relatos muito interessantes sobre a formação e alguns desdobramentos da internacional situacionista, mas não sobre guy debord, que aparece principalmente como secretário. mostra a variedade e conflitos e tensões nos agrupamentos e indica projetos e feitos outros que não a sociedade do espetáculo e o simples détournement ou deriva. ( )

The Situationists were on to something, in their description of the trouble: the commodified experience of time and space, the equation of happiness with acquisitiveness, the spectacle that chokes out awareness, ‘modern cities as miles and miles of organized nowhere’ —but I read Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life (twenty years after it was written) as an eccentric prose poem, and Ken Knabb’s compilation as an episode in the history of late-20th c. European ideas. Situationism, I thought, was a dead thing from the past. McKenzie Wark wonders if that is true.

The Beach Beneath the Street presents some of the precursors to and the influences on Situationism. Wark largely bypasses the more well-known work of Vaneigem and Guy Debord to credit artists in Romania, Belgium and Denmark with developing concepts deployed by the Situationist International (founded in 1957 with nine members; only 72 people ever belonged). Situationism also took surprising inspiration from Johan Huizinga, Pyotr Kropotkin and Franz Boas, and in the first three years of the International, says Wark, there were many potential versions of it. The architect Ivan Chtcheglov, the painter Asger Jorn and the psychologist Henri Lefebvre were figures against which Situationism sharpened itself in sympathetic opposition.

The Situationists were less interested in offering dogma, writes Wark, than in developing ‘tactical mobility’ combined with ruthless criticism. Their goal was the expansion of the possibilities of social life; they proffered ‘a diagram of forces, trajectories, and possibilities rather than a representation of an object, cut from the world as a frozen moment.’ Alas, the Situationists were better at articulating a negative and critical tactic than in building a positive, constructive model to replace the society of the spectacle. They were never able to surmount the tension between the communal impulse and bohemian creativity. Debord, who successfully jettisoned those thinkers who did not share his (naïve) faith in proletarian consciousness, envisioned not a collaboration between specialists, but the overcoming of specialization in the name of a new kind of collective activity. Jorn, with his insistence that the nucleus of a radical form of action was not the specialists in politics but the connoisseurs of the free use of time, was cut adrift, left to return to the isolation of his studio.

The Beach Beneath the Street is 20th c. cultural history done well, and a bittersweet retrieval of ideas that once suggested the possibility of a different 21st c. than the one we wound up with. Wark believes that there are elements of Situationism that are relevant to the demands of the present, but “the spectacle requires a structural transformation which no mere passing of information between disaffected hipsters could ever achieve.” So, what does optimism look like now? ( )

Over fifty years after the Situationist International appeared, they continue to influence activists, artists and theorists. From the Invisible Committee's bestselling The Coming Insurrection to Iain Sinclair's psychogeographic explorations, their work is still found to be rich with possibilities, yet its breadth and diversity is still unexplored. In the first account since Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces (1989), McKenzie Wark traces the Situationist International's beginnings in 1950s bohemian Paris up to the explosive days of May 1968. This account puts the legendary figure of Guy Debord back into the context of the other fascinating figures who made up the movement, including Constant, Asger Jorn, Michele Bernstein and Jacqueline De Jong. It treats them as an international movement of conflicting passions rather than as a Paris coterie. Accessible to those who have only just discovered the Situationists and filled with new insights, Wark reconnects their work to new practices in communication, built form, and everyday life.