SITUATIONISM - A PRIMER.


WORSHIP CELEBRITIES, TRUST THE MEDIA, CONSUME SHIT.. 
IT IS YOUR DUTY! 

- Spectacular Party. 




During the nineteenth century the traditional working class
movements came into being (most of which were influenced by the
works of Marx or Bakunin). Since then those movements have been
defeated and appropriated; in the East by the Bolsheviks and
then capital; and in the West by the bourgeoisie. Organisations
that were supposed to support the workers (trade unions,
political parties, etc.), have sold out to capitalism and now
act against the workers. More than this, capitalism has taken
over the most radical ideas and returned them safely to the
people in the  form of harmless ideologies such as socialism or
communism until the only choice we are presented with is either
the spectacle of domination or the spectacle of opposition.
Because of this advance in capitalism not only are the
ideologies themselves redundant but also the theories and
techniques of analysis from which they sprang.

"Can any pleasure we are allowed to taste compare with the
indescribable joy of casting aside every form of restraint and
breaking every conceivable law?" 

To remedy this we must use new theories and techniques of
analysis, because the old terminology of revolutionary ideology,
defined when the technology of modern capitalism was beyond
fantasy, is now sheer banality. It is no use trying to make the
new conditions of life fit the old analysis; we need theories
and techniques that are relevant to the modern world not those
of the nineteenth century. It was in regard to this problem that
Guy Debord developed the theory of the Spectacle in his book
"Society of the Spectacle".

Nowadays we live in a world where capitalism (through
television, computers, architecture, transport, and other forms
of advanced technology), controls the very conditions of
existence. This is the Society of the Spectacle. The world we
see is not the real world, it is the world we have been
conditioned to see; a world constructed from the black and white
of tabloids, a world framed by the mahogany veneer of the
television set, a world of carefully constructed illusions -
about ourselves, about each other, about power, authority,
justice and daily life. A view of life from the perspective of
power.


THE DAYS OF THIS SOCIETY ARE NUMBERED; its reasons and its
merits have been weighed in the balance and found wanting (Guy
Debord). 


Life itself has become a show contemplated by an audience. That
audience is the proletariat itself, and the proletariat consists
of anyone who has no control over the conditions of their own
existence. Reality is now merely something we look at and think
about, not something we experience. In the real world, what is
possible is determined by our resources and the limits of our
imaginations, but upon this real world a totally fake world -
the Spectacle - has been constructed. It is maintained on a
microscopic level by our conversations and relationships; in our
simplest everyday dealings we engage in the construction of
social illusions. The Spectacle is a constructed reality. It
does not satisfy, it cannot satisfy. It offers only the dream of
satisfaction.


"The basic characteristic of the spectacle today is the way it
calls attention to its own disintegration."


The effect of all this is the substitution of images and
commodities for "real" experience. People enter into
relationships with spectacular production rather than each
other. Isolated individuals, united only by a passive
contemplation of the spectacle. A manufactured alienation (i.e.
the image of original totality or perfection from which we fell
but to which we can return is also just another spectacular
commodity whether it takes the form of Xtianity or Marxism) for
manufactured personalities that multiplies needs precisely
because it can satisfy none of them. Industry creates

new needs to stimulate consumption and productivity. All of
which conspires to conceal the fact that the material conditions
for liberation already exist. However the various methods used
by the Spectacle (mass culture, commodities, consumer goods,
etc.), don't always work.


Power must be totally destroyed by means of fragmentary acts
(Vaneigem).

For example - punk rock, the riots of '81, the LA. riots or the
early raves. This shows the vulnerability of the Spectacle. It
can be defeated, but not without real difficulty because the
Spectacle has another weapon - "RECUPERATION".

To survive, the Spectacle has to have social control.
Recuperation is the way it achieves it. The Spectacle is able to
recuperate a situation or resist any challenge to itself by
shifting ground, by creating new roles and cultural forms.  One
way of doing this is by encouraging "participation".  People are
allowed a greater say in the construction of the world of their
own alienation.  Punk rock became packaged for consumption
(designer bin bags, torn tee-shirts from Fiorucci, limited
edition Sex Pistol singles, etc.), free festivals were replaced
by Glastonbury and Red Wedge, and rave became the darling of the
music industry. Once again we have the Spectacle of rebellion.
The Spectacle embraced the threat made it safe and sold it back
to us.


Everybody wants to breathe and nobody can breathe and a lot of
people say "we'll be able to breathe later." And most people
don't die because they are already dead.

Another technique of recuperation is to inseminate a nostalgic
yearning for the past; keeping people happy by reproducing the
fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, etc. The

news and fashion of today becomes the plot and setting of the
soap opera of tomorrow. Today becomes like yesterday, tomorrow
like the day before. It is not enough that life be experienced,
it must be seen to be experienced. The Spectacle is not
sustained by the images it produces but by our reproduction of
these images in our daily life. An artificial production of a
present ripe for infinite reproduction as long as the audience
remains happy and passive.  Participants become spectators and
the whole thing just another commodity.


We are not working for the spectacle of the end of the world,
but for the end of the world of the spectacle.

And if this fails and anyone decides to reject the materialist
values offered by recuperation, there is a way for coping with
this too. People bored by the mere possession of things are
encouraged to possess experiences. Experiences are marketed by
carefully controlled leisure industries, package tours, and the
burgeoning New (order?) Age industries. The Spectacle, of
course, tries to provide all things for all people; for people
who don't find this enough, the state's clandestine branch, the
Mafia, will peddle you dope, acid, smack, crack, E, etc. but all
at a price. And of course if that isn't enough you can always
buy into a cop out "alternative" lifestyle. 

Ideology is essentially a partial, technical rationality.

The Spectacle not only occupies people's time it occupies their
environment as well, with "URBANISM". This came about when the
recuporators realised people would no longer accept, and were
beginning to resist the damage that the Spectacle industry was
doing to their surroundings. Haphazard urban scrawl is replaced
by more manageable structures (the new town [factory town], the
supermarket, the shopping mall, the housing estate, the leisure
centre, the grid road system, etc.). Huge new towns were
developed solely for the purpose of work, profit and control,
with no consideration of the needs of the real people who are
forced to live there.

Urbanism maintains the class system, and class power, by
deliberately keeping workers apart in little boxes, in
isolation. The sub-division of space is merely the concrete
manifestation of what has already happened to time. It controls
the narrative structures of our lives both in time and in space;
dividing it up into work time/work space, leisure time/leisure
space, consumer time/consumer space, etc. Carefully controlled
times, places, and activities, isolated and unconnected except
by transport systems that become a kind of limbo space, a
metaphoric mis en scene, and as the distance between places
shrinks, the distance between individuals grows. The mass
character of such a planned environment constructs within its
glossy facade a formal misery.


"The desire to play has returned to destroy the hierarchical
society which banished it" (Vaneigem).


The answer to urbanism is simply the destruction of the entire
territory and the reconstruction of a discourse between the
needs of the people and the environment. Situationists are not
interested in the improvement of society as it exists;
resistance in terms of survival condemns us to the misery of
working for oppression. Situationists are interested in putting
something better in its place:

	"To make the world a sensuous extension of man rather than have
man remain an instrument of an alien world, is the goal of the
Situationist revolution. For us the reconstruction of life and
the rebuilding of the world are one and the same desire. To
achieve this tactics of subversion have to be extended to
schools, factories, universities, to confront the Spectacle
directly. Rapid transport systems, shopping centres, museums, as
well as the new forms of culture and the media, must be
considered as targets, areas for scandalous activity."

Governor Hughes said after his morning inspection tour (of the
1965 Watts LA riots) that he had found the "holiday atmosphere"
among the looters most repelling.

While we may choose particular issues as a point at which to
intervene and extend the struggle we must never lose sight of
the "big picture". Fragmentary resistance may win us some
improvement in our individual position but it hardly makes an
impression on the totality of oppression. In fact, single issue
campaigns legitimate the Spectacle by allowing it to publicly
make concessions that are of little value and can be taken away
again if necessary. This is why it is important to expand from
particular situations to universal ones that can serve to
involve more people, because at the end of the day single issue
campaigns play into the hands of the specialists of the
Spectacle who play one group off against another (Animal Rights
verses Human Rights; Sexual Discrimination verses Racial
Discrimination, etc.) and stage manage the whole procedure so
that control is maintained. Single issue politics can contain
radical potential, but should only be used as a "detonator", a
point from which to expand from, to widen the total struggle; to
send shock waves of resistance reverberating around society.

Never sacrifice a present good for a future good. Enjoy the
moment; don't get into anything that doesn't satisfy your
passions right away (Fourier).

We must intervene in radical situations to try to speed up the
revolutionary process; to create situations that jolt people out
of customary ways of thinking and behaving. To destroy the stage
sets of spectacular illusion, to know and to show that there are
other ways of doing things. To 

identify the real demand - the demand for real life, the one
demand the spectacle cannot meet. It is not enough to analyse
the misery of daily life and its causes, we must speak of our
dreams and desires and provide examples of life as it could be.
We must start to build the world we want now (in our
relationships, our interactions and the way we conduct ourselves
in our daily lives). The only way to develop a revolutionary
theory is to put it into practice; revolutionary theory is
developed on the basis of lived experience. A revolutionary
movement based on revolutionary theory is participatory. Its
goal is the destruction of the commodity Spectacle.

Each person is the offspring of their works, as passivity makes
its bed, so shall it lie in it (Debord).

Without political parties, hierarchies of any sort, or the mere
transfer of power from one ruling elite to another, the
Situationist revolution holds out the prospect of the total
transformation of the world. The answer to the "Society of the
Spectacle" is "The Revolution of Everyday Live". Revolution is a
process, a process that can be started now.



by Grim.