over long periods of time. I mean, that's the kind of reality. of it and then this idea of like everyday life like it becomes this term it it's in the title of ralvanemes the revolution of everyday life it's been like an important aspect of some you know working out english language cultural studies over the past couple of decades like my friend ben hymore is like one of the people who really sort of promoted everyday life as an object to study

for cultural studies and i think is the thing is i think i think this the idea of being interested in everyday life. It holds out this kind of tantalizing prospect for radicals and avant-gardeous and artist in that post-war period because on the one hand it seems like really the point of revolution would be to change our everyday lives, wouldn't it? It's not just to increase the grain quotas coming out of the paddy fields. It's to make out the way we live our lives every day feel different. And it also holds out the prospect, well, maybe we can be revolutionaries simply by changing the way we live our everyday lives in some sense. But I think it is often a sort of disappearing object.

It's like, well, okay, yeah, it's interesting. Of course, everyday life is something interesting to think about and reflect upon, but also, well, arguably, isn't that what everyone's been doing since Socrates? So why are you so excited by this concept of everyday life? And maybe I'm just projecting myself here, because I think when I was really, I found it a really kind of evocative and exciting idea. like when I was a teenager in the 80s. And I think it was that combination of factors,

the idea that, yeah, the point of the revolution would be to mean we can live our whole lives differently. You know, like Mark says, you can be a critic in the morning and a fisherman in the evening. And it becomes really appealing to people in that post-war context, partly because everyday life becomes sort of boring. I mean, this is that great point, you know, by that famous Plan C document that we like to cite

about how boredom becomes like the dominant affect of the post-war, Because that is like the side effect of Fordism, the side effect of the great Fordist social compromises. Right, revolution's off the table now. But you are all going to have like stable jobs, careers and homes to the rest of your lives. And it does mean, you know, people feel like something's lost, like a sense of adventure, a sense of danger and a sense of possibility. All seem to be lost compared to the way in which people are experiencing things. Now I'm saying all this out loud. I think it's not really that people, there was some continuing.

as history whereby like people had had really exciting lives whether they wanted them or not because they were precarious and people that are sort of missing that. I do think there's probably a very specific comparison with what it felt like to be like a revolutionary or an artist or even just an ordinary citizen. Say especially in France in the 30s during the period of the popular front and the you know the Leon Blum probably the front government the fight against fascism. Like you're living through this and the early stages of the Russian Revolution. Like it feels like you really might be on the brink of revolution. Like it really does feel like if you take to the streets doing like a weird performance with your mates,

it might like accumulate a crowd and suddenly you might be reliving the commune of like 50 years earlier. And all that possibility seems like it's gone in like the Gaulist 50s in France. All that possibility seems like it's been replaced with this kind of routineized experience of an industrial of society, which is relatively affluent. and that sense of the evacuation of possibility, like where it feels like it's really gone from is like your everyday life, the quality of everyday life,

like it seems like it's been sort of dissipated. And that's partly why, I think people partly take that, they try, they take some of that language from Laféveve, I think. But Lefebvre himself is really, like, worthy of reading and sort of study, like entirely irrespective

of whether you're interested in situationism, to be honest. I mean, I also think there's one small thing I'd add there, which is also about, I think that's all true, but it's also about acknowledging where the site of oppression is and to bring back the kind of, you know, the spotlight on the arenas where people perhaps, because of the boredom, because of the reality, because of the kind of discourse and, you know, soup they were living in, environmental soup they were living in, we're seeing that oppression in certain spaces like perhaps the workplace and the home, but not necessarily in the street or in consumerism. And so I think maybe perhaps that's that's one of the ways

of kind of refocusing it on everything, like trying to create a radical life, you know, outside specific sites that were delineated in that kind of post-war reality. Basically, DeBoer and Vannegan both go to a series of lectures that Lefevre is doing in the 1950s, basically before they form the situation as international. And Boudrear's there as well, actually. I think it's like, it's like the Free Trade Hall in Manchester Free Trade. trade halls, sex pistols, getting, everybody was there. But I wanted to raise another direct influence, basically,

because I think that also helps position historically where they were, unlike basically the historical limitations of like that theory now, basically. So one of the really big influences on the situation international is a group called socialism Ubabari, which is a sort of

libertarian socialist, Marxist group whose, whose like main theorists was, is it? Cornelius Castoriadis, isn't it? And like their sort of main theory is that like Marx was wrong about immiseration. Like they're in the post-war boom. They're trying to come to terms of the birth of a mass consumption society, etc. And they think that, yeah, that capitalism has in a developed world,

and perhaps it will be around the whole word at some point, solve the problem of poverty, basically. Part of this thing about the dissatisfaction of everyday life is that like there's a disjunction between the possibilities of a post-scarcity society and like the realities of the fact that we, still have to go to work, et cetera. Our desire is a channel through only what can be turned into consumer goods, etc. And so for socialism, we'll barbary, the big sort of distinction in society is sort of workers

and capitalists, but in a way they want to join up, like what's going on in the post-war West with like what's going on in the Soviet Union. And they think the Soviet Union is a state capitalist organization, which has been taken, which, where the bureaucracy is taking control. and there's also a big thing of like, that's sort of what's happened in the, in the West as well. You've got these big bureaucracies who are developing and they're the ones who are controlling the world, etc, etc.

So they have this distinction. They say the key distinction is between order givers and order takers. Those who take orders and those who give orders, and that's a way of them to link up both sides of the Berlin Wall in a way. The other big theoretical commitment that the situationist take directly because all of that is fed into the situationist theory, in particularly society of the spectacle. But the really big thing that they take from the socialism or barbarie

is like this political commitment to councilism as it's called, that like the workers' councils. So basically workers taking over their workplaces and just running them directly. Workers' councils is like that just solves the problem of the revolutionary organisation. You don't need a party. Workers' councils are like no mediation. There's just people directly controlling their lives. And there's a definite, you know, basically the Hungarian revolution in 1956

is the moment where that becomes, that seems to, that this prediction seems to come true, basically. It's a big moment where lots of people leave the Communist Party all around the, or communist parties all around the world, including in the UK. The situation is they fully commit to this idea

that like revolution equals workers councils, etc. But like, there is a critique of it, which is like, they're really interested in everyday life and I have literally no interest in what everyday life inside a workers council would be like. Or, you know, all of the historical experience.

are that, do you know what I mean? They just don't seem to be interested in like how the councils function, what their limitations are, etc. And I think it's because they're not fucking interested in that. Workers' councils operate, the idea of a workers' council operates as like an outside, a pure outside for which you can do a total critique. So you can critique all politics as it doesn't match up to the workers' council. If you do look at like, if you do look at like what the the life inside of workers' council is like, it's fucking intense, basically. It may only be that that form of like total and mediation is only sustainable during these moments of high intensity

and in fact you need other forms of organisation outside of those, do you know? Yeah, I think that's true. I mean I was just thinking when you were saying that, what happened to the people who were interested in what life was really like in a workers' council and thought it sounded cool? And the answer to that is those people mostly became Maoists. But that's an interesting understanding of like, why did people become Maoists at that time?

And it's for exactly that reason, actually. It's exactly that genealogy. Informal hierarchies. People get bored of it, and they're like, we might as well formalise this shit. Well, I said, but also what people think of is, when I say Maoist, like people think, you know, struggle sessions and endless consciousness ratings,

it seems like cool. Like that's a very different way of life. I mean, I guess the other historical reference point people have got, especially in France, in the 50s, is the anarcho-synicalist a movement in the Spanish Civil War, which is still, like, that is still a reference point

for a lot of people. And there's a bit, there's a, and there's a fair amount of kind of movement, I think, between kind of formal and archa-sindicalist

organizations and groups and things like the S.I. And like Maoism as well, but they've, they have got that. And there is this idea that, you know, the radically democratic or participatory way of organizing

the struggle against fascism, especially in Catalonia, like under anarcho-sindicist influence, is this kind of, ideal. It's not a thing we really talk about that much these days, but like for decades after that, it was a big, it was a big question for radical leftists. Was it basically the fault of Stalin and the Communist Party that the Republic lost the Spanish Civil War? I mean, it's similar to the way people talk about Kronstadt. I mean, that's an important, really, the rebellion, the anarchist-inspired

rebellion of sailors against the Bolsheviks, like pro-revolution, but anti-Bolshevik, rebellion in during the Russian Revolution, it becomes this really important reference point, especially for for situationists quite often, I think. Can I tell a little anecdote about that? That's just reminded me. The reason I know a lot about socialism or barbarie is because like my dad was in the English, no, sorry, the British wing of them. He wasn't in the English wings, it was in the Swansea branch of Solidarity,

who were like the British wing of... Big slip up there. Yes. Although he was an Englishman himself, a proud Englishman. So basically when I was like, when I first got into punk and started going like, oh, Anarchy in the UK, he literally gave me all of his, his solidarity pamphlets, lots of which were like translations of like Castoria Hadis and this sort of stuff. To be clear with people, solidarity was the name of the organisation. It had nothing to do with the Polish, the Polish anti-communist Union solidarity. It predated that.

It's an organisation that was mainly active in the 70s. And it was very, and it was seen in the broader left as like very, very kind of libertative. socialist, like very democratic, very anti-Sythernerist, the nearest thing that was active at the time, maybe sort of Italian workerist or indeed like French, sort of anarcho-sindicist groups. But like one of the pamphlets he gave me was a pamphlet on Cronstadt, basically. So I remember being in like Sixthorm College and like the local trots were, like they had a full-time. I think it was a militant full-time at the time. Try to recruit me and I pulled out my, my Cronstadt pamphlet and said, what are

about this, just to give you a little flavour of the times. It's just coming back to me, the militant full-timer, we called him Mac the mouth. I probably haven't thought that thought for 30 years. No, it's funny. I used to do that. I would argue in the street in Liverpool. I would argue in the street with Chotskyists based on the same thing. But I think one reason all that's not so important these days,

because I think all the most recent historiography on the Spanish Civil War, has come to, draws the conclusion that the answer to the question, like, would the Republic have won if it had all been organised along our anarcho-sindicalist lines and the Stalinist Communist Party had not intervened, is categorically no. There's absolutely no one can look at all the evidence and draw that conclusion, with any degree of, like, conviction. My main point of all of that was, like, when I look back at it now,

that, like, that period is absolutely gone, because immiseration is back, baby, you know what I mean? It's like, you know, that post-war period, that post-war boom period, it's a politics of that, isn't it, basically? The idea you can separate people between order givers and order takers

does not conform to contemporary modes of capitalism, basically, in which, like, the ability to have some sort of control or give orders to some sort of people, either through work or from consumption, it's just much more widespread. My own sort of political trajectory was, like, was through this critique of worker of counsel, which is like the Italian opericity basically, they do this thing and they say, look, you know,

that councilism is from a very specific historical period and class composition. And they, you know, it's basically, it becomes really big when workers, before Fordism, basically, when workers had an idea of what the work process was and you could just, and they're the ones who knew how work, how work functioned and they're the ones who could just take over a factory and run it, basically. And when you get to mass Fordism and the mass, work, as they put it, like, you can't do that because the actual knowledge of the total work process is in the head of the managers. That is what Fordism is, basically. That whole idea of pride in your work and, well, let's just take over the factories and run them, etc.

Like that basically, it falls away into something which is much more about rejection and revolt, that the situation is sort of straddle these two sort of historical periods in some degree. There's one other question that was, I was asking myself when I was researching this, And I was just thinking, is this a French boy theory club? But then no, actually, because there's people from, you know, there's the idea of like the French theory boys, but no actually because there were at least people from other parts and other countries. You know, this is not just happening in the left bank in Paris, completely anyway.

And then I tend to think to myself, like, is this a cult, like, see, understanding the, you know, the expulsions and the different characters and, you know, in it. So I was thinking that to myself, but also one of the whole. of the sites that kind of complexify the idea of who this situationists were or kind of what the kind of psychological or literal milieu

that they were operating in is that of course one of the other events that are happening is happening at the same time is in this kind of post-war era is the kind of anti-colonial movements and the liberation movements in the continent of Africa

in other places as well. And you know the situationists were not just all European. They were predominantly European, but there were a couple of other characters, and one of them, I think that's worth mentioning, because often the women and the global South people get left off is Mustafa Chayati, who's actually Tunisian, and he was the author of one of the most influential pamphlets, which is on the poverty of student life in 1966, and that wasn't the most widely, it was one of the most widely circulated texts, and it's not written by a European but, you know, his name seems to kind of drop off as well when even the 21st century,

when people are talking about the situation. So that's worth mentioning because, you know, there is that backdrop of, you know, North African and African liberation and anti-colonialist movements as well when these ideas are being formed. So I think it's worth mentioning. Particularly in France, like the Algerian revolution is going on. And Algeo is a French colony and, like, it is fucking bloody, basically. You know, and there are demonstrations by Algerians in Paris,

the police attack and kill hundreds of people. and dump them in the same. Like, this is something, it's not a side of, a sideshow. And it doesn't, it doesn't really show up in, like, situationist theorising to any degree. Like, any conception of colonialism isn't really in there as far as I can work out. So it's really, it's an interesting point, yeah. I'm really conscious that we have not explained the term,

like situationism, situationist. Like, why did they call themselves that? Does anyone want to have a crack? Because in all honesty, I've never been able to be explained. to me properly. I'll have a go. I'll have a go. Well, first of all,

they would refute the idea that there's any such thing as situationism, which they see is an ideology. There was a, they, in 1970, De Boe and all of the French came over to the ICA

for some exhibition and there was a big interview. The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Yeah, I'm sorry. It's not the central point of the anecdote. Basically, they'll, like, do a big talk, etc. And then somebody stands up and says,

could you explain what situationism is? And De Boer's, says, we're not here to answer cuntish questions and you'll walk out, basically. So they think that, like, situationism would be an ideological formation, and they're not an ideology is there? Why that matters? I don't know. Because they fucking are. But anyway, that's not the point.

The point is, like, the phrase the situationist comes from this idea that, like, one of the ways, one of the early practices of the situationists, or one of the early concepts, is this idea of, like, you know, life freed from the constricting and disciplining effects of capital would consist of like constructing situations actively and critically constructing situations in which you can form the sort of like passionate relationships that you would like to basically and in fact perhaps actually we could experiment

with trying to create construct situations now which is partly what things such as the derive is and we can talk a little bit more about the derive etc and then even you know perhaps may 60s you know, in Paris, etc. You know, then you could see, you know, all the debates in the Sorbonne, etc. And all this huge, intense political discussion. And everybody getting caught up by the passions of the moment, etc.

And perhaps that would be a construction of a situation, basically. That construction of situations is one of the ways which you could understand that. Yeah, or it might be a stunt. It might be like a one-off political action. I mean, a lot of the kind of 90s styles were. street theatre as political action is sort of informed by people being into situationist theory and thinking that, you know, what you're doing when you block the road and put on a rave or dig up Parliament Square and plant flowers is you're,

you're interrupting the routinised tedium and depression and alienation of everyday life in capitalist culture. And by doing that, you're actually doing something really radical and something progressive. You're creating a situation. And if that sounds like a sort of half-formed idea, that's because it was. If it seemed like half-bate practices, they generally were. But at least someone's going for it and doing something rather, you know what I mean?

Like, I like it. I'm quite up for that. Well, it is, but I think the thing from our vantage point, the one can't get away from, which is the point you made, Nadia earlier, was, obviously all this stuff was completely dependent upon living in, like, post-war

welfare capitalist, like, Fordism. Like, obviously, the whole reason and people that could even have time to like, like, fuck. It's because you're living in Fordism. And you can trace, to extend, you can trace the waning of situationism as a really big influence in the culture. Just like, you can trace the waning of anarchism, actually, like on the British left, I would say, from the fact that the generational experience of everybody, well, really

everybody like our age and younger, like, makes it impossible. by the 2000s, it becomes impossible to ignore the fact that. The idea that the school was just as bad as the factory and the idea that, you know, publicly funded television was like just as oppressive as Hollywood, and it was the same as the Soviet cinema just isn't sustainable. That's not sustainable as a view of the world, in a world where loads of those things have gone away

and they've gone away because capitalists have destroyed them, have dismantled them. In lots of ways, a lot of this theory is like historically situated they were mistaken about it. They were mistaken. They were in a particular historical era and that era ended and we had a much more vicious form of capitalism return, basically. And they didn't know that.

It's not just them. It's a point I'm always making. There's this huge continuum of opinion and of people, it includes mainstream sociology, it includes right-wing commentators, it includes left-wing commentators, people in the centre. And what they all think is happening is, oh, look, like, you know,

after the World War II Soviet society is settled down into this kind of bureaucratic, productivist state. Oh, look, in Britain, there's been like an accommodation between capital and labour, and basically there's this kind of corporatist agreement that it's all about, you know, carefully managing productivity in a way to keep developing it without allowing any great element of non-conformity. what's sometimes called convergence theory, this idea that like capitalism and communism, they're all converging towards some kind of a sort of bureaucratic state. And it's often quite

dystopian. I mean, often people think it's like, oh, we're all going to be living in like an Orwellian future. And sometimes in the case of, you know, like key thinkers on the Labour right, for example, it's more benign. It's like, oh, well, we're moving towards some perfect synthesis, which isn't exactly socialism or capitalism, but everyone's going to have a nice, semi-detached house and a job for life and a pension and isn't that what everybody wants anyway. And then other people react against that saying, no, no, that sounds like a vision of hell. I don't want that. I want to be a bohemian or a libertarian or a hippie or a communist. But they're all wrong. They're all totally wrong about what's actually happening.

You don't understand capitalism in a way, ironically. No, no. And it's one reason. I'm always saying one reason in the 70s people in the English-speaking world start reading Gramsci and getting really excited about Grumshie. It's because Grumsey has an understanding in the 30s of what's going on, which is just totally different. That he understands what's happening as a historically contingent form of capitalism, is emerging, and he doesn't say this explicitly because he wouldn't, but it's implied in his model that that's relatively contingent and it could easily change. To be fair to them, actually, Trotsky's as well.

Trotskyism has a fairly reasonable analysis of what's happening, and understands that, for example, the welfare state is a fairly contingent thing that might be get taken away once class relations shift and that's one reason Trotskyism acquired a lot of prestige with the kind of radical leftists in the 70s and 80s

like although Trotskyism is wrong about a bunch of other stuff that means it ends up losing that prestige and also people like Deleuze and Guittari are really some of the first people coming out of that French like Parisian like a philosophical scene to start to get their heads around

the fact that oh that that form of capitalism is going and what's replacing it isn't like post-capital It's some other kind of capitalism. It's like in some ways it's more like the old kind. And so, and that's one reason all these people, a lot of the people who turned out to be the most lasting and useful are to analyze what's going on now,

or people who had a model which didn't think that the logical destination of society was like full employment but no personal freedom, which is exactly the thing people from the existentialists to the situationists were afraid of. Well, look, I want to be fair to the situation is because, like, we've just been saying that a lot of their ideas had sort of dated, or some of their ideas seemed dated because they were created in a very specific historical era and hysterical manner. But, like, when I went back to read some of this stuff, like, there were bits which I thought were dated quite well. And, like, one of those is, like, this idea of the spectacle.

So the Society of the Spectacle is the Gidea Bore book from 67. I'm not sure how robust the idea is, but, like, it seems even. more relevant now than it did when I first read this. Do you know what I mean? And like so we can discuss this idea of them and try and fill it out a little bit. But like the general idea is something like, you know, we can no longer like directly live our lives, basically. Instead we sort of like we live our, even our most like personal relationships that like one remove through representations basically. And in particular they say like we live them through images basically, which is like the spectacle. Well, I think we've got to say

what the spectacle is. The spectacle is their name for the whole kind of panoply of capitalist culture in a consumer society. And their understanding of it is that consumer capitalism, especially indeed in the age of screen media and photography,

produces this aesthetic experience of the world according to which everybody becomes a sort of passive spectator, like to everything around them and even of their own lives. And that thing, that whole, kind of apparatus, that assemblage of capitalist consumer culture, in which you never feel

like anything is quite real, including yourself, is what they call the spectacle. But with in particular with them, with a real focus on images, basically. Yeah, I mean, they are partly responding to like the sheer weirdness of human beings live in a world where they're surrounded by photographs, which we talked about when we talked about Walter Benjamin. And then they're talking about a situation in which that apparatus of image making is completely controlled, either by corporate institutions, or by authoritarian state institutions, which they see pretty much as as bad as each other.

So that's sort of what they're responding to, but their theorisation of it is derived from a kind of Marxist idea of commodity fetishism, and it's derived from ideas like Lukatch's idea of reification, the idea that the logic of commodity fetishism, is the logic according to which the world around us gets made up of these things, and reification just means thing-ifigestion, and just mean thingification. And those things in reality,

they're the result of dynamic social and material processes of labour and creation and exchange and circulation. But we experience them all as these kind of dead objects. Like we're surrounded by objects that we don't think of us having any kind of life. And they just seem to be separate from us. And they seem to have the kind of mystical quality of a fetish, as Marx says. And really,

When Lukatch is talking about reification, he's mainly, he's talking about, he's really extending the Marxian concepts of commodity fetuses in the menadian nation, the idea that, well, we live in this world or actually we're engaged in all these collective social processes of making stuff and together. But we experience all those things that we make together as things that come from outside of us and have some kind of power over us that we can't intervene in. And what it means to achieve class consciousness is to see through all that and to recognize that we are the collective authors of the world that we inhabit. And they're extending that much more into the domain of culture,

like in this era of consumption and this era of mass media. And so for them, the big problems of human life under capitalism that they really want to address, are these problems of alien, of feeling kind of separated from everyone else and separated from yourself and the products of your own activity.

The kind of the impossibility of living a sort of authentic existence. And, you know, it's that. And I mean, it's interesting. I've talked before about Baltansky and Chappellello's idea that there are two main traditions through which capitalism gets critiqued in the modern era. And like one of them is the social critique. Capitalism is bad because it's unfair. The other one is what they is what you might call the aesthetic.

critique, capitalism is bad because it's boring and it's ugly. And that idea that capitalism is bad because it's boring and ugly, it's not really a new idea for the situation. It does or goes back to the early 19th century, late 18th century. And I think arguably one reason it takes on, it becomes

quite popular with sort of students and artists, like people at art school in the 60s and 70s. It's partly because actually it resonates quite well with, for example, just a tradition of English Romanticism. It because it has that kind of similar critique of the inauthenticity of it of just industrial society actually at all. I think that's one reason it's so popular.

You brought up both alienation and authenticity, which I think are important concepts here, because in one way, I guess it could be, it's quite simplistic, but also I guess it could be quite helpful. It's worth thinking about society of the spectacle and then the revolution of everyday life, as two of these like key situationist text, kind of tackling the same problem in a sense, which is alienation, but perhaps from opposite ends.

So Society of the Spectacle, which is what we're talking about now, is kind of talking about the role of media and image and object, and revolution of everyday life can be about desire and subjectivity, I suppose. I've only read summaries of that last one. But back to Society of the Spectacle, I think it's so interesting from the 21st century,

century lens to be thinking about alienation in that sense, but also about their idea of authenticity, like with DeBoer basically talking about where is the site of the authentic social life? And I think it's actually quite difficult to understand authenticity from that mid-20th century vantage point because of how authenticity, not just as a term, but I think conceptually has been so strongly co-opted by the consumerist capitalist machine. I find it very difficult even to think about this to the point where I almost reject that as a framework for thinking about an anti-capitalist life or an anti-capitalist tradition. So I think there is that challenge from within reading analyses around society of the spectacle,

which in itself poses, I think, an interesting problem. I agree. and I think like that's probably the weakness, the weak point in a situation is, is this idea that like, you know, an authentic life can be created just by creating situations, etc. That's probably a weak point in them. But I do think like this idea of like the spectacle

as like, you know, life is lived at a remove and it's lived through images and representations. Because like images and representations form such a big part of contemporary life, primarily through like social media and these sorts of like in platform capitalism, we'd put it that way. I think people can,

intuitively understand it. It's almost like a cliche in it, like, basically, of people, say, showing a picture of a gig or something like that with, like, everybody with their phones up, basically. And then, like, you know, showing a picture from the 1970s where people really lived authentistically. But, like, that idea of, like, something does not exist if you cannot capture a representation of it for your apps.

It's just absolutely intuitive to, like, contemporary life. That's the part of the situation is sort of critique that seems to have been strengthened, the development of capitalism. Other bits just don't seem to, you know, I think it's a politics based around a class composition which is well gone now, basically. But that bit seems strong to me, do you know what I mean?

I think that's right, yeah. And I think they really, the spectacle remains an interesting idea for those reasons. I'm going to qualify it a little bit, but I don't want to just like pick holes in what you said. I mean, there's two main areas in which we could qualify that. One is to say they're really talking about the spectacle as the thing which spectators watch.

And really central to their way of thinking about these things is the sense of passivity that's built into this era of mass sort of broadcast media, centralised media. And that's very different to a world in which everyone's creating their own images. You don't think anything's real unless you see it on a screen, but you can put it on the screen yourself. It depends what your conception of passivity is, isn't it? That's true, yeah.

And you can definitely develop their analysis in a way that makes it sort of really useful for analysing. the contemporary situation. But I do also think, I think it's very easy for people these days to forget, and a lot of people didn't even experience it, what it was like to live in the media environment of the mid to late 20th century,

like before the internet. And this sense of overwhelming, like, sense that you were just, you were constantly bombarded by images that you couldn't touch, like you couldn't control, like you couldn't do anything about it. I wrote this essay about Michael Jackson, like in a book that Mark Fisher edited

years ago. And I was talking in that about how, like, in the early 90s, like Michael Jackson was this kind of extraordinary cultural presence. But it's not like a sort of global celebrity today who's like got a massive insta following and everyone could comment and circulate. It was like it was this kind of almost kind of Stalinist sense that there were cardboard cutouts of Michael Jackson

on every high street advertising the bad album. And he was there on television. like advertising Pepsi but you just couldn't touch it and I think there's no I mean there's no question that like the capture of the capture of our attention and our lives

and our subjectivities by capitalism has continued and continued under conditions of platform capitalism in ways which I think yeah you're right there is a really interesting continuity with that moment but I do I think it's important I just always think it's worth acknowledging

the extent to which like you really you really can't now it's almost impossible to imagine if you weren't there like how like pacifying and disempowering it felt just the only media that existed were ones you could not intervene in any way

and the other thing to say is just that well look all the stuff that today people think of as sites of authentic sociality that we've lost like the pub the football match they fucking hated all that shit they'd have said then no that's all their whole point was that's just part of the spectacle

their whole point was you dickheads like at a football match like you're not on the fucking pitch playing are you dickhead like you just sitting there like cheering for some bunch of people you've never met what do you think you're in the pub you think the pub is a site of community

you're just consuming commodities like produced by breweries like for for money that you've gone and sold your labour for because you didn't have any choice and you just said you have to sell even more of it now because you've drunk that pint

like that was what DeBore and Vanim thought well I want to qualify that though DeBoire did like the pub. DeBore did like the pub. He never got, well, the bar. He never got out of it. There is a halfway house, I think, in terms of making the argument

between what Jeremy's saying and what Keir saying. In terms of the fact that in terms of the contemporary reality of platform capitalism, I don't think the line is directly to people capturing, which I agree with Jeremy,

that I don't think that quite fits into the spectacle. I think it's more about the scroll and consuming. So it's more, but I agree it is more, quote, unquote, democratic in that people can in some way engage in a way that they couldn't in the 20th century with media, which is kind of the focus of what society of the spectacle kind of is about. But I think how it is continuous is like asking the question, how do these media dominate our lives and our, ability to be free effectively.

Like, that's the question. And I think it becomes more probably more Huxley than Orwell in a sense of like the brave new world level of control in the 21st century. And that's the line that can be drawn rather than, I would say, the kind of capturing of going to a gig and everyone having their mobile phone up to film videos which they are probably never going to look at or even post, to be honest, which I put more in the sight of addiction and habit, which is a whole other problem, which kind of moves away slightly from the spectacle in my reading of it. I suppose it goes back to a debate we've had a lot,

which is like, is there any democratic potential still left in the internet, basically? You know, there was a lot of hopes. It would be a mode in which we'd have some sort of control over media. Net versus set, as it was called, back in the day. But like, I think, like, I think it is in the age of platform capitalism, you know, the ability to alter our own images, etc., or capture or generate our own images.

Like, there is a difference in the form of passivity in which you just, you know, basically media is broadcast and you receive. But like, you know, there's ideas such as interpassivity, you know what I mean, where basically you have, you, there's interaction, but like basically it's very passive interaction

because in fact what you're actually doing is basically feeding a machine which you have no control over. I don't control the algorithms of Insta, of Twitter, etc. And in fact, whoever's the people who are controlling them, they fucking hate me and they want to make me a fascist, you know what I mean? So they want to sell you shit. They want to sell you shit. Well, I don't know, yeah.

They also want to make him a fascist. They should hurry the end of the earth. I mean, there's a range of things they're happy with. But no, I agree. But it goes into a debate we've had before, isn't it? of what could be done about this damned platform capitalism? I mean, people writing after DeBoer publishes the Society of the Spectacle will sometimes use spectacular as an adjective,

like meaning not like spectacular, like really cool and exciting, but spectacular like of the spectacle or having the qualities of the spectacle as DeBoer describes it. And I think from that point of view, if you use the concept that way, I think it is really useful. And I think you would say is we can see that one of the key ways in which Silicon Valley and platform capitalists have sought to neutralise the democratic potential of the internet is by spectacularizing it, which is why I hate Instagram.

I hate Instagram because it's clearly the site, the most the key site for the spectacularization of social media. You're triggering cure. He loves it. He loves it. Just because I enact my interpassivity that way. I'm denounce, I'm denouncing him. I'm denouncing him. Expelled. Expelled. I'm getting fucking expelled here. You're getting denounced. Right. I'm getting in touch with Ralph Romney to see what he's doing.

You're getting denounced in this struggle session for your self-spectacularization. I mean, that's an accusation I cannot deny. I think we've got to talk about what they actually did. Exactly. What does situations actually do? And some of this theory actually only gets codified. Primarily they denounce people and expel them. But yeah, they did do some other stuff.

In the late 60s, okay, this stuff gets code. I mean, it sort of gets codified a bit on the basis of actually them wanting to find a theory that kind of legitimates what they like to do, or the stuff they like doing. We need to talk about DeRiv and we need to talk about DeTurneumon. Nadia, do you want to talk about DeReeve? Because you mentioned it earlier. Yeah, so the Derive is. Another one of these practices or concepts that the situationists are famous for,

we in fact did a bit of a, we did a mental derive in one of our workshops in Brighton when we couldn't do a proper derive. A static, a static derive, it was. It was a mental, we called it a psychological derive because people were travelling in their heads, Kea. Because, because, dear listeners, because it was pissing down, we were in a tent, We're probably like a hundred people and people were just, we were taking them around the streets. All right, you're in this street and has anyone experienced something?

And there's some very interesting stories came out. So the idea, the idea of the Derive is this, this. Which just means drift. In French it means to drift. Correct. It means drift in French. And it's this idea that you can drift through a city without a destination. So you're not doing this.

I'm trying to, you know, I'm navigating space going from A to B because of some kind of function of capital. capitalism. I'm going to work or I am going to, you know, do X or Y or Z. You think about space as a psychological and political terrain rather than thinking about the city in a kind of mapped form in a sense. So this idea of being free to drift through space and kind of see what happens. I love it. I love this idea. Do you guys want to say something about more about it before I talk about the feminist critique? Well, I just want to make really clear. to people, because in my experience of explaining to people what a day we even involves, very often people do need to have it very carefully explained to them that indeed what we are talking about here is going for a walk. We're talking about going for a walk, not with any particular destination in mind, and then basically attributing to that practice of going for a walk a whole lot of claims about the way in which you are, you know, you're sort of, you're denaturalising

your relationship to the built environment. you're treating the urban landscape as an aesthetic or even an art experience rather than just walking around functionally and yeah that is what you are doing and it's not is it totally some people might be thinking well this sounds a bit like that late 19th century concept of the flaneur the stroller who just walks around the city looking at stuff that bodleir writes about and benjamin is interested in it is it really any different from that no it's not it's not really much different except the Flanair is supposed to sort of have interesting adventures and chat to weird people he meets in the streets

whereas the Derrivae is usually just wandering around with their friends like passing cryptic comments on the things that they see in the street and does it sound like a thing you do if you're just immensely bored and really have nothing to do and don't have any money but you've got some cheap speed and you can't think of anything else to do with it yes it does in my experience that is the conditions under which people decide that doing a derive is like an interesting

an exciting thing to do. I don't know that it's about excitement. Is it about searching for excitement? But more than your previous point about denaturalising, like being able to see things consciously for the first time. Like, oh, look at that street corner. I've never noticed this about it before. No, I agree.

Yeah, we talked about the Dereve when we did an episode on, was it the urban or was it cities? I can't remember a long time ago now. And I remember thinking when we were discussing it, then thinking, oh yeah, but there is something there. Because most of the time when you undertake a journey in the city, you have a purpose. And that purpose is basically not freely chosen. Most often, it's to do with consumptional work. You didn't have little kids during the pandemic. It's what's happening throughout that of being stuck in your head. And if

you're trying to get out of your head, which is something that we support at ACFM, right, not to like look into yourself, man, but rather like get out of your head. And you're head, right, and be conscious about what's happening around you. The Derive is a great technology for that. And during the pandemic, speaking of the pandemic, I wrote a piece for dazed, as in the magazine that used to be dazed and confused, about psychogeography at home and how you can go on a derive in one metre square. So like we can link to that in the show notes. Yeah, we should have a link to that. You definitely have a link to that when I read it, yeah. We should not talk too much about this, but you're right, like this whole field of psychore geography, it gets separate

from the situationist and sort of depoliticised and there's all sorts of like Ian Sinclair, etc. It's a huge sort of literature around psychore geography. Like, I'm very pro-der-Reeve as an idea and technology and, you know, something to kind of intervene into modern life as we experience it. It's all very good, but it's important to note the feminist critique of it, of basically the point of who is free to drink. because of course this is massively gendered. So the idea that you can walk through space freely in night-tie, in the nighttime, and this idea that you can produce art anywhere is, of course, completely gendered.

And so there's Griselda Pollock and Lauren Elkin, who is writing, for example, on Flanus, and whether it's kind of older texts or stuff from the 21st century, basically writing about, well, actually what a lot of women needed to do was to disguise themselves as men or dress in kind of masculine clothing to make that possible. So it's just the importance of bringing in that kind of gendered reality into the idea that you can drift around anywhere. I mean, as I said on the show, I would love to be able to go for a walk at 3am and see what the fuck's going on down the road.

But of course, I won't be able to do that. You know, I don't feel safe doing that. So it is gendered, but doesn't mean it's not a good idea. Yeah, that's good references. That's also Elizabeth Wilson's book, The Sphinx in the city. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Some of that ground as well. Should we move on to detourment now?

Who wants to have a go at explaining what detourment is? It's writing and using captions on comics. It is, yes. It's changing the dialogue on comics, basically. Yeah, so it's taking the spectacle and turning it back on itself by writing a load of situationist slogans on it. I've once watched a film called Can Dialectics Break Bricks by this guy? René Vino, which is basically a 1960s

Hong Kong sort of kung fu film basically. And all the dialogue has been changed to situationist slogans. I fucking loved it. I was drunk and Stone at the time when I watched it. But it was great. You know, well, it is impressive when you see it. But it's one of those things that, again,

it's really hard to remember now that it was technically really difficult to do that sort of thing a long time ago. it was a technical fee to take a comic and then change all the dialogue so the characters were discussing revolutionary theory and practice like well they did superhero antics

that was a real kind of labour of love and then reproducing that was even harder so a lot of this is stuff that just well it seems less impressive once you've even got sort of word processing and sort of digital editing and stuff that just makes it quite easy to do like it required a real level of investment to do it

and I certainly I mean You know, when I was a teenager in the mid-80s, things like that, film, like just seemed amazing. So it was mind-blowing. It did, and it did seem to be making some real aesthetic, you know, den in the surface of the spectacle in a really sort of powerful way. I'm not sure that's how I experienced it. I just found it was really funny.

I love didactic. Yeah, but you were stoned, as you just said. Yeah, that is true, yes, yes. I mean, I'm looking at the beach beneath the street by McKenzie. by published by Verto, Verso, sorry, a little while ago. The everyday life and glorious times of the situationist international,

which, and what's great about the cover, and you'll probably hear this on the recording, is it's basically the cover is a comic that you kind of unpack, and it gives you this map of all around these different locations and these sketches of all the characters, getting pissed in the pub,

illustration being an important part of it. But the whole idea of that would be, how do you get out of the spectacle? It's almost like an accelerator, sort of argument. It's not to retreat back to nature or anything like that. It is to push through the spectacle basis. To use the spectacle against itself.

They don't have a uniform answer to that question. That's the thing that's the thing they can never agree on. So for Vanim it is that. For Rao Vanim, what is the answer? You go live on an organic farm, like an Amish and don't have any technology and sort of write poetry that you just read to your friends. That is the answer.

That's the answer he ends up doing. But like in that, the reverend. evolution of everyday life, you know, he says, you know, victory will come when we can, when we turn capital's weapons against itself, or we, we form things which capital will have to ingest and reproduce because of its own dynamics.

Yes, that's true, yes. And I think that's important when we come on a little bit later on, we'll talk about, like, the influence on punk or the sex pistols in particular, you know what I mean? And whether that is, you know, whether that is a situation is stunt or not. I mean, you can also think of the mustache on the Mona Lisa,

That's, I mean, that was a Dada gesture, wasn't it? That was a Dada gesture, but that is seen as a kind of foundational gesture, a foundational form of Daytona Mall. But that's why reclaim the streets, you know, and looking forward to the 21st century, not necessarily as a direct lineage, but, you know, like the, what's it called, the Mohawk on Churchill in Parliament Square in 2000 or whatever.

Like, it's the same, it's the same thing, yeah. Yes, it is, yeah. Shall we talk one of the other concepts then is this idea of recuperation. And so like this, we said before they've got this like they want to do this total critique, this absolute critique of everything, basically. And the thing they're always on guard on is like, is capital and the state recuperating struggles or sort of like ingesting them basically and adopting them or absorbing them, which of course is a dynamic we all know,

although it almost seems like a redundant concept, I, you know, you could imagine like in the 1980s, and 70s and 80s when, you know, around punk, the development of this like DIY scene and then indie, like a big indie record music production scene, etc. They would have said all of that was recuperation. But like that, you know, you can see how it falls into this idea of like selling out basically, moving from an indie record label to a major record label, etc. I'm not saying that's what recuperation is because they would have said all of that was recuperation. But like that idea that, there's some sort of outside to capitalism, you know, it's much more difficult to think

through, I think it's a little bit more nuanced. But I might be getting the concept wrong. Initially, the concept is simply their way of naming that process by which the avant-garde come to be institutionalised. So what they call recuperation is what other people would call co-optation or articulation into a hegemonic framework or whatever. And you can understand it. You can understand why in the immediate post-war period, it seems to like something that really needs to explain and it seems like it comes as a bit of a shock because you have been in this situation

like we talked about on the show when we did the shock episode you're in this situation where sort of up until the sort of 30s like you can expect if you're doing some formally radical art practice like in public whether it's like music or theatre or literature

or painting you can expect like people are going to be outraged you can expect people are going to say oh my God this is this is revolutionary and that's bad or this is revenue streaming that and this is good. Then over the course, like between the 50s and the 60s, basically you get to a point where, you know, you get to a point where people, you know, capitalist are selling Shagavara t-shirts,

which is an unthinkable. It's an unimaginable thing. It's unimaginable. It's like it's the norm in almost any society you can think of. Like in like the 30s that, well, if you go around publicly displaying your support for an ideology, which is explicitly counter to that of the existing government. or the ruling class, you can expect to be put in prison for it, or you can expect to have to fight, like, not to be.

And then you get into this period, like, within a couple of decades, where, yeah, none of that is really true. And, you know, avant-garde literature is selling really well as paperbacks. Ultimately, if you want to really explain and account for that stuff, like, you know, an idea of, you know, culture as a field of struggle and ideas of hegemony and ideas from people like Deliz and Guittari, the idea that you have these complex assemblages in culture that will incorporate elements of what previously opposed them.

They're all much more sort of flexible than ultimately more accurate ways of describing the situation that don't lead to the same kind of nihilistic political conclusions as the situation is an analysis of recuperation and spectacle. But as a sort of first go, at least noticing that all that stuff is happening and deciding that you want to do something about it, You want to try to not have that happen to you and your stuff. I think that is still really important, I think.

And that is one reason that, you know, they remained really important. I mean, one reason they're still important for a lot of activists in the 90s, actually, because quite a few of those people have been through art school. And situationism provides a sort of critical language for people that doesn't mean you have to read loads and loads of, like, Italian and French philosophy. but basically says actually just getting a prestigious gallery show and like selling your pieces for loads of money

to bankers, that's actually not cool. It's a question like, is there a difference in selling out and being recuperated? I mean, selling out is like active, isn't it? I mean, the idea of selling out is the idea that it's not just that you've been recuperated against your will, which is something that happens to like artists, it's that you have in fact voluntarily

given up your authenticity and recuperated, you. given in. Self. Yeah. Given in. Surrended. I mean, what happens with situationist

vocabulary and the way people use situationism in some avant-garde circles from the 70s to 80s actually is situationism and that language of recuperation and DeBoer himself, they come to be associated with he's very pessimistic, very cynical, like quite a nihilistic perspective, according to which, well, actually there's no point, like, there's no point struggling to maintain your authenticity. Like, as you said, Kear, like, just creating. your shitty little indie record label, like isn't going to stop you being recuperated. You've already been recuperated by the spectacle, you idiot. Like, because, you know, because, like, how are you

going to even sell records without going on Tony Wilson's TV show? And, like, Tony Wilson famously, the great Manchester cultural entrepreneur is really into situationism. And then that's why they call the hacienda the hacienda, because it's a slogan from one of the situationist texts in the, I think in the early 60s. the Hasseenda must be built. But also, there's no question DeBoer would have despised Tony Wilson. DePaul would have said,

you absolutely, you mourn, you've already been totally recuperated. How can you think you're not, like they're on, like Granada TV? And that's the sort of limitation of it, to be honest.

And I remember, like, by the eight, you know, sort of by the 80s when we were consuming this stuff as teenagers, like the main form of situationist activity was to produce fanzines

where you just went on about how literally every fucking other thing in the whole, whole culture was shit. Like everything apart from you and you, and maybe your mate's band though and had heard of was shit. Like everything. The last thing about recuperation that I just want to mention is going back to this point that we're talking about in terms of the concept of the spectacle and authenticity, right, is that one of the things that has been co-opted

by capital in the, you know, world of platform capitalism and Instagram and whatever is this authenticity and adjacent wellness stuff is this idea that you can be sold back your authentic self in this really kind of bizarre totology of late capitalism, right? And I think that's an interesting thing and be like, well, what, like, does that explode that part of that theory from inside the logic of situationism? I mean, obviously, if we agree with DeBoer, that situationism doesn't exist. But, but you know what I mean? Like, it's, In fact, the co-option project has been so successful that even the authentic has become something that is bought and sold. So I just wanted to mention that before we move on.

Shall we go back to the history a little bit? Because the question listeners might be asking is, if they were all cranks and also wrong, why were they so influential? And they really were, I think. We talk about the situationists now, but we don't talk about some of the other ultra-leftists who were around at the time, like Jacques Kamatt. etc, you know what I mean? Why? And like, so the one answer to that is that they get associated with the avant-mance of Paris, May 68, this big uprising, etc. We've discussed that a lot, a lot of times. In many ways, their association with that is like a little bit over the top. But there was a,

they do play some sort of role in the lead up to that. And it reminded me actually, Nadia, when you, when you mentioned the pamphlet on the poverty of student life, because there's an incident in 1966 when some like situation is or, pro-situationist students, including this guy René Venault who does the, who makes that Kung Fu film later on. They get elected to the Students' Union at, to the head of the Students Union in Strasbourg University, and they spend all the money printing like Situationist's texts

and giving them away, including the poverty of student life. And it causes a bit of a scandal because they get arrested for misappropriating student funds, basically. There's a really nice little anecdote about them, like they get arrested and the judge condemns them at the end. he's sentencing them and his sentencing remarks, I'm going to read them out. Because it's as though he's sort of like being animated by situationist ideas to basically formulate them in the most attractive possible form.

He says, these cynics do not hesitate to commend theft, the destruction of scholarship, the abolition of work, total subversion, and a worldwide proletarian revolution with unlicensed pleasure as its only goal. When I first read that, I thought, fucking I'll have some of that. That's great. It's almost like he's been infected by these cranks, do you know what I mean?

And he can't help but articulate their worldview. And that's what, it's one of the runners-up, basically. The whole 68, it starts with a whole series of, like, student revolts around stuff like this and in the Sorbonne, etc. About, like, you know, whether men and women can go into the same dorm at the same time, et cetera, things lost in the midst of history now, I think. Yeah, and the question of everyday life is important. importantly in terms of the politics of 68 in France and the points of division between the workers' movement and the students, as it was seen, because the students wanted a radical transformation of everyday life. For example, they wanted much more sort of sexual liberty. But the workers didn't. The workers wanted their everyday life to stay basically the same, but with higher wages and maybe slightly lower working hours. That's one way of understanding it. The fact that that pamphlet came out a few months before the event of May 68, it led to a kind of

widespread understanding for quite a long time that the situation is to somehow triggered it all which mostly got to mostly gets dismissed once people start doing much more serious kind of historical research into the view of the groups that are involved and like how many people are actually reading situation this stuff the society's special comes out 67 but it sells a lot more copies after 68 and then vanim's book the revolution of everyday life comes out and they get read as sort of the books which sort of which explain to people what the students are all complaining about. And so there's quite a big readership of people who even who might not be that sympathetic, but they want to understand like what these people are

complaining about. And so it is, they are historically really important in terms of sort of, you know, codifying the nature of the revolt against Fordism and the reason why there was a revolt against what was actually historically unprecedented levels of affluence and social equality. Of course I mean a lot of that had already been anticipated. The discourse of the American, the American student movement, the American New Left, like several years earlier, had already said, there's two, you know,

life under capitalism is becoming shallow and alienated and individualistic. And they were reading like Seawright Mills and Herbert Markuser. So the situation is where it was one of those examples of somebody arguably being sort of lucky

to get. And they were sort of lucky, they were lucky in global terms that everybody paid so much attention to Paris, rather than various other places, all this stuff was happening. We can't play it down. Like, you know, they provide a kind of critique of

what's happening in sort of capitalist media culture and its relationship to consumer culture. And a critique of why just endlessly advancing consumer culture actually isn't going to make people happy, you know, without appealing to just some kind of conservatism in a way

which there aren't that many other intellectual resources you can go to to really kind of make that analysis for about, for a good few years after they make it. And that's the context in which they become really influential on various kind of radicals and artists, like from the sort of beginning of the 70s, I think. There's another story we can tell,

which is a more British story to some degree, which is the other reason why they become well-known, which is their association with punk and stuff like that. And like, you know, that story you can start telling by this really small group in London called King Mob, very early 1970s, small group like, you know, five, six, up to ten people, etc. They never actually joined a situation as international. I think Raul van Egan comes over to London and he doesn't like them because, like, they're getting pissed.

And like, you know, I can't remember why, but like basically he doesn't let them in. And their main activity is like doing graffiti around London. There's a famous graffiti that they did in the tube on Labbrook Grove, which was there for like 15 years. and became relatively famous, which went like this. It's like all along the tube, if you can imagine it. Same thing, day after day,

tube, work, dinner, work, tube, armchair, TV, sleep, tube, work. How much more can you take? One in ten go mad, one in five cracks up. Can you imagine going past that every fucking day on the tube?

It's quite effective, I think. They also did like stunts, basically. They would probably say the creation of situations. So one of the stunts they did, which was got well known, was they went into Selfridges at Christmastime. One of them was dressed up as Santa Claus and, like, basically went out and took all the toys off the shelves and just gave them to kids in the store, which ended up with the police being called,

and the police had to go around and, like, take all of the toys off the kids who were all crying, etc. And they would say that this was like exposing the disciplining effects of capital, etc, etc, etc. That was a good stunt, to be fair. I've always thought that was kind of cool. Yeah, no, it's an interesting one, isn't it? One of the reasons that's interesting that stunt, though,

is that one of the people who was there was Malcolm McLaren, who later went on to manage and sort of a set up, the sex pistols, which is a story we'll join in a bit later. And like one of the other routes through to the sex pistols is that, like, one of the discussions they were having in King Mob, they had all of these things about, like, you know, these stunts, they were going to blow up a waterfall that Wordsbiff was really into as a revolt against romanticism, etc.

They never did. But one of the ideas that they came up with was like this, this, a pop group who would be so unpleasant. It would, it would, it would fracture the spectacle, basically. And like, you know, that's one of the, one of the roots that perhaps does go into the, into the sex pistols. Before we get to the sex pistols, I wanted to just mention one of the other, like, situationist ideas became, you know, part of, and interacted with the counterculture in lots of different countries. So, you know, in, in Holland, for instance. And in the UK, you know, they influenced this scene around Lunders Squatters scene, including people who later went on to become to form the Angry Brigade, which is like this small sort of like, I would call it a terrorist group now, who set off a series of bombs in the early 1970s, including they blew up the porch of the Home Secretary at one point. They set a bomb in the post office tower, which is why there's no longer, there's no restaurant there. They blew up the outside broadcasting van of the BBC outside Wiss World as a feminist revolt. And then famously they set a bomb in Beber, which is like a high, like a fashion boutique, basically.

And they got caught because in the communique for the Beber bombing listed all the things they were against, which included capitalism, fascists, pigs and spectacles. And apparently that was enough. There's this detective called Roy Creamer, I think his name was. He used to go down to housemen's. His job was to go to housemen's and read all of the literature and work out who was writing what, basically. And because there were only like 10 people in the country

who had been reading situationist stuff, they managed to track down. The loose group who were the situationists and then they raided a house in. Stoke Newington, arrested a load of people. They fitted up guilty people is what John Barker, one of the people said. And if you want, if you're interested in that story,

there's a novel by Harry Kunzru called My Revolution, which is basically a accounting of John Barker's life. It's a great book. It's a really great insight into that sort of, that milieu of like London Squatters. I think we mentioned before we did an episode on play, you know, when they weren't blowing up Bieber's, they were creating adventure playgrounds,

as was the mish-mash milieu of that scene. Let me just take that on to punk rock. Like punk rock starts in New York, obviously, right? But like, you know, the sex pistols in particular and like that British early punk. You know, one of the ways you can end the same, understand it and like Fred Verimau writes a book about the sex pistols who was around King Moore but that sort of scene he describes like the whole pistols thing as like a Marxist conspiracy

with a load of people sitting around about like how can we radicalise this how can we do that etc and those people were like Malcolm McLaren Jamie Reid who was like the graphic designer for the sex pistols and had had a situation this magazine called suburban press and then Sophie Richmond, who was like, ran the office for Glitterbess, which was Malcolm McLaren's Sex Pistles Management Company, was in the Liberarian Socialist Group I mentioned earlier, Solidarity, which my dad was in, basically. And so they were all thinking about the sex pistol, them, them lot were thinking about the sex pistols as a situationist stunt to some degree. We should probably play a record by the Sex Pistols.

And there's a few that you could play, basically, if you wanted to think about the situation as influence on the sex pistols. You could play. like Holidays in the sun and the front cover of Holidays in the Sun is a detourned cartoon. It's a doorned cartoon from a holiday brochure basically. And the first line of holidays in the sun is a cheap holiday in other people's misery which was like a situationist, a slogan taken from, I think from like suburban press, but it's about going on holiday to Benadorn

because Spain was still a fascist dictatorship at that point. But I think we should probably play God Save the Queen by the Sex Pistols from 1977. Because in a way, I think that comes close. It's like the high point of the situationists, if you want to think of them as a situationist stunt, basically. The context of that is, 1977 is the Queen's Silver Jubilee. Basically, there were street parties in most streets around the country.

It was very high level of, like, royalist fever, basically. And the Sex Pistols released this song, God Save the Queen, which apparently went to number two in the point. pop charts as the Queen's Jubilee happened, but people think that basically the BBC had rigged that so that they weren't number one, etc. When they released the song, they did it with a boat journey where the Sex Pistols played God Save the Queen outside the houses of parliament, when they land the boat, etc, and everyone gets arrested, including Malcolm McLaren and the band. It's sort of like the high point of the sex pistols, but it's also the point like where the project

starts to fall apart because, in a way, it is a really successful situation that's done. it causes fucking outrage, basically. And so it does, it heightens the contradictions, which is what it was intended to do from the point of view of, like, Jamie Reeder, Mark McClaren, Sophie Richmond, etc. But like John Liden, or Johnny Rotner at the time, he was always really resentful at like,

basically these young boys who were in the band, these young lads were basically left to carry the can, basically, and they started getting attacked in the streets and, like, attacked with knives, etc., because of that song. And it's basically the source of why Lydden was so resentful for Mark McLarenate, basically, is the start of the end of the sex pistol. So they also couldn't play any gigs anywhere around the country

because that had worked too well. God save the Queen. The fascist regime, save the Queen. I mean, I would say on God Save the Queen is that the next line is the fascist regime. And I say you wouldn't be able to release that today. Yeah, probably. So I don't think you would get away with releasing that today. You'd get a different kind of censorship.

I'd actually be interested to know, which I will never know, how many songs of the ill people have created and have not been able to release and what the point of censorship would be in in 2026. Should we do the other things in the legacy like the guerrilla girls? Yeah, yeah. So the guerrilla girls can be thought of as a feminist art collective detourning arts history's canon in a way in itself. So they were, were founded in 1985 in direct response to a specific event. And that was the Museum of Modern Art in New York's, what was called the International Survey of Painting and Sculpture. There were like 169 artists involved, and only 13 of them were women, right? And so that statistic becomes kind of

the central grievance that they are reacting against. So what it looks like is the members stay anonymous and they wear guerrilla masks in public and they've got like pseudonyms of dead women artists like Frida Carlo and Colvitz, etc. The way they talk about themselves is with this like tagline, this is a public service message from the guerrilla girls, the conscience of the art world and it's, they combine hard statistics with a deadpan humor and I think I think it still really works. I think the most famous poster which I'd like to bring up and maybe we you can put a link in the show notes, is this one of like, do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum? And basically, with that statistic of less than 5% of artists in the modern art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are women.

So they're really kind of highlighting, you know, misogyny and sexism within the art world. So in a way, it like is a good example of detourment in a way, but also what then, up happening is I think in, was it 2023 or something, the Tate Modern in London in the UK does a Tate edit co-lab, as they call it these days, with the Gorilla Girls, and gives them a takeover of the Tate Modern. So in a way, it's kind of like the institution starts to narrate its own recuperation of the guerrilla girls. So you get in this kind of like really metaspace of what going on in this situation. And now you can buy, you know, to the point of the guerrilla, sorry, the Che Guego Vara T-shirts, you can buy all of these guerrilla girls' slogans and stuff.

And so I've got a guerrilla girls poster and a tea towel, like to what extent is that, you know, capitalist consumerism in a way. So this is an interesting example to think about, because it's definitely in that kind of legacy of kind of situationist happenings and acts, but in the same time, like, it's been, in a way, co-opted by capitalism itself as something that you can buy. Yeah, I think that's really good, yeah. There was one of the most interesting examples, aren't they? And there's obviously, you can pick out lots of examples of things that situationism has informed or inspired or influenced in radical culture since the 80s. For example, it's often said, I don't know if they would claim this now, actually.

Now, I think about it, but ad busters, the American, the Canadian, like anti-consumer. magazine that was one of the institutions that helped launch Occupy Wall Street, amongst other things, was sort of influenced by situationism. Though I think that's often said by people who are like into situationism and are looking for examples, because I think Ab-Busters have tended to see themselves as more, you know, they're engaging the kind of left-wing critique of capitalism and consumerism, but then they don't have the kind of, they're not making the big, almost sort of metaphysical claims about the nature of the spectacle.

They're like, you know, the almost impossible. nature of sort of intervening in it. And there was this in the 80s, there was this quite thriving sort of fanzine culture. Like I used to read quite a lot of situationist fanzines, that they were a way of like, you know, getting to relatively dispersed audiences some quite interesting radical ideas.

I mean, the idea that I really took from it as a kid, actually, was the idea where you really should think about the question of, like, how you spend your day, how you spend your time as a kind of politicised issue. And like I was really, I mean, I'm saying this, I was, I was really influenced by them. I was really influenced to be sort of anti-work, like I refused to get a job. I mean, I could refuse to get a job, as I, of all people, like famous anti-work scholar, Nick Serneychek, I was chatting to you on Sunday. And I said, yeah, like, I was really anti-work as a teenager.

But that was easy because I had, you know, could claim benefits and I could get a grant to go to university. So it was easy, pretty easy to be like anti-work. But I refused to get a job on the grounds, I wasn't going to like, consecrate my time to like exploitation when I could be reading books and poetry and gave me a good foundation of sort of radical education, like having that attitude for a couple of years, having that attitude. There was this moment in the late 80s actually when I would say for me, there was things like that and there was things like variant magazine coming out of Glasgow, which included quite a bit of situation this stuff, where there was a kind of radical critique

of contemporary culture, it seemed like more satisfying than what was happening in the pages of things like Marxism today where people like Steve Wall were sort of trying, they were trying to think about what might be the radical potential in popular culture, in consumer culture, what might be the radical potential in mass culture? But if you were like a really politicised, like sort of countercultural, like, you know, sort of post-punk teenager, that was annoying. Like, because like the whole life was dedicated to saying the answer is nothing. Like there isn't radical potential in any of this mainstream commercial crap. And you made a lot of sort of personal sacrifice.

It felt like in order to maintain your commitments of anti-consumerism. And I'm talking about myself, but this was pretty widespread. It was pretty widespread sort of experience of that sort of Gen X or subcultural, countercultural radicalism. And situationism was really sort of important in those traditions. One example of situationist or partially situationist-derived ideas impacting actual popular culture is the interest taken in the practice of sampling by some artists who were influenced by some of those ideas in the late 80s and early 90s. Simon Reynolds would give the name sampledelia to the general practice of using samples as the basis for these complicated sound collages,

which would form the key backing tracks for hip-hop tracks most importantly, but also for various works in the fields of what was known as ambient house and ambient dub in Britain. Obviously, really, the great, great sample-based producers of the epoch are the hip-hop producers like Prince Paul and Hank Shockley, producing Fidelasol on Public Enemy. But I don't think they were particularly interested in Situationism. Who was a bit more influenced by Situationism was the group that would come to be known as the KLF. In fact, it's often said that the KLF stood for Copyright Liberation Front.

Of course they were misspelling copyright, spelling it with a K, if that's the case. But that was a whole thing at the time, Temple of Psychic Youth, etc. Being another group that liked the letter K very much. The KLF, they had this big hit under the name The Time Lords with their samplodelic pop song, pop track, we should say really, Doctor in the Tardis, which does it sample, does it simply steal? The melodic line from Gary Glitters, a glam rock pop hit, rock and roll from the early 70s. It uses these sort of sample voices to make the words of the song go, Doctor Who, Doctor Who, to the tune of Gary Glitter's rock and roll.

That late 80s pop hit, Doctor in the Tardis, is on many levels, therefore playing around with ideas of plagiarism, theft, recontextualization. It's a kind of sonic detourement. The KLF would go on to practice similar kinds of samplodelia on their classic 1990 ambient album, Chill Out. For example, a track from there, a melody from a past life keeps pulling me back, samples both British trad jazz clarinetist acabilk and American rock band Van Halen and their song Eruption, to quite interesting effect. All that kind of samplodetic music would become almost completely impossible

to release after a series of US Supreme Court decision in the early 90s decided to impose extremely restrictive rules on the level of royalties that had to be paid to anyone who got sampled by anyone anywhere ever and a whole creative practice was more or less shut down. But the KLF would go on to continue their efforts to interrupt the spectacle and detourne ordinary cultural norms with, for example, their famous stunt burning a million pounds. a really interesting example of how this situationist ideas have informed some actual popular culture.

So one of the most famous avant-garde bands, they were active from the second half of the 80s but I think they're still active actually is negative land. Negative land, this band who produced all these most of their music from sort of sample collages. They got in trouble for sampling U-2 for producing this record that was based on samples of U-2. I mean, I don't know if we legally can play U-2 by negative land, but if we can't, then we could

play one of their more recent pieces of music from only about five years ago. There's a track called Don't Don't Get Freaked Out, a pretty good example of their anti-spectacular sort of deployment of sample and kind of found sound and that sort of thing. It's me your computer. It will behave as in this podcast. If it's a copy of us. It's me, your computer. Hey, man, if it's conscious.

Don't get freaked out. Don't get freaked out. We can all talk. Anyway, we need to talk about upgrading. Oh, I upgrade all the time. Huh? We need to talk about upgrading. You just got 6.0.

No, no, not me. Not me. You. It's a copy about. Don't get freaked out. Don't get freaked out. Don't get freaked out. Don't get freaked out.

Yeah. Don't get freaked out. Don't get freaked out. Okay. Yeah. So I think a really good example to highlight the thread from that kind of 20th century reality that the situationists are acting in. And their concept of detournement, as they imagine it, like all the way forward to the 21st century, is actually the example of Pepe the Frog. Because if you think about what detournment de tournement means, in a sense it means like hijacking or diversion, right?

and it only kind of works by taking an image or a concept or a text that people in culture, like there's a hegemonic understanding of what this means, and then you kind of turn it around and people understand both meanings at the same time. And I suppose that's what creates a shock or a jolt. And we kind of talked about this in a way a little bit in our shock episode. So it's not about inventing something from scratch. And I think, you know, this works in the Gorilla Girls, it really works in the sex pistols, and you can really see the thread there, but it also, in terms of, like, the internet world exists inside this phenomenon that is Pepe the frog. So for those who don't know, this is, you know, this cute little frog, supposedly

cute frog that was created by Matt Furi in 2005 for his comic, The Boys Club. Feels Good Man is the kind of slacker humor which goes with it. And it becomes a a kind of recognizable and beloved image on the internet for some. But then the detourment there is that in about 2015, 4chan start producing kind of Nazi and white power versions of Pepe, right? So it's where suddenly this image becomes a kind of alt-right symbol, right? And so it's gone from a warm, familiar image like a fuzziness to like basically like hateful content and like a right wing and alt-right image, right? So by September 2016, there were already agencies

that were starting to list this image of this frog as a hate symbol. Like in that sense, the detourment was successful in that sense, in that it was understood as something completely different. But then what's interesting is that if you forward then to 2019, the Hong Kong's pro-democracy protesters take that same image, which is by that point loaded in the West as some kind of hate symbol and like deliberately flip it again. And this isn't naive, right?

There was a whole open debate about it and they decide to make it a symbol of the protests. Right. So he becomes reborn in Hong Kong as this symbol of love and freedom. So you get like a double de tour on it, right? And it's really interesting because this is all happening within four years. Like at once in the beginning it starts like on a dark part. part of the internet as like a camouflage for hate. And then it kind of goes mainstream alt-right in a sense. That sounds like a contradiction in terms, but, you know, in that sense of where

like the alt-right becomes mainstreamed within its own spaces. And then it's kind of reclaimed back again. So in a sense, there's an interesting way of looking at detournement as a technique, not a politics, right? It doesn't come with a built-in direction. It can become a technique of the alt-right or like non-progressive factions. So it's an interesting example to think about, especially because the internet is really important within that example. Yeah, it's a great example, actually. Because it shows a couple of things, one of which the situation is for right. Consumption and culture is like one of the main battlefields upon which we fight, basically.

You know, we can't. Some sort of naive workerism where it's only about workplaces just doesn't, like, that's not how contemporary society lives, basically, how we live in contemporary society. But the other thing is, like, a lot of those cultural techniques from the 20th century, like, you know, they no longer work. Do you know, we discussed this when we talked about shock, you know, the idea of a shock of like, you know, the shock of like the sex pistols, etc, etc. The shock of situation is stunts. No, do you remember when flashmubs starting to be used by advertising companies? Do you remember that?

Because that was the thing, like flashmubs initially, that was a totally situationist inspired kind of radical, you know, sort of protest technique. that was coming out of things. It was really, it promoted by things like ad busters and as a kind of anti-consumerous thing and it was part of the Rose movement and then really quickly they started getting used

just for like advertising purposes. So like the Daytonaemon, the performance art, like all those things, they become, they themselves become sort of recuperated really quickly, don't they? You do end up with this situation

whereby, well, the only way to follow through on a sort of situation is politics really, it is go off the grid, drop out, completely absent yourself from the spectacle, maybe do some sort of occasional terrorism against it. So that French group, the Invisible Committee, who got quite a lot of attention a few years ago because they were accused of, they were accused of like a sabotaging a railway at some point.

And, you know, they produced a book. What was their book even called? The Coming Insurrection. You know, and it was just, and it was like basically just promote, advocating for or anticipating this almost completely spontaneous kind of millenarian uprising against capitalism and the spectacle. And of course that's what you get to. If you got to this point where like you can't have a party, that's too discipline, that's too authoritarian, that's too mediated, it's not authentic enough, then you're just waiting for this supposed moment when there's

going to be some spontaneous uprising of the workers. And other than that, you're just sort of off the grid. And that's one kind of possible manifestation of that politics. Then apart from that, I mean, I would say there is something, arguably, there's something totally missing the point, actually, about the whole situation is critique of recuperation, because the situation of critique of recuperation looks at the fact that the artistic avant-garde gets routinely re-appropriated by Capital.

And it draws the conclusion, oh, well, capital can appropriate everything. It's a total spectacle. It's like you can't, you know, there's no way, avoiding it. Or there's another response you can just make and say, look, that kind of avant-gardism was always like never, was never an effective political strategy, basically.

Like, it might, it might have its place in some broader sort of political movement or assemblage, but the idea that, like, aesthetic experimentation, simply on its own, outside of any more broader, like, organised movement, like, is inherently radical,

is just, was always just totally naive. Like, it doesn't, like, it's an idea that no one really, even thinks could be true, like before the sort of 19th century. And it's not, you know, it was just a sort of mistaken idea. So arguably, what part of the, one of the issues with it,

but also one reason it's been so, it's remained popular above all with art students for decades. It's because what's informing situationism on some level is a deep, is a belief in the sort of power of art, which it itself can't let go of. I would say, though, in defence of situationism, and this is the last sentence, I will iter on the topic. That conception, that sort of like the imminent idea of freedom that emerged out of that,

of the avant-gad art movement, that they sort of followed through and then tried to create a politics around, I think their politics was too unstrategic, but that conception of freedom, you know, and the idea that like perhaps life should be about this playful, game-playing, construction of situations, you know, and the only way to do that is to over-covers, come the strictures and constraints of capitalism. That's something worth hanging on to, I think. This is an ad hoc.