Presentation

-My reading was the “Great sideshow of the situationist international”, written by Edward Ball in 1987. I couldn’t find any information on Mr Ball, so im going to start with a brief history of the Situationist International, then I’ll go into more depth about what they did and how their work has impacted society today.

-The Situationist International was formed in July of 1957.
- It was made up of members from different European avant-garde groups, who had met at a conference in Italy and decided to join up to form the S.I.
-They were situated in Paris and lasted 15 years before breaking up in 1972.

-The SI was a group of artists, politicians and academics who had the common goal to bring about social and political change. They had pretty extremist views on capitalism and the state of the social conditions at the time, and they were strongly influenced by the philosophies of Marxism. The SI developed a strong critique of the industrial culture of capitalism in the west and socialism in the east, and long before postmodernism had and come into existence, defined and practiced much of what postmodernism stands for today. They saw everyday social life as being dominated by capitalism, and although capatalism had been attacked before by socialist oppositions, they felt that new ideoligies, criticisms and new forms of rebellion were required to bring about change.

Ball describes the history behind one of the main ideologies of the SI in quite a long drawn out way, so I’ll try to simplify it a little so you can get a view of how and why the SI operated. It is a criticism of capitalism economies that they use the idea of reification as a huge operation to commodifiy social life. Reification is the idea of treating an abstraction as a real life, concrete thing or object. Another definition Ball describes is that
“Socail life is shattered into an ensemble of hermetic points for the purpose of organizing a higher untity, that is, the analytical arrangement of experience that capitalism requires for its smoothest operation.”

-The SI played with reification to create a revolution of consumption, to create a misrecognition commodities by changing their meaning. They did this through detournement. This is art of taking elements of well known media and changing it so that it holds a new meaning, one opposing that of the original message. By doing so they influenced art, literature, cinema and even product development and marketing stratagies of consumerism. They showed people how to recycle what was the official norm to empower them with new meanings, to create new products out of the commodity economy. This is the idea of detournement.

-One example of how they practiced their ideas, was an attack on literature, where artist Asger Jorn and Guy Debord, who was the sort of head of the SI, made a book where all of its content was of pirated elements, the print ran in all directions, there were many sentences left unexplained as they broke off suddenly or had text superimposed over them. The cover was also made of sandpaper so that it would damage other books it lay next to. The purpose is to take the book, a well known corporate medium, and give it a new meaning and purpose. So Detournment recycles something with a specific but completely different and oppositional meaning.

Ball finishes quite nicely by saying

“Detournement has become axiomatic to profit making, and like surrealism, a mass phenomenon. The cult of the displaced object has developed the contours of an industry in design, in clothing, in architecture, even food- in short, in every marketplace of postwar capitalism. Everything that was once made now reappears as a fragment in the hands of the pasticheur. What could not be converted into cash flow used to be expendable, but this problem has been solved: thanks to detournement, everything may stay in the stream of the economy, even the expendable.”