Adventure
Is adventure dead? Are we doomed to live in a world where our actions amount to nothing? Where every day is much like another? Are we condemned to play only in safe playgrounds, on appointed playdates? To find our desires thwarted, diverted, co-opted – and sold back to us as package tours and theme parks? Recognizing and escaping this sordid fate is the first objective of a Situationist theory – and practice.
No era ever began with a theory. Eras begin with a journey, a game, or an adventure. The adventure with which the Situationists thought our era began was a particularly challenging one. It was the adventure of contesting everything, of challenging everything. Much was at stake. Some will not make it. Some will be lost along the way, to suicide, drugs, madness – or worse – a literary or artistic success.
Most of the early Situationists were children during the war against the Nazis. They were born too late for that adventure. [Mension] They were born too late for what seemed like the heroic era of the avant garde movements such as the Dadaists and Surrealists, who combined elements of art, literature and politics into a generalized challenge to their times. Their predicament, in short, was a familiar one, of being born either too late – or too early. And hence they wanted to hasten the world through one of its periodic nap times.
“Childhood? It’s right here – we have never emerged from it.” We are all children in this world. There’s no majority to assume, no real powers over one’s conditions to inherit. Sure, you wake up one day and find you have a job, kids, a mortgage. A bleak necessity descends. But this is really just an extension of the necessities of childhood. Do your homework, eat your greens. If adulthood means coming into control of one’s own actions, then that adulthood never arrives. Not in this world. Until the landscape in which we live is something that anyone and everyone can affect and transform, until, in short, everyday life is our own responsibility, we can never really grow up.
There are only children, then. Children and lost children. What distinguishes lost children is that they know it. They seek the adventure of confronting the totality of forces that produce this powerlessness. ‘Lost children’ (l’enfant perdu) was a name once given to soldiers sent on suicidal missions between the lines. They venture into a zone in which even one’s own side will likely treat them as the enemy, where they confront not just the other side, but the whole battlefield, while they pursue their singular task with singular dedication. They no longer belong to anybody but themselves. They are off, on their adventure, maybe never to return.
His picture is everywhere, on t-shirts and stickers, on books and posters in Spanish, English, a host of other languages.* If there is an icon of adventure these days it is Che Guevara. But it is just the legend of an adventure. This one made the adventure for us. He is the face of the adventurer who died, not so much for our sins as for our boredom. There’s no need to feel guilty about it. He lived in another time and place, where the path to adventure was still open.
Are these times not unlike the postwar 50s, then? That was a time when adventure seems far off, either in the past (the resistance to the Nazis), the future (the long awaited ‘revolution’) or elsewhere (anti-colonial struggles)? Adventure is transmitted as legends and fables from glorious times by the cinema. These days, it’s like that movie The Beach, where even if you find that special, untouched place for which there is no postcard, the very act of discovering it brings the postcard sellers flocking at your heels. Tourism is to adventure as the handjob is to sex. Without encounter, adventure made banal, just a different routine.
And yet, even before they had a name, or even a philosophy, the proto-Situationists found the passageways to adventure, and right in the streets of Paris. “And only a few encounters were like signals emanating from a more intense life, a life that has not really been found.” Out of those encounters came, at first, nothing more than the feeling that this world, this life, could be otherwise. Everything else would flow from that sensation: A theory, and a way to practice it.
There are no Situationists any more. The Letterist International, where some of their key ideas were formed, lasted from 1952 to 1957. The Situationist International, formed in 1957, dissolved itself in 1972. In that twenty year period a handful of people advanced the most far reaching theoretical and practical critique of modern society. It’s ideas and practices anticipated the widespread current of revolt of the late 60s, in which some members and associates of the Situationist International were direct participants. The organization dissolved with the coming of the political winter of the 70s and 80s. Some of its members, including Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem, Alice Becker-Ho, Gianfranco Sanguinetti, continued to write and to develop Situationist ideas – and we shall pursue those ideas in this book – but effectively the Situationist International has been history since 1972.
Situationist texts and images continue to circulate. It helps that many were published without copyright and hence can be reprinted or posted on the internet freely. Yet there is something more to it than that. There is some constant current of seduction, some desire deferred, to which these curious documents speak. If Che Guevara is the beautific of adventure, then Guy Debord might be the sublime alternative, the less familiar product for canny consumers of downloadable adventure. He retains currency as the perfect example of what this society did not want. While he is already the property of an ‘industry’ dedicated to turning out souvenirs in his name, he cannot be recuperated without risk.
What is living and what is dead in the legacy of the Situationist International? First come the Letterists, and their great slogan: “never work!” They invent a way of experiencing the city, of confounding its divisions between work places and amusement zones. But the Letterists adventure risks destroying itself and sinking without a trace. Out of the wreckage comes the Situationist International. In its early days, a utopian strain prevails. There’s an interest in pushing avant garde ideas about art to the limit, to an architecture that would embrace the whole process of creating environments for play. In its later incarnation, it becomes more than a little messianic, and very political. It’s about total critique and overthrow of everything that stands in the way of realizing the ideas discovered in the earlier phase.
Neither the utopian or the messianic seem appropriate forms of optimism in these times. And yet, in their struggle to leave the twentieth century, the Situationists may have some clues as to how to deal with this twenty-first century in which we find ourselves. In these mundane times, we have need again of their extravagant demands. These times are not so bewildering, and not so dull, when understood from the point of view of what they do not permit.
This book is not a history of the Situationist International. Nor is it a biography of its leading personalities. It is not, strictly speaking, an accurate representation of the best – or worst – of what it thought and did. Rather, this book is oriented toward the future rather than the past. It wants to free the Situationist International from its custodians. Others treat it as a goldmine for scholarship, art history, political score settling or scurrilous biographical yarns about those safely in their graves. The Situationist International has been embalmed by those it had pronounced dead.
Our interest here is rather in what is living in Situationist thought and action. Can we tour the ruins of its seductive and widely if selectively advertised critique and still find some living concepts? Concepts which might, in turn be developed, expanded, revised, updated – applied? That is what this book advertises. (For certain caveats and cautions, see the Acknowledgements.) This is a book about how the Situationists might inform the way we live as much as the way we think. That is not to say that they are help up as examples to imitate. They did not want disciplines. Rather, it’s a matter of looking back to the passages along which adventure might be renewed.
Like most travel guides, this book takes in some contrasting terrains. Rather than the plains and the mountains, those terrains are the spectacle and that which negates it. Where most travel guides are about what is particular about a given place, this one is about the qualities that connect all places under the reign of the spectacle. Where the hip travel guides have only the latest shopping and leisure activities for the discerning consumer, this book concerns itself only with antiques – with the concept of the totality of social relations, their falsification, and their critique.