The Situationist International (S.I.) was a political and social movement that ran from 1957 to 1972 that attempted to synthesise elements of Marxism and anarchist themes with ideas from avant-garde art movements such as Dada and Surrealism.  Although the Situationists cannot be reduced to an avant-garde art movement, Tom Bunyard notes that their “unabashedly utopian goal was to infuse lived experience with the passion, creativity and imagination that had previously only been articulated within the cultural realms of art and poetry.”

“For the Situationists, whose political goals had developed from their early concerns with avant-garde art, the modern revolution would afford a ludic, creative relation to lived time: art would cease to function as a means of representing and commenting upon life, and would instead become one with life itself. This would be achieved through using society’s previously alienated technological and creative powers to consciously create the ‘situations’ that compose lived time. Within modern society, they claimed, all such situations are dull, rationalised components of the spectacular social order; the all-encompassing revolution that the S.I. envisaged would, however, afford a social existence within which these moments of experience would take on more festive qualities.” (Bunyard, p5)

The Situationists imagined a revolution where the line between art and life would disappear. Rather than experiencing the world as passive spectators, we would become active agents engaged in shaping our own history.

Due to their utopian ambitions and deployment of aesthetic devises, the Situationist International has often been seen as an art movement, and their seminal text, Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967), is frequently viewed as a piece of media theory. Tom Bunyard challenges these assumptions. Although the Situationists emerged from a set of concerns with avant-garde art and culture, the ideas and ambitions of the S.I. extended far beyond the arts; Likewise, The Society of the Spectacle’s claims are not reducible to the contention that advertising and mass media constitute  pacifying spectacles. Bunyard argues that The Society of the Spectacle is more generally a book about time and history, in the sense that it “describes a society that has become detached from its capacity to consciously shape and determine its own future.”  In his book Debord, Time and the Spectacle, Bunyard provides an impressive reconstruction of Guy Debord’s political thought that centres around Debord’s preoccupations with temporality, and which demonstrates its connection to the writings of Marx, Hegel and Hegelian Marxism. In this session, we will be talking to Tom Bunyard about his work on Debord and the Situationists and exploring connected themes of avant-garde art, Hegelian Marxism, strategy, history, spectatorship, revolution and temporality

Guy Debord and the Situationist International with Tom Bunyard

Art & Research Group led by Bradley Tuck dedicated to exploring the history and future of avant-garde and radical counterculture.
📍Brighton, UK & Online

Guy Debord and the Situationist International with Tom Bunyard

Exploding Appendix