S.I., or Situationist International began in 1957 with the merge of Guy Debord's Lettrist International and Asger Jorn’s International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus.
Situationist International references Fururism, Dada and Surrealism in its contextualisation, and the manifesto laid out forms part of a utopian anti-art tradition that are influenced by these movements themselves.
"The SI has a reputation for scandal and subversion. Its political theories made popular by punk rock were a blend of Marxism and anarchism. In spite of this the SI condemned both communism and anarchism for their failings. They criticised modern consumer society for alienating people and turning their lives into meaningless pursuits of commodities." -Karen Elliot 1999
On Detournement - http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/detourn.htm
Detournement in the words of Situationist International, ‘there is no Situationist art, only Situationist uses of art.’
Detournement is distinctly different theft plagiarism "which only subverts the source of the material and post-modern ‘ironic quotation’ plagiarism which only subverts the meaning of the material, the source becoming the meaning. The SI used detournement in films, art, graphics for their journal and in posters that detourned comics during the events of May ’68." (Elliot 1999)
Guy Debord as key to SI, the only member to stay with it for its duration. Georg Lukacs gave the SI the idea of reification, which he meant to mean a form of objectification where the relationships between things replaces the relationships between people. Debord was interested in freeing people from the alienation of work, commodity fetishism and money, he wanted people to experience everyday life without alienation - ‘man must be everyday, or he will not be at all.’
Debord wrote 'The Society of the Spectacle' (1967) extending the idea of reification where where what ‘was directly lived has moved away into a representation’.
"The spectacle is not the domination of the world by images or any other form of mind-control but the domination of a social interaction mediated by images. Reification separates people from one-another but the spectacle is a unifying principle of society where it ‘reunites the separate, but reunites them as separate’." ( Eliott 1999)
The Spectacle generates passivity in its spectators, as made evident in the
SI essay ‘The Spectators Of Suicide’. "The spectacle forces people into stereotypes and roles especially through the specialisation of labour (you are your job and the things you consume) The spectacle presents a false view of the world where ‘the liar has lied to himself.’"
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