[NetBehaviour] Nowhere To Run - by Stewart Home

[marc]

*Nowhere To Run *(MetaMute)

by Stewart Home

Stewart Home reviews two new publications dealing with the Situationist 
International and other political currents of the 1960s: Art-Ist 
magazine's Situationist International special issue and Dancin' In The 
Streets!, a collection of texts from Rebel Worker and Heatwave

These two recent publications show the way in which discussion about the 
Situationist International might be broadened out. In recent years far 
too much attention has been focused on Guy Debord as an allegedly key 
figure within the SI. While Debord was one of several individuals 
central to the group, creatively he was dependent upon collaborators to 
a degree its other leading members were not. Debord's strength was as a 
classical French prose stylist, thus he very often wrote up ideas that 
were developed collectively and for various reasons assorted 
recuperators wish to place his signature alone upon these texts. While 
other Situationists such as Asger Jorn were original if sometimes rather 
wayward thinkers and doers, Debord remained to the last politically naïf 
(and I say this because I believe his revolutionary fervour was sincere, 
I'd call him a bourgeois political sophisticate if I doubted his passion 
for communism). As a result of this naivety, when viewed from a purely 
Debordist perspective the SI is inconsequential, a marginal political 
sect with a handful of followers whose low-grade repackaging of a very 
specific strand of Marxist discourse is likely to be found wanting by 
anyone who has encountered a broad spectrum of left-communist positions.

more...

http://www.metamute.com/look/article.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=1&NrIssue=24&NrSection=5&NrArticle=1503 

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