The Last Avant-Garde

CULTURE, NO MATTER what today’s feverish online discourse might tell us, is consummately, frustratingly ordinary. This is not a value judgment, but a simple truth, and remains as true today as it was when Raymond Williams argued it 60-plus years ago. Every historical moment and civilization has its art, its customs, and its contours expressing […]

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CULTURE, NO MATTER what today’s feverish online discourse might tell us, is consummately, frustratingly ordinary. This is not a value judgment, but a simple truth, and remains as true today as it was when Raymond Williams argued it 60-plus years ago. Every historical moment and civilization has its art, its customs, and its contours expressing how it feels to be alive and conscious at its particular moment in time.

Williams’s argument was already quite prescient when it was made. The postwar economic boom had pulled the Western world into spectacular realms: rock and roll, cinema, marvelous modern conveniences like washing machines and refrigerators, televisions that beamed the space race into every home. But Williams warned that we mustn’t get too entangled in the novelty of it all, mustn’t let it overtake the grand human collective.

One wonders if he could picture our current moment, when desire and expression are so ready-made, so undemanding and yet so effortlessly able to mollify and monopolize our attention. Open your streaming services—film, TV, music. The choices are overwhelming. Funny, then, that so much of it looks and feels the same, that every artist and writer and musician can tell of unproduced passion projects, that dissenting voices are so easily drowned out. Quantity drowns quality. That which exists is good; that which is good exists.

What doesn’t exist is a challenge to this state of affairs. At least not to the degree it once did. Plenty of artists and creatives are willing to don the vague and flaccid label of “experimental.” Very few seem willing to go beyond the limitations of their genre or medium, to disrupt the shape of daily life. It was a defining feature of 20th-century culture, pushing the horizon of possibility, but largely forgotten in the 21st. After all, why would we want to change the world when the world designed for us already seems so adept at changing itself? Progress, like everything else, has been automated.

To insist that the world needs changing is, therefore, to assert that there is a need for an avant-garde, that there is, in fact, a link between the world and its aesthetic representations, and that acts of human creation carry an insurgent promise. Dominique Routhier’s With and Against: The Situationist International in the Age of Automation (2023) doesn’t directly bemoan this current lack. The period it examines more or less ends in the late 1960s, and it has little to say about contemporary matters. It is, nonetheless, impossible to read its arguments and stories without mapping them onto the fault lines of our own time.

With and Against is part of a recent flurry of books urging a reassessment of the would-be revolutionary movement known as the Situationist International (SI). The fact that so many contemporary writers have so much to say about a group of cranky left communists, whose global membership was never more than a few dozen, might seem odd at first. The often opaque writings of the movement’s most recognized theorists—Guy Debord chief among them, but also Michèle Bernstein, Raoul Vaneigem and others—add to the mystification, and explains the subsequent exile of much of their work to the prosaic world of media studies.

Only when we grasp that the situationists spoke of culture and politics interchangeably—that true creative freedom was synonymous with society’s revolutionary transformation—do we begin to understand the surprising longevity of their ideas. Any valid take on the SI has to view them as a logical next step in a lineage that reaches back at least to the Dada movement and evolved through Surrealism, Russian Futurism and Constructivism, Bauhaus, and the Lettrism movement, from which many of SI’s leading members emerged. All, in their own way, explicitly defined revolution as a breakdown in the barriers between life and work on one hand and fully liberated human creativity on the other. As for the potency of these ideas, they’re reflected in the situationists’ most easily recognized historic contribution: the slogans scribbled on the walls of a Paris gripped by upheaval in 1968. “Never work.” “It is forbidden to forbid.” “All power to the imagination.” “Be realistic. Demand the impossible.”

Routhier’s book builds on this understanding by looking specifically at how the situationists approached the then-burgeoning movement around cybernetics and the closely related explosion in automation. The SI had a surprisingly large amount to say about this relatively new field of study, partly in response to the promises many cyberneticists made about their own revolution in daily life. In examining these ideas, With and Against also shows how late capitalism undid the avant-garde dialectic between creation and liberation.

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Routhier’s analysis begins in 1956, an auspicious moment in the development of what we have come to call the New Left. In October of that year, the West’s military seizure of Egypt’s newly nationalized Suez Canal showed the postwar order to be as dangerous and volatile as the one that came before. Almost simultaneously, the USSR’s invasion of Hungary, crushing the small country’s efforts at reform, disabused many of the idea that a viable road to socialism would go through the Soviet Bloc. Thousands around the world left the official communist parties, including some of the movement’s leading intellectuals.

In early August, two months before the tanks began to roll, several artists and writers were invited to assemble on a rooftop in Marseille. This gathering was a part of Le Festival de la Cité Radieuse, sponsored by the French government and held atop the legendary architect Le Corbusier’s “Radiant City” housing development. There, as the sun began to set, attendees watched first as a group of ballet dancers began to perform around an abstract sculpture of metal, then as the sculpture came robotically to life, dancing in alignment with the human danseurs.

The self-moving robot, named CYSP 1, was built by cybernetic sculptor Nicolas Schöffer. Schöffer would go on record stating that, in Routhier’s summary, “the artist should take on a new role as public innovator,” supported and placed on a pedestal by state and capital. Science publications and arts magazines alike praised his CYSP 1 as a modern marvel, a preview for how automation would make everyone’s life more convenient and freer.

The Situationist International would not be officially founded until the following year, but to its thinkers—many then organized under the short-lived banner of the Lettrist International—Le Festival de la Cité Radieuse was a risible and tawdry attempt by the French state to hijack the avant-garde. A few days before the festival was to take place, then-Lettrists Debord, Asger Jorn, and Gil J. Wolman published a leaflet that urged artists and attendees to boycott the Marseille festival.

The leaflet didn’t have much impact. “Existing SI scholarship seems to agree that the Ordre de boycott is peripheral to the history of the situationist movement,” writes Routhier. But the author nonetheless argues that the tactile, ephemeral piece of paper provides an entry point to understanding one of the key concepts of the SI. “In the history of the SI, […] the strange nocturnal spectacle in Marseille offers an Urszene of the cultural logic that the situationists would come to theorize and critique as ‘spectacle.’”

The image of the dancing robot sculpture is indeed an informative one for the notion of spectacle as the situationists conceived of it. Beneath the exterior of convenience, leisure time, and technological wonder, late capitalism in practice reduces life to its representation. Hence Debord’s coolly acidic opening line to his 1967 Society of the Spectacle—directly détourning the opening lines of Marx’s Capital—and everything that follows from it.

As contemporary scholars of the SI argue, this notion of the spectacle isn’t just aesthetic. “The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life,” Debord writes. “Modern economic production extends its dictatorship extensively and intensively.” In the same way that the assembly line robs its workers of control over how and what they produce, the extension of commodity into every aspect of life robs them of what little power they have outside of work. Human subjectivity is dulled and hollowed until it disappears entirely.

Looking at the point in history where cybernetics as we know it came into being, it is difficult to paint the subject as entirely benign. Technology had gotten to the point where the machinic anticipation of human want and need could be feasibly discussed. But who decides what humans want? And who decides which needs are worth anticipating or nurturing? With most of Western Europe’s political, social, and industrial development under the sway of the United States’ Marshall Plan, the potential answers were not encouraging.

To the situationists, then, cybernetics and automation might be a very material encapsulation of how a radical human imaginary is curtailed. In much the same way that Le Corbusier’s buildings sought to head off social revolt by atomizing occupants’ lives, so did CYSP 1 portend a world where the desire for freedom is replaced by the desire for the latest model of smartphone.

How this bears on our own time is fairly obvious. Past all the paranoid jokes about an imminent rise of the machines, the anxieties about artificial intelligence robbing us of jobs and purpose are real and valid. One does wonder what, say, the Amazon warehouse worker—whose work is already made intolerable by the algorithm—is to do when they are replaced by AI, without any recourse to a basic income program. For the time being though, it is the scant remaining jobs offering some form of creative input that AI is devouring quickest. This trajectory can only bend in the direction of a future not where people are freed from drudgery so that they might pursue their ontological vocation but where we are left to scramble for scraps of insecure, piecemeal employment, hoping to eke out a living. The reality of the microworker beckons.

These tensions have already been thrown into relief in American cultural life. Last year’s strikes by actors and writers against the Hollywood studios characteristically revolved around bread-and-butter issues like pay and residuals. Ask any of last summer’s picketing members of SAG-AFTRA or the Writers Guild of America their biggest concern, however, and there’s a good chance they would answer: the encroachment of AI on their work as creatives.

Writers feared they would be reduced to mere copyeditors, their control over plot, characters, and themes handed over to a chatbot that can crank out a script based on a two-sentence prompt. Actors, meanwhile, ran the risk of having their likeness captured and used in perpetuity without credit or compensation. To studios, the fact that AI-generated content might be derivative and synthetic was of little concern. If anything, it would have created an overarching culture where streaming executives were able to further isolate artists from their work and from each other, to plead ignorance around viewer numbers and royalties. To both sets of workers, AI presented an existential threat to their craft and livelihoods.

Headlines dramatically cast the dispute as one between human and machine. Strikers did the same, not just leading to the jarring scene of artists speaking like workers but also illustrating a bleak reality that would otherwise be written off as part of a third-tier dystopian sci-fi flick. “It’s as if everyone is part of a machine assembly line,” TV writer Rachel Alter told labor journalist Alex N. Press: “you give your contribution, and then you’re cut out of the process.”

The spectacle of the Hollywood dream factory, always prone to its own crises of overproduction, ground to a halt. For many, it was a moment of clarity. Who creates? Who profits? And between the two, what justifying fantasies emerge?

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It isn’t at all hasty, therefore, to view the problems of artificial intelligence as a logical continuation of the tendency identified by the Situationist International. “Technology is neither good nor bad,” wrote tech historian Melvin Kranzberg, “nor is it neutral.” It is bound to be imprinted with the values of the system that made it. And in a system that prioritizes the maximization of profit, whatever potential there is in cybernetics to extend human subjectivity will always take a back seat to ensuring production is predictable and efficient.

This isn’t to say that the situationists viewed cybernetics as an unqualified bad. With and Against chronicles a brief but effervescent willingness on the part of the nascent movement to entertain the idea of technology integrated with a radical everyday democracy. This would necessitate a very different mode of production, however, spilling into a radical reimagination of just about every aspect of life. Which was what the Situationist International would come to demand anyway.

Against the social engineering of thinkers like Nicolas Schöffer and Le Corbusier, situationist thinkers like Constant Nieuwenhuys and Gilles Ivain would conceive of urban life as one of constant collective reinvention. Limits placed on how a space or location might be used would be repeatedly transcended and smashed. This will sound familiar to anyone who has come across the situationist concept of psychogeography, but Routhier finds more of use in the related—and somewhat more coherent—framework of “unitary urbanism.” As the author writes:

Unitary Urbanism implied breaking away from the reformist modernist movement and imagining a radically different path for modernity. In keeping with their avant-garde ethos, the situationists reckoned that an alternative path would necessarily have to pass through existing forms rather than circumvent them.

Not only would this require a return to the barricades and occupation of factories, à la the Paris Commune; it would also call for electronic technologies to be put to a very different use. The relationships between the organic and the cybernetic being would need to be reconfigured. Automation would be dedicated to fulfilling human need first, freeing citizens to dedicate their time to play and creation.

What exactly this looks like is never satisfactorily illustrated. This is likely due to the fact that the situationists were true devotees of the spontaneous uprising, and therefore never had the chance to show in practice how “their” city would look and feel. Nieuwenhuys’s New Babylon project attempted to imagine it over the course of 18 years. Between 1956 and 1974, the artist repeatedly added new drawings, maps, collages, and scale models to his concept.

Though vague, it is difficult to deny the allure of Nieuwenhuys’s Gesamtkunstwerk: a city of free-floating platforms where living spaces and town squares can be made and remade, capable of fostering various moods and ambiences and functions. The ludic society made real. None of this would ever be put into practice of course, and as Routhier points out, few of Nieuwenhuys’s ideas confronted the specifics of how a more democratic cybernetics might be realized.

Other members of the Situationist International may have gotten a bit closer to proposing something concrete, though ironically in a far more analog form. Fin de Copenhague, assembled by Asger Jorn in 1957 with the assistance of Debord, contains some of the most recognized image collages associated with situationism. This “anti-book” is a collection of advertising images culled from French leisure and lifestyle magazines, each one subverted and détourned, its meaning turned inside out to saltily comment on the nature of life as commodity. Adverts for aperitifs juxtapose with demands for a free Algeria; plaudits for automation are made ambiguous next to comic frames of disappearing characters.

It’s a recognizable situationist gesture. As Routhier writes, at least as in regard to Fin de Copenhague, it was also a conscious redeployment of past avant-garde movements’ own gestures. There is, naturally, a tip of the hat to Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” which has been updated to the “age of automation” and now examines the same contradictory pulls between art’s anesthetization and cultural democratization.

More salient, however, is the way in which Routhier contextualizes Fin de Copenhague with the work of revolutionary Russian Constructivist El Lissitzky, and his own visions for what the “book of the future” might look like, in the context of not just new technologies but also new human relations. The traditional book—ever present since the age of Gutenberg—was ill-suited to an age of revolution. By revamping the way in which letter and image interacted on the page, the human imagination could be challenged in collective directions, namely toward communism. A new mode of production required new ways of thinking.

Fin de Copenhague should therefore be seen as an attempt to realize Lissitzky’s vision of a world of mass-produced abundance beyond the pacifying sameness of capital and consumerism. Routhier writes:

Considered as heir to the Russian avant-garde book, Fin de Copenhague is swimming with the current of economic, scientific, and technological progress, and clearly shares the constructivist ethos of mass-production. But it is also a material proposal to go against the utilitarian or functionalist drive of a late capitalist culture where all kinds of creative excess are inevitably channeled into, and pass through, the value-form of the commodity.

Somewhere between New Babylon and Fin de Copenhague, then, between the most grand expressions of human civilization and its most intimate interactions, it isn’t impossible to glean a different mode of living: utopian, technologically marvelous, not only more just than our own but also more creatively fulfilling.

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Pity, then, that the question of making this world a reality was never seriously confronted by the SI, either on a technological or a political level. If the situationists were the last movement to embody the avant-garde link between imaginative freedom and social liberation, then they also embodied the stereotypical limits of any avant-garde arts movement. The dogmatism, the haughty elitism, the vicious but admittedly titillating polemics and denunciations—these were always part of the situationist oeuvre. But they play an especially prominent role in the final sections of With and Against.

As Routhier writes, the discourse around automation and cybernetics had become increasingly depoliticized by the 1950s, more easily integrated into the spectacle. Prying apart the potentials for liberation and subjugation in technology was increasingly difficult. Debord and Jorn’s own notes and arguments reflect how torn they were between these two possibilities.

In 1966, philosopher and erstwhile member of the Nazi Party Martin Heidegger gave a famous interview in which he said that philosophy would soon be replaced by cybernetics. Inquiry into the human condition—indeed, the human condition itself—was to be foreclosed by ones and zeros (a stance that finds echoes today in the Dark Enlightenment posthumanism of Nick Land and his contemporaries).

That same year was one of the Situationist International’s most influential and disruptive, prior to the événements of 1968, particularly on university campuses. One particular target was University of Strasbourg professor Abraham Moles, one of the leading cyberneticists in France at the time. The situationists hounded Moles, lobbing fruit at him during his inaugural lecture, and accusing him of “programming the future cadres.” Moles later wrote to the SI’s publication Internationale situationniste, provoking a response from Debord himself, who addressed his letter to “Tiny brain.”

It is difficult to tell how productive these very public polemics were. Moles’s ideas, as Routhier writes, “played a crucial role in promoting a multi-disciplinary research programme in tune with the exigencies of the Marshall Plan era.” His lot was that of the intellectual justifying technocracy.

On the other hand, Routhier points out, in passing, that much of Debord’s vitriol toward Moles comes off as petty. Is there as much agitational value in public polemics against a lone professor as the situationists might have thought? Or is it a reflection of their isolation? In any case, Debord was to play an increasingly centralizing, influential role in the SI, particularly after the uprisings of ’68 dwindled. He led the way in denouncing and expelling former comrades from the group until little remained of it at its 1972 dissolution.

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So much in the history of revolutionary ideas is an exercise in missed encounters and what-ifs. In the 50 years since the Situationist International’s demise, there have been plenty of radical experiments and intellectual exercises exploring the intersection of technology and humanity. In the wake of 1968, large portions of the French Left—including the influential philosopher André Gorz—recentered notions of autogestion and the elimination of work. Philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari’s criticisms of cybertheory are a worthy rebuke to Heidegger’s techno-nihilism.

The short life of Salvador Allende’s socialist government in Chile included an even shorter experiment in using cybernetics to strengthen industrial communication. The cyborg has proven a fecund heuristic for Donna Haraway in exploring women’s oppression. It has also mooted the idea that, in some ways, modern humans are already cyborgs of a sort, an assertion taken to new radical and interesting places by Helen Hester’s Xenofeminism (2018).

Of these, only Cybersyn has come remotely close to inflecting the lives of a broad section of working people, and its potential was crushed along with that of Allende’s government by Pinochet’s coup well before anyone could feel it. As for the others, for as vital as they are, for as much as they valorize a human imagination that is far too often discounted from history, the vision remains fantasy.

Work and creativity have both already been automated. Much of it would look both entirely foreign and eerily familiar to the likes of Debord, Jorn, or Nieuwenhuys. Not only has the liberation from work not happened, but work has also been made more precarious and maddening. Thanks to the algorithm and data mining, automation has even managed to make the lion’s share of our leisure time a kind of work.

Sure, today’s tech barons are a lot dumber than Nicolas Schöffer and Abraham Moles. But just pointing this out or denouncing them does nothing. In fact, the recent history of Elon Musk proves that such denunciations can be absorbed back into the spectacle, weaponized and turned against the already powerless.

Almost nowhere does there exist any force insisting that creativity is a radically democratic right, let alone that it can play a role in practically changing the shape of daily life. In the face of all this, is a meaningful revival of the avant-garde possible? Is it even desirable? Quoting German philosopher and theorist Peter Bürger, Routhier ends With and Against with a reminder that the failure of the avant-garde “coincides with its success within the institution.”

If so, then a revived avant-garde faces a contradictory challenge: it must become mainstream. Not through the sanction of institutions, but in seizing the imaginations of masses of people, and it must do so without being recuperated, without losing any of its transformative radicalism. In a way, it is a challenge to make the extraordinary ordinary, and vice versa.

Back to basics then. In a sense, the pessimistic worries of the situationists have come true. The refrains of “learn to code” have given way to a reality of shimmering impoverishment, where mobile devices and big data facilitate a precarious and ever more atomized existence.

If the spectacle has wormed its way into our lives and consciousness more than the situationists ever could have anticipated, though, then it is going to require far more hard thinking and sweat to keep running. The recuperation and atrophy of modes and spaces that would allow people to push back is real, but the ability to refuse remains. Look at the push from Google employees to unionize, or the (admittedly very beleaguered and confused) attempts to do so at a highly surveilled and algorithmized Amazon.

Look at Hollywood, arguably one of the key sites of the spectacle’s construction. To think that the most encouraging signs of refusal to AI, to the homogenization of dreams, would come from within the machine itself—this seemed less than feasible not very long ago. But here we are.

None of these are on the scale of a grand uprising or anything so fun and sexy. They are, however, reflections of a rising dissatisfaction with a life increasingly lived in simulation. Whether we are talking about something as quotidian as a book or massive as a city, reimagining anything in this day and age requires such refusal. Plenty already know that technology won’t save us. The question of what will remains.

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