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In this week's ISM Lyn Gallacher searches for a definition of Situationism and cannot get past the figure of Guy Debord, who was one of the movement's founders and its leading light.

Transcript

Lyn Gallacher: When I was beginning to think about this ISM for the series I went to borrow a copy of Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle from the city library and couldn't. Not only were all the copies out but there was a waiting list. A waiting list -- for a tiny obscure book like this published in 1967? Why? Could situationism be the ISM of the moment? Well, perhaps yes.

For me situationism perfectly describes the current meltdown in the world economy. Back then in the early 1960s, the situationists already knew that consumerism would eat itself. And now that market economies are being propped up by government bailouts, their predictions seem all too true. Not that Guy Debord would have been pleased about that. He would have hated a world where trillions of dollars could be found to save the stock market and not an extra cent to feed the poor. He would probably have rather seen the economy collapse, but whatever he thought, he would have hated being right. To him all ideologies were useless -- even his own.

What was much more important was the situation, the current reality, not its reification, the original experience, not its packaged by-product. He was in favour of situations and the enemy of the spectacle.

As you may already know, the Situationists International was first formed in 1957. But their most famous moment was the May '68 riots in Paris -- when a student revolution, partly inspired by the writings of Debord, grew to become a workers' revolt, a general strike, and France was brought to a standstill for two weeks.

Guy Debord grew up during WWII, a conflict he only was able to watch because he was too young to participate in. So it was a conflict he could see but do nothing about. Imagine a child absorbing newsreels of the Vichy government in collapse, then later in life starting a philosophy which berates the image, a philosophy which ultimately allowed the post-modern philosopher Baudrillard to declare that the Gulf War was only a movie.

There has to be a link because that's the spectacle. It is the moment when images replace the real, and life becomes a gigantic movie -- or worse still a commercial. In the face of such commodification the situationists say 'No!' And that includes a 'No' to television, sport, art, education, meaningless work, and holidays, especially when they include vacations in someone else's misery.

The situationists were the decendants of the letterists -- a group of individuals who were concerned about the commodification of language. The situationists understood this and went a step further. They were worried about the commodification of life. They said that even the tiniest of gestures, such as holding open a door or a facial expression, could be commodified. Indeed, the death throes of late capitalism have seen even the unconscious become a commodified zone: our feelings, dreams, imaginations have in some ways all fallen prey to the market economy.

So just as advertising constructs desire, the situationists construct resistance. For them it's a guerrilla war with not just language and society at stake but our soul.

Once you start looking for Guy Debord he is everywhere. You could argue that his radical movement essentially failed. It was, after all, an impossible mix of idealism and fatalism. The situationists wanted a redefinition of concepts such as employment, power, order and authority. And they failed because in some sense a definition IS a spectacle.

Nevertheless, Debord's tactics have remained a blueprint for dissent, and they've been used by groups both on the far left and the far right. The fluxus movement, flash mobs, happenings and World Trade Organisation protests can all be linked to situationist thinking. Also Debord has been cited by authors as far apart politically as Julian Barnes and Bret Easton Ellis, and he has been seen in everything from punk to the Angry Brigade.

Part of Debord's appeal is that he is eminently quotable. His writing is -- if not elegant -- is then enigmatic, arrogant, aphoristic; like much of the graffiti that was around at the time of the May 68 riots. It reads like a slogan; such as 'It is forbidden to forbid' and 'I take my desires for reality, because I believe in the reality of my desires'.

One of the most famous slogans at the time was 'Under the cobblestones the beach,' because the cobblestones were unearthed by the students to be thrown at the authorities. They were a symbol of the fact that capitalism had cobbled over reality, which somehow still existed underneath.

And here's another one, 'You are searching for the hacienda of your dreams. You will never find the hacienda -- it does not exist, cannot exist. The hacienda must be built.' This one is obviously ridiculing the requirements of capitalism, and insisting that the present moment is all that matters. These slogans also insist that words are no longer about something, they are something. They are a splash of graffiti on a wall, they are a passing shouted cry, they are ... well if you don't know by now you've missed the present moment.

Finally, in 1994, after suffering from lifelong alcoholism, Guy Debord shot himself. Nevertheless, Debord's critique of society is more relevant than ever, as we fill our lives with inane TV shows and endless psycho-babble about dreams coming true. It is time to say NO.

The situationists believed that capitalism was an unjust moral system and that it perpetrates the spectacle to serve its own cynical ends. Capitalism, they said, wrote its own definitions, so let's write some definitions back. Capitalism's definitions removed ambiguity and uncertainty. Situationism put them back. Capitalism homogenised the evidence. Situationism gave us raw milk -- unpasteurised, unsanitised, and full of (possibly useful, possibly harmful) bacteria.

You'll be pleased to know that I did find a copy of Debord's book Society of the Spectacle. Unfortunately I had to bypass the public library and go to the market economy -- meaning I bought a copy off the internet. However, it means I can directly quote Debord.

Try this for size: 'Culture is the meaning of an insufficiently meaningful world.' It's a terribly addictive style of writing and it encourages everyone to make up their own slogans (just as situationism would have wanted). So how about this, 'Take the joke out of the word 'wage' -- let exploitation be home delivered.'