Situationism: Where Domination Ends

The two interludes just past strayed some distance from the writings of the Situationists, the little clique of avant-garde Marxists in mid-20th century France whose reflections offer certain highly useful insights into the problems and predicaments of life in the twilight of the industrial age. Neither of those divagations, however, was irrelevant to the theme I’ve been developing here. Both the no-ego ego trip and the collapse of genuine humor on the American left—shown most clearly, perhaps, by the impressive lameness of most leftist memes—cast a necessary though indirect light on the path the Situationists could have taken.

To be fair, it’s a path neither they nor most of the other soi-disant rebels of their time and class were willing to consider. In the first post in this sequence, I talked about the social function of Marxism in modern bureaucratic societies, which have already passed through the changes that Marxism brings about in practice (though not, of course, in theory). Since it’s hardly necessary to impose a metastatic bureaucratic system fusing politics and economics on a society that already has one, Marxists in bureaucratic societies—beta-Marxists, as I termed them in that post—have the function of providing dissatisfied youth with harmless ways to act out their fantasies of rebellion, before they sell out in the usual way and get the jobs in the corporate or bureaucratic worlds to which their class status entitles them.

Beta-Marxists therefore tend to pursue an intriguing double agenda. On the one hand, they quite often craft extremely insightful critiques of the societies in which they function. On the other, they are exquisitely careful not to embrace any means of action that might actually pose the least threat to the status quo. Marxist rhetoric makes this last task easy. Read through Situationist books such as Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life, for example, and you’ll find no shortage of stirring evocations of that imminent moment when the masses will rise up and take destiny into their hands, or what have you.

Of course that moment is never going to happen, and that’s exactly the point. The masses aren’t interested in taking destiny into their hands.  Nor, to be a little more precise, are they interested in handing over their destinies to a cadre of downwardly mobile bourgeois intellectuals who want to play at being revolutionaries. When the masses take to the streets, it’s because they want an end to specific burdens or the provision of specific benefits, which can be provided quite handily by any modern bureaucratic system that isn’t hopelessly sunk in incompetence. I’m sure that beta-Marxists are quite well aware of this, but daydreaming about the supposedly inevitable proletarian revolution allows them to evade the whole question of how to turn their fine ideas into something other than a head-trip to entertain denizens of the political fringes.

What makes this especially fascinating in the case of the Situationists is that they had to go out of their way to define their insights in a way that would exclude constructive action. To some extent that effort was made inescapable by their intellectual ancestry; the Surrealists, who laid down so many of the foundations on which Situationism built, had contended with the same issues before and during the Second World War, and some of the leading Surrealists had drawn exactly the conclusions at which the Situationists balked. To at least as great an extent, however, the struggle to avoid the practical implications of their own realizations was forced on them by the nature of those realizations themselves.

That’s almost painfully visible in the book by Vaneigem just mentioned. (Its title in French is Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations, “treatise on knowing how to live for the use of young generations”; the title The Revolution of Everyday Life was picked for it by the publisher of its first English translation.) Every time I read it, it brings to mind that fine scene from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels in which Gulliver wakes on a beach to find that the tiny Lilliputians have anchored him firmly in place with an abundance of equally diminutive ropes and stakes. The Gulliver in this metaphor is the crucial insight that fills the pages of Vaneigem’s book and the better end of Situationist literature more generally; the ropes and stakes deserve a certain amount of attention before we proceed, because Marxism is only one source from which the Lilliputians in question got the necessary hardware.

Perhaps the most striking thing about The Revolution of Everyday Life, in fact, is just how perfect a period piece it is. It was first published in 1967, and if you know your way around the avant-garde literature of the Sixties counterculture you’ll recognize nearly every trope that Vaneigem deploys. Some of those, in fact, are less tropes than self-parodying clichés. For example—well, I don’t imagine more than a tiny handful of my readers recall Maynard G. Krebs, the beatnik sidekick of the main character in the otherwise forgettable TV show The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Among Krebs’s signature gimmicks in the show was responding to the word “work” by leaping back in dread with a horrified yelp of “Work?”

Vaneigem basically does the same thing. For him, work of any kind is “forced labor,” and he makes plenty of hay from the fact that the French word for labor, travail, comes (via a long and winding etymological road) from a Latin word for an instrument of torture. The thought that he might be expected to put in some productive effort in exchange for the goods and services he consumes is, as far as he is concerned, an oppressive and unreasonable demand. This invites ridicule, but there’s actually something deeper going on. To his credit, Vaneigem refers to that deeper dimension more than once.

Few people remember these days just how deeply committed the supposedly serious thinkers of the 1960s were to a specific set of false beliefs about the near-term future. Nuclear power was expected to provide effectively limitless amounts of cheap electricity that would revolutionize human life. Combined with widely predicted advances in robotics and automation, the fantastic energy surpluses of the imminent Atomic Age would make most forms of work obsolete. Robots, not human beings, would labor in the factories and the fields, turning out goods and services in such abundance that poverty would be annihilated. The great problem faced by the societies of the future, many pundits held, would consist of making sure the prosperous legions of the permanently unemployed had ample diversions for their lifelong leisure.

This wasn’t just something you found in the science fiction of the era, though of course it did appear there, in countless variations. Major universities hosted symposia where eminent scholars discussed how to manage the transition to the new age of limitless abundance. Cultural venues such as opera companies were told to brace themselves for the onslaught of mass audiences, and poets celebrated the utopian future that was supposedly about to dawn—Richard Brautigan’s once-famous piece “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” published the same year as The Revolution of Everyday Life, is typical of the genre.

As Brautigan’s poem suggests, this wasn’t just a belief of the buttoned-down mainstream of the day. Brautigan himself was one of the archetypal counterculture poets of the time, and he was far from the only figure in those circles to embrace the vision. Such icons of the more practically minded end of the counterculture as Buckminster Fuller also leapt aboard the nuclear bandwagon. So did avant-garde architect Paolo Soleri, whose plans for gigantic self-contained cities had such a massive presence in the alternative imagination of the time—look at the fine details of Soleri’s plans and you’ll find that his planned megastructures depended on nuclear power plants tucked into the basement, providing all the electricity anybody would want.

Even the people who protested nuclear power assumed as a matter of course that nuclear technology was just as viable as its fans claimed; they objected to it on other grounds. Like most of the neo-Luddites of the era—the comparable movement against supersonic transports (SSTs) is another example—it never occurred to the antinuclear activists to challenge the technological triumphalism that undergirded the march toward nuclear power, and wonder whether those hugely expensive facilities really could make electricity too cheap to meter.

Of course that turned out to be not merely the fly but the Rodan-sized pterodactyl in the ointment. Far from being too cheap to meter, electricity from nuclear power plants turned out to be too expensive to pay its own costs, much less to justify the giddy dreams that had been piled on it by the publicists of the Atomic Age. That the same thing happened to SSTs, space travel, and a great many other linchpins of the imaginary future of the Sixties simply adds spice to the resulting irony. The expected advances in robotics and automation also turned out to be much slower to arrive than anybody thought in 1967, but it was the catastrophic failure of nuclear power to act out the role assigned to it that dropkicked the whole richly imagined future of the Sixties into history’s dustbin.

(Yes, I know that this whole set of failed ideas has been trotted out and put on display yet again by promoters of so-called “artificial intelligence” schemes—“so-called” because the programs in question have no actual intelligence, and simply assemble statistically likely sequences of words, numbers, or pixels in response to queries. It’s remarkable how many of the failed dreams of the Boomer generation’s youthful days are being rehashed around us as that generation sinks into its second childhood. All things considered, this reminds me of nothing so much as the reverence directed to the mummified corpse of Lenin in the Soviet Union’s last years, as the regime he founded stumbled toward its self-inflicted end.)

Vaneigem wrote The Revolution of Everyday Life long before anybody had begun to notice the failure of the dream, however. He penned his denunciation of work at a time when nearly every respectable thinker was certain that work, in the usual sense of the word, would soon be obsolete. That, of course, is the hidden context of Vaneigem’s tirades. I mentioned earlier on in this sequence of posts that beta-Marxists are assigned the task of developing a reserve army of unemployed ideas, a penumbra of potential ideological positions that can be coopted and exploited by bureaucrats if they ever become advantageous to the system. To this, Vaneigem’s rhetoric was a potentially useful contribution.

Most people feel adrift and useless unless they have some outlet for the normal human desire for productive effort. Working class culture, in particular, tends to treat work as a locus of identity and value as well as a source of weekly paychecks. To convince millions of people raised with such attitudes that they should give up any hope of doing anything useful with their lives was a tall order, but an ideology that condemns all forms of work as torture and forced labor might have done the trick. If the Atomic Age had turned out as advertised, Vaneigem’s ideas might well have been turned into the central theme of a cascade of advertising campaigns meant to convince the masses that being condemned to useless lives as permanent welfare recipients really was what they had wanted all along.

The rejection of productive effort in Vaneigem’s book extends remarkably far. He argues, for example, that poetry is a central principle both of the revolutionary process and of the wonderful world of the future that the coming orgy of revolutionary violence will surely bring forth. By that word “poetry,” however, he means nothing so mundane or productive as writing a poem: “True poetry cares nothing for poems,” he proclaims airily. Poetry for him seems to consist, rather, in living poetically or even, in a revolutionary context, in rioting, looting, and murdering in a poetic manner. All the arts, in fact, are to be abolished and replaced by artistic living. What people will do if they happen to want to read a poem or look at a painting is not something Vaneigem addresses; no doubt Brautigan’s distinctly creepy “machines of loving grace” will manufacture those on demand.

Though I’ve chosen to explore it in depth here, the rejection of productive effort is far from the only cliché of Sixties alternative pop culture that gets an additional fifteen minutes of fame in The Revolution of Everyday Life. I don’t propose to go through the whole set, partly because this essay isn’t a review of Vaneigem’s book and partly because the basic principles behind all of it can be seen clearly enough via the points already covered. By and large, it amounts to an angry insistence that “the people”—or, rather, this or that clique of radicals who arrogate to themselves the right to speak for the people—should get whatever they want without being expected to offer any sort of recompense for it, or even accept any compromise with the valid needs of others, with the unspoken subtext that what they want just happens to further the interests of the corporate-bureaucratic state as those were understood by the elites of the time.

All these are the Lilliputian ropes and stakes holding down something much larger and more interesting. The Gulliver-figure in all this? The paired recognitions that the living reality behind all that Marxist handwaving about classes and other abstractions is the subjective life experience of individuals, and that this subjective realm is the battlefield where the revolution that matters has to take place. Grasp that and you have a key of remarkable power.

That transmutation runs all through Vaneigem’s book, and through Situationism as a whole. When Marx wrote of alienation, for example, he had in mind the removal of control over the means of production from the laboring classes by a succession of governing classes. When Vaneigem and his fellow Situationists wrote about the same theme, they refocused the discussion on the concrete personal experience of alienation, of the inner state of the individual who feels cut off from his or her own sources of meaning, value, and power. Look closely at every other central concept of the avant-garde Marxism of the time as it appears in Situationist literature, and you’ll find the same alchemy at work.

That was the great achievement of the Situationists, but it also endangered their status as loyal beta-Marxists serving the bureaucratic system against which they claimed to rebel. Recognize the subjective dimension of alienation and you open the door to responses that can actually affect the situation: responses that have the potential to move past the point at which domination falters and freedom comes within reach of the individual. Once these responses are understood and the necessary skills have been developed, the bureaucratic system has no effective defenses against them. The downside of this subjective approach is that these steps can only be taken by the individual for himself or herself. Nothing is more futile, or more certain to end in exploitation and defeat, than waiting for someone else to do it for you.

Furthermore, there are sharp limits to how much help you can give anyone, even if they want to follow your lead. Situationism, interestingly enough, included several of the core methods that can be used to assist that process. In future posts here, I’ll talk about the crafting of situations, the art of the derivé, and the practical tactics of détournement, which provide a good solid toolkit both for the individual pursuing autonomy and for the experienced practitioner hoping to show the way to novices. Even so, the original impetus and the follow-through both have to come from the individual. Thus the movement toward freedom can never really be a mass movement. It can only be a movement of individuals in opposition to the mass.

I’m pretty sure the Situationists themselves were aware of this. The way that certain patterns of Marxist rhetoric repeat in their writings like so many nervous tics suggests, at least to me, a sustained effort to back away from the implications of core Situationist concepts, and hide from the challenge of individual liberation behind the old failed dream of mass revolution followed by sentimental fantasies of utopia. More revealing still, though, is the extraordinarily ambivalent attitude the Situationists displayed toward the Surrealists, who in many ways were their most important predecessors. While some of the core Situationist writings acknowledged their debt to Surrealism, those same writings also rejected Surrealism root and branch.

That rejection was no accident. Some of the Surrealists, in their own ways, reached some of the same insights before the Second World War that the Situationists grasped after that war, but many of the leading figures in the earlier movement followed those insights into territory where the Situationists would not follow. For a significant number of them, their quest for the place where domination ends led them to occultism. We’ll follow them there in due time.