ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
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an end to die passive spectatorship of consumer capitalism, Raoul Vaneigem,
joining the SI in 1962, called for a “revolution of everyday life.”13 While
retaining a Marxian emphasis on production (promoting a program of workers
councils), the SI departed from Marx by broadening the revolutionary focus to
include a wide range of qualitative, aesthetic, and sexual demands. Articles
published in Internationale Sittiationiste convey the spectrum of political and
cultural concerns, ranging from questions of urban planning (refened to as
‘urban geography5); artistic intervention (which included public poetry writing
and graffitti); critiques of cinema and language; political responses to the
Vietnam and Algerian wars; and the situations in China and the Middle East.14
Distinctive of the SI was the ability to infuse an urban idiom of political
reconstruction with a poetic idiom of everyday life. In a communique delivered
during the 1968 occupation of the Sorbonne, die SLs “Occupation Committee
of the Autonomous and Popular Sorbonne University” advised others to
disseminate slogans by:
...leaflets, announcements over microphones, comic strips, songs,
graffiti, balloons on paintings in the Sorbonne, announcements in
theaters during films or while disrupting them, balloons on subway
billboards, before making love, after making love, in elevators, each
time you raise your glass in a bar.13
The committee’s list of slogans, including “occupy the factories,” “down with
the spectacle-commodity society,” “abolish alienation,” and “humanity won’t be
happy until the last bureaucrat is hung with the guts of the last capitalist,”
reflects an analysis grounded in a set of cultural, political, and economic
concerns16 The SI called for ordinary people to “construct situations” within
urban centers
to awaken others from the deep sleep
of capital and
state-induced passivity. In this spirit, they called for the construction of aesthetic
and political activities such as street theater, poetry, and graffiti, as well as
public ‘play’ or ‘games’, Unsettling vernacular distinctions between actor and
audience, spectators and spectacle, so integral to consumer society, the SI
promoted a sensual and creative re-activation of a desire that had been blunted
by life in a bureaucratic and capitalist society, a desire that would engender a
new political and social reality:
The really experimental direction of situationist activity consists in
setting up, on the basis of more or less clearly recognized desires, a
temporary field of activity favorable to these desires. This alone can
lead to the further clarification of these primitive desires, and to the
confused emergence of new desires whose material roots will be
precisely
die
constructions,17
new
reality
engendered
by
the
situationist