Situation

Description

Stephen Duncombe:

"The theorist/activists of the Situationists made a useful distinction between spectacle and situation. The spectacle they condemned as a site of “nonintervention”; there was simply no space for a spectator to intervene in what he or she was watching because it demanded only passivity and acquiescence. The Situationists saw it as their mission to fight against “the society of the spectacle,” but they also felt a responsibility to set something else in motion to replace it. “We must try and construct situations,” their master theorist Guy Debord wrote in 1957. These “situations” were no less staged events than fascist rallies, but their goal was different. The Situationists encouraged people to dérive – drift through unfamiliar city streets – and they showed mass culture films after “detourning” the dialogue, dubbing the actor’s lines to comment upon (or make nonsense of) the film being shown and the commercial culture from which it came. These situations, it was hoped, would create “collective ambiances,” which encouraged participants to break out of the soporific routine of the society of the spectacle and participate in the situation unfolding around them: to make sense of new streets and sights, look at celluloid images in a new and different way, and thereby alter people’s relationship to their material and media environment. As Debord wrote: “The role played by a passive or merely bit-playing ‘public’ must constantly diminish, while that played by those who cannot be called actors but rather, in a new sense of the term, ‘livers,’ must steadily increase.” Whereas actors play out a tight script written by another, “livers” write their own script through their actions within a given setting. The ideal of the “situation” was to set the stage for “transformative action.” (http://turbulence.org.uk/turbulence-1/politics-in-an-age-of-fantasy/)

More Information

1. Stephen Duncombe's book on Dream Politics and the Participatory Spectacle