The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International

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McKenzie Wark appears at cafe OTO to talk about his book on the life and times of the Situationist International 'The Beach Beneath the Street'.

Over fifty years after the Situationist International (SI) first appeared, the group’s restlessly creative experiments in the practice of life – of living, playing and working together – continues to influence activists, artists and theorists. From the anti-cutsnetwork UK Uncut and hacker and pirate practices, to versions of pyschogeography in the popular writings of Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd andWill Self, traces of the whole spectrum of Situationist ideas and practices can be found throughout culture today. The Beach Beneath the Street re-presents the Situationist project in response to the demands of our time, to discover the lost entry-points to the routes of play, adventure and resistance in contemporary experiences of communication, architecture, and everyday life. Writing against the boredom inspired by the ossified remains of the twentieth-century encounter with art and politics, Wark declares that whilst the Situationists failed to escape the world of spectacle, there might still be hope for us!

McKenzie Wark’s stylish, wide-ranging history of the SI trails the paths taken from the bohemian after-hours drinking dens of 1950s St. Germain-des-Prés, to the explosive May ’68 days of the evocative slogan “Sous les pavés, la plage!” (Beneath the pavement, the beach!). So that we might go forward, Wark takes us back to a time when another twenty-first century seemed possible through the convergence of two kinds of demands: one was radical, and demanded equality; the other bohemian, demanding difference.

Wark explores the often-overlooked breadth and diversity of SI as an ensemble creation with a mixed heritage including the Romantics, Henri Lefebvre, the Lettrist International and other European avant-garde groups. Roaming through Europe and the lives of those who made up the movement – including Constant, Asger Jorn, Michèle Bernstein, Alex Trocchi and Jacqueline De Jong – Wark uncovers a dynamic international movement beyond the famed Paris coterie and its most prominent member, Guy Debord.

The Situationist project implied an overcoming of separate and specialized knowledge. Wark’s lucid, engaging account both tells and enacts the SI’s delinquent and theoretical adventures in this spirit, resisting parcelling out its legacy to the academy or the art-world. Wark reveals a world as rich in practice as in theory, locating key concepts and practices – including dérive, détournement, potlatch and the spectacle – in their historical and biographical context, the everyday life and glorious times of the SI.

Riven from the beginning with tensions arising between the utopian and artistic drives of the left and right wings of the movement, parallel contradictions in approaches to organization would precipitate the ultimate split. Recuperating the shared heart of the SI project, Wark emphasizes the understanding of culture as common property shared by both incarnations: each issue of their journals contained copyleft statements permitting “all reproduction, deformation, modification, derivation, transformation” of its contents. Debord’s tactical expulsion of artists and reliance on structural forms led to the creation of the Second Situationist International, centred around Scandinavia. The Second SI pursued a different course, of anti-organization, or the détournement of an organized avant-garde: it “offered resources for thought, action and creation, rather than a consistent line. It was more about suggesting possible connections rather than pronouncing on fault lines.”