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Guy Debord, translated by Stuart Kendall and John McHaIe, Correspondence: The Foundation of the Situationist International (June 1957-August 1960), London, Semiotext(e), 2009, 397pp; £12.95 paperback
Tom McDonough (ed), The Situationists and the City: A Reader, London, Verso, 2010, 256pp; £14.99 paperback, £65 cloth
Recuperation, the process whereby an oppositional position is assimilated into that which it opposes, remained something of an aporia within Situationist theory. Recuperation was deemed inevitable and unavoidable; even the most radical critique of capitalism could be ideologically rewritten and then incorporated into what Guy Debord called the society of the spectacle. The Situationist International (Sl) was aware that its own work would face the same fate, and it is true that many Situationist concepts have been defused and accepted into institutional discourses around art, architecture and urbanism. Through the recuperation of the SI, a popular characterisation of the group has emerged which consigns its historical role to a vague involvement in May '68 and reduces its theoretical contribution to a handful of signature concepts. This recuperated SI can then be conveniently filed away with their spectacle alongside, say, Baudrillard and his simulacra and McLuhan and his global village.
This state of affairs, in the Anglophone world at least, has been due in part to the uneven appearance of English translations of Situationist texts. Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle (1967) and Raoul Vaneigem's Revolution of Everyday Life (1967) have come to form the twin pillars of Situationist work: Debord representing its dense Hegelian theory and Vaneigem its more affective calls for quotidian insurrection. Yet both of these texts were produced ten years into the SFs fifteen-year existence, after it had shifted away from aesthetic production and cultural intervention and moved towards a more theoretical critique of contemporary life. Although Debord and Vaneigem's texts address many of the concepts that the SI had been developing over the previous decade, these were mostly synthesised and subsumed into the total theory of the spectacle. The disproportionate amount of attention paid to these two texts over the rest of the SFs oeuvre not only beatifies Debord and Vaneigem, but also overlooks the fact that Society of the Spectacle and The Revolution of Everyday Life present only two interpretations of a long period of experimentation, disagreement...