The media theorist and activist McKenzie Wark has published two books on the Situationists – The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (2011) and The Spectacle of Disintegration: Situationist Passages Out of the 20th Century (2013) – where she demonstrates her passion for, and encyclopedic knowledge of, their history, ideas, practices, pre-history, and post-histories. Wark read “Debord’s Society of the Spectacle at an impressionable age and decided thereafter to do something with it.” She explains that many of her books are deeply imprinted by the Situationists.
Virtual Geography: Living With Global Media Events (1994) engages with Debord’s theory of a “lived time of experience” to glimpse, in the differentiated flows of information and vectoral trajectories of electronic transactions, gaps in simulation or the spectacle.
Dispositions (2002) is a dérive or wandering, written in the shadow of the worldwide integrated spectacle of global positioning and surveillance systems that want to fix our location and identity, defining us by our data profile.425 It is a diary of aphoristic poetic musings.
Written in the style of Society of the Spectacle, A Hacker Manifesto (2004) is an updating of détournement (the diverting of technologies) for the digital age. Echoing Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, it calls for the “hacker class,” who work in the realm of intellectual “abstractions,” to rebel and actively question the necessity of private property.
Gamer Theory (2007) is a critical theory of games that rises to the anthropological level of Roger Caillois’ seminal Man, Play and Games, where the French ethnologist developed an “ideal typology” of games and festive rituals in different human societies across time. Computer games and virtual worlds are the archetypal cultural form of contemporary society. Wark explores the complex intertwined relationship between the comforting perfection of the online game and the imperfections of the “compulsory creative” games we must play offline to survive in everyday life in the “disintegrating spectacle” of global capitalism.
The most succinct statement of Wark’s position with respect to the Situationists appears at the beginning of her pamphlet 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International (2008). From the 1950s to the 1970s, the Situationists were the heartbeat of a movement of neo-Marxist rebellion in Europe that was “beyond art and politics.” Their energy culminated in the student-worker near-revolution in France in 1968. The organization officially dissolved in 1972. According to almost all accounts, that was the end of it. It is precisely that assumption of closure with which Wark takes issue. She is primarily interested in what happened afterwards. Her books explicitly about the SI trace in detail the post-1972 activities of those who had been part of the group, or of others who sought to continue, or go beyond, the legacy of the Situationists. This is almost a secret history.
McKenzie Wark wanders with grace and verve through the ideas, creations, and activist practices of many figures in the social and intellectual history of the Situationists who were previously regarded as secondary to Guy Debord.
Starting about 1989, the Situationists were recuperated by “official international cultural exchange.” They entered the museum and pantheon of culture. The Pompidou Center in Paris curated an official exhibition that went on tour. Greil Marcus published his book Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century, situating Situationism in “the history of oppositional popular culture”: the successor to Dada in art provocation and the forerunner of punk rock and the Sex Pistols in music. Academics rushed in to claim the Situationists as part of art history, or of futuristic architecture, or of utopian urban planning and design. For literature professors, Debord’s writings came suddenly to have poetic and literary value. For film studies professors, Debord’s films became part of the avant-garde cinematic curriculum.
For McKenzie Wark, the dérive is only one instance of the more general ideas or practices of experimental behavior and permanent play. Situationist architecture is only one component of the more general idea of unitary urbanism. When experimental behavior is choreographed and enacted brilliantly in the context of unitary urbanism, then the possibility of the highest stage of “the construction of situations” appears.
The thesis of The Spectacle of Disintegration is that May-June 1968 and the self-dissolution of the SI in 1972 were not the end of the Situationist project. Wark writes at length about the works of the art historian and former Situationist Timothy J. Clark; the utopian writings of Raoul Vaneigem (and his relation to nineteenth century utopian socialist Charles Fourier); the détournement films of René Vienet such as Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (1973), The Girls of Kamare (1974), Mao by Mao (1977), and Peking Duck Soup (1977); and the later collaborations of Guy Debord, the film editor Martine Barraqué, and the poet and scholar of Western European slang Alice Becker-Ho in filmmaking and the devising of a board game called Game of War.
Echoing Machiavelli, Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor (the secret of God is that God does not exist), Baudrillard, and Claude Lefort, Wark concludes that the power of capitalism and the state is not “real.” The secret of power is that power does not exist. It is a ruse perpetrated on the populace. It exists because people believe in that power. Power abides thanks to the spectacle of appearances. “The state renders spectacular the production of its own secrets,” writes Wark. Appearances are exchangeable for other appearances. Secrets are exchangeable for other secrets. Secrets are complexly related to the spectacle. Wark concludes:
While the spectacle renders all that appears equivalent, the division between the secret and the spectacular implies a hierarchy – the main game of power. The division between the spectacle of appearances and the secrecy of non-appearances is itself an aspect of the falsification of the whole that the spectacle affects.