The Situationist International and Literature: Introduction Alastair Hemmens (Cardiff University)
Gabriel Zacarias (Universidade Estadual de Campinas)
he theme of this issue, the “Situationist International and Literature”, may well raise some eyebrows among those readers who are already well acquainted with the Situationists. The Situationist International (SI), after all, rejected cultural production, at least under present conditions, as a spectacular dead-end and consigned all such works to the dustbin of history. One might therefore reasonably ask what point there is in even thinking of the SI in relationship to literature. On the other hand, those less familiar with the history of the Situationists but well versed in literary theory might come to the subject with a set of expectations that must, for these same reasons, be quickly frustrated. The Situationist relationship with “literature” is, by design, difficult, negative, and even hostile, while also being rich, complex, and, arguably, expressing a deep love of what makes literature, in so far as it touches life, so important. It is, on the surface at least, something of a paradox that perhaps only Guy Debord himself, the key figure of the SI, ever fully managed to resolve. It should be noted, however, that he did so in a fashion that by no means precluded the creation of texts. Indeed, as some of the articles in this issue of New Readings demonstrate, reading and writing were central to what made the SI tick. That these ostensibly “literary” activities sought to break with the limits of “literature” is precisely what makes the study of this relationship so interesting. At the same time, as other articles in this issue show us, it is clear that the Situationists have had an important, if largely unrecognized, impact on literature, particularly French literature, since May ’68—a fact that is mirrored in the now more widely acknowledged influence the group had on punk rock in the late 1970s and early 1980s (see, e.g., Hussey and Self; Marcus). What concerns us here is how the producers of cultural products, who were otherwise enamoured with or at least echoed Situationist themes and rhetoric, could respond to or be understood in relation to a group that had already declared the death of art. The Situationist International, it cannot be denied, poses a problem for literature as both a practice and an object of study. The Situationist relationship to literature should be considered first and foremost as a consequence of a broader commitment to the dépassement, or super-
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New Readings 19 (2023): i–viii. e-ISSN: 2634-6850 – Article doi:10.18573/newreadings.136 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence. URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ The copyright of this article is owned by the authors.