To read about the real, original Avant-Garde, I recommend "The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France - 1885 to World War I" by Roger Shattuck. It's a great book about a true revolution in the arts.
The situationists were (in my personal opinion) non-productive poseurs. Too much bound in the manifesto and not equal to the times they lived in.
Perhaps to one side, at the end of the situationists time, ex-anarchist Daniel Cohn-Bendit started levering the cobblestones up to make barricades and wound up a TV pundit and Co-opeted into the state political arena of the EU. Regis Debray was critical of Situationists. Tariq Ali likewise. I don't think they were as smart, or useful as they thought.
Organised Labour movements have little need of public intellectuals, and their postures.
Lots of claims that artists are confined to their media. This assertion is false. Artists mix in new technology, innovate all the time.
A lot of emphasis is put on the history of ideas, establishing a pedigree for the situationists, as if that pedigree lent credibility. This is juvenile.
Today's young adults would give an arm and a leg to live in a society as safe and comfortable as the one the situationists were criticizing and rebeling against.
Unfortunately it's not going to happen any time soon.
Ah I see. I think if you read what situationists and the like actually said, you'd learn that such examples of rapid of capitalist growth is precisely the object of their critique!
Like it or not, many thinkers in this era do not see liberalism as a particularly powerful answer or conclusion to the terror of facism they lived through or inherited. Quite the opposite in fact! And situationism falls squarely in this camp.
I gather you would not agree, totally fine, but that is different than asserting "they just didn't know how lucky they already had it."
But then again, from your original comment, what has gone wrong since? Why have we forever lost our safety and comfort? If it is not something intrinsic to what began during such reconstructions, I wonder what external force you have in mind?
The article talks about AI, but I think it's interesting that Ted Gioia ("Honest Broker"), similarly, talks about the lack of a counter-culture [1]. I propose that the avant-garde has been synonymous with deconstruction / meaninglessness and the Enlightenment project of personal freedom. Now that we've come to the place where anyone can define their own gender, or, indeed, choose to identify as a completely different species from Homo sapiens, where is there left to go? The avant-garde has been completed.
So if we want to look for the counter-culture or the new avant-garde, we're going to have to look somewhere else. I think that, in a culture that systematically stripped all meaning out of life by atomizing it--how can humanity have any meaning if even being human is up to each individual--I think things like religions which offer meaning are going to be very appealing. In today's culture, someone converting to, say, Eastern Orthodoxy (in the West) is very counter-cultural: they are old, odd, hierarchical, are insistent that truth rests not in ourselves but in God, and say that fulfillment comes from ordering our lives based on an external Other not our internal feelings; all of these are opposing current cultural values. Similarly, I think Jordan Peterson is part of the new counter-culture (not that he is E. Orthodox). However we aren't conditioned for "counter-cultural" to look like anything like that, because that has always been seen as "conservative" or "reactionary". But since there is nowhere else for the Enlightenment project to go, it seems like the only possible change is back towards the way we came, and hence, this is the only sort of direction remaining for the advance guard of the culture to go.
MacKenzie Wark does a good job on one of her two books about the situationists to connect some dots but also draw some lines between Baudrillard and Debord. But even more interesting is the shadow of Lefebvre and his "Critique of Everyday Life" which predates much of this stuff by decades. Lefebvre himself is a somewhat forgotten figure in Marxism in general, got a somewhat bad rap for going against the party line at the time to focus on the "bourgeoisie science" of sociology. But he became a kind of elder for the situationists for a time. His "Critique" is much more aligned with a Kantian philosophical tradition, which makes it a little hard to digest if you're not already bought in to such things (let alone bought into Marxist critique...) but it is huge, vastly interesting book nonetheless.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 54.7 ms ] threadThe situationists were (in my personal opinion) non-productive poseurs. Too much bound in the manifesto and not equal to the times they lived in.
Perhaps to one side, at the end of the situationists time, ex-anarchist Daniel Cohn-Bendit started levering the cobblestones up to make barricades and wound up a TV pundit and Co-opeted into the state political arena of the EU. Regis Debray was critical of Situationists. Tariq Ali likewise. I don't think they were as smart, or useful as they thought.
Organised Labour movements have little need of public intellectuals, and their postures.
Lots of claims that artists are confined to their media. This assertion is false. Artists mix in new technology, innovate all the time.
A lot of emphasis is put on the history of ideas, establishing a pedigree for the situationists, as if that pedigree lent credibility. This is juvenile.
Unfortunately it's not going to happen any time soon.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trente_Glorieuses
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirtschaftswunder
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_economic_miracle
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post%E2%80%93World_War_II_ec...
Like it or not, many thinkers in this era do not see liberalism as a particularly powerful answer or conclusion to the terror of facism they lived through or inherited. Quite the opposite in fact! And situationism falls squarely in this camp.
I gather you would not agree, totally fine, but that is different than asserting "they just didn't know how lucky they already had it."
But then again, from your original comment, what has gone wrong since? Why have we forever lost our safety and comfort? If it is not something intrinsic to what began during such reconstructions, I wonder what external force you have in mind?
So if we want to look for the counter-culture or the new avant-garde, we're going to have to look somewhere else. I think that, in a culture that systematically stripped all meaning out of life by atomizing it--how can humanity have any meaning if even being human is up to each individual--I think things like religions which offer meaning are going to be very appealing. In today's culture, someone converting to, say, Eastern Orthodoxy (in the West) is very counter-cultural: they are old, odd, hierarchical, are insistent that truth rests not in ourselves but in God, and say that fulfillment comes from ordering our lives based on an external Other not our internal feelings; all of these are opposing current cultural values. Similarly, I think Jordan Peterson is part of the new counter-culture (not that he is E. Orthodox). However we aren't conditioned for "counter-cultural" to look like anything like that, because that has always been seen as "conservative" or "reactionary". But since there is nowhere else for the Enlightenment project to go, it seems like the only possible change is back towards the way we came, and hence, this is the only sort of direction remaining for the advance guard of the culture to go.
[1] https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-vil...
If Society of the Spectacle is your thing, you might try Jean Baudrillard.