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Situating Situationism/Supporting Its Legacy–Reply to Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen

Hunter argues that Rasmussen’s reading of the Situationists and the text of their key theoretician, Guy Debord, is overly pessimistic. Rasmussen limits his discussion to Situationist practices unfolding between 1957 and 1962. This decision masks those moments of real success, which didn’t emerge fully until the May 1968 movement in France and which were still under discussion by what remained of the group as late as 1972. The questions they raised spawned a plethora of related–if not directly connected–ideas and practices that, for a generation increasingly disconnected from the kind of power structures observed by Marx, would have been unthinkable without Debord’s re-reading of Marxism at the level of the symbolic.

Situationists, Guy Debord, May 1968, Marxism, existentialism, avant-garde, art movements

Citation: Social Justice Vol. 33, No. 2 (2006): 16-28