ACFM Trip 63: Situationism

Keir Milburn (0:20)

Hello, welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. My name is Keir Milburn, and I'm joined as usual by my good friend, Nadia Idle.

Nadia Idle (0:29)

Hello.

Keir Milburn (0:30)

And my other good friend, Jeremy Gilbert.

Jeremy Gilbert (0:33)

Hello.

Keir Milburn (0:34)

And today we are discussing Situationism. Or are we? Are we discussing Situationist ideas and the Situationist history? For those of you who haven't got a clue what I'm talking about, the Situationists were a group of artists, political theorists who were influential on radical politics and culture, especially punk and post-punk scenes through the 70s, 80s and 90s.

So what do you think, Jeremy?

Jeremy Gilbert (1:02)

I think it's a really interesting topic. I mean, partly we want to do it this week as Raoul Van Eem, one of the great Situationist thinkers just passed away last week. And it's the idea of Situationism or the activities of the Situationist International and its constituent members, which is an important distinction. It's had a significant effect on various aspects of culture, radical culture, and it's provided a vocabulary and a set of ways of thinking about things, which has been quite important for certain kinds of avant-garde practice and attempts to theorize the nature of capitalist power and culture in the late 20th century and subsequently. So there's a lot to look at there. There's a lot to draw on and get engaged with.

I guess, like a lot of people will have been Situationist adjacent or curious at some point in their lives, and I definitely was like as a teenager. So I'm looking forward to talking about that.

Keir Milburn (2:05)

What about you Nadia?

Nadia Idle (2:07)

Yes, all of that is super interesting. I think there's a direct link to our last couple of episodes about why we're talking about this now, the famous quote attributed to but maybe actually not created by, but the situationist or situationist ideas of beneath the street, the beach. We've just been talking about the beach. That's one of the famous slogans associated with some of that thinking. But also in general, I think situationist ideas are fresh at the moment in the sense that they talk to some very ACFM topics perhaps like desire, the spectacle, recuperation and kind of that critique being something that we're interested in in terms of how it's related to some stuff that might be quite alive for us now, ideas of capitalist realism, algorithms, meme warfare and that sort of thing. So I think that's a good reason why we should be talking about situationism or the situationists at this moment in time. What about yourself, Keir?

Keir Milburn (3:11)

You know, I read quite a lot of situationist theory in my early 20s. In fact, before that, I'd sort of like come across situationist ideas because it was quite a big influence on the sort of like the post-punk anarchist sort of milieu I grew up in. One of the ways I come across situationist ideas was through these little small pamphlets, which were released under the title Spectacular Times by this guy, Larry Law. They were like little pamphlets where he made the ideas of the situationist sort of digestible to a sort of punk rock audience, I think. And are they just, the collection of these Spectacular Times pamphlets has just been reprinted and have been issued as a collection basically. I think by Seth Wheeler, I'm not sure, friend of the show, probably not very frequent listener. Well, I found it really interesting actually going back and looking at my Situationist books. I've got quite a lot of large collection. I like reading my annotations and stuff like that. Cause it reminded me of my relationship with like Situationist ideas. Cause around about that time in the early 20s, I was coming out of a sort of Situationist inflected sort of class struggle anarchism into a much more Marxist sort of political position. I think primarily for reading like autonomous basically, autonomous Marxist and these sorts of characters at that sort of time. You could almost read the history of Autonomous and must start with a critique of Councilism that's belief in workers' councils. Critique of that in 1950s is the birth of like operismo really. So yeah, we could get into a bit of that a bit later on, I think. But it's almost like it is tied up with my own biography, I think. And so it's an interesting thing to go back to and rethink. And like you Nadia, I was thinking when I went back, I'd sort of like given up on Situationism a long time ago or Situationist ideas. Partly because like their conception of subjectivity seemed pretty naive after I'd started reading more Marxist theory and then into poststructural theory like Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari, etc.