A small, influential and highly politicized artistic movement founded in 1957, from the remnants of two previous avant-garde groups, the Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus (led by Asger Jorn, who had also been involved in COBRA) and the Lettrist International (founded in 1946 by Isidore Isou, an early influence on Debord, Guy). After an illustrious but tumultuous decade and a half it dissolved in 1972. Internationale Situationniste, the groupâs journal and principal means of disseminating its ideas, published the first of its twelve issues in 1958 and its last in 1969. Long out of print, the full run is now available in English translation on the Internet. The name of the group as well as the philosophy underpinning it derives from Sartre, Jean-Paulâs concept of the situation read as an answer to Lefebvre, Henriâs injunction in his critiques of everyday life that change can only be radical if it is engineered at a grassroots level. Creating new and surprising situations through art was its means of challenging the orthodoxy of everyday life and countering its alienation (in Marxismâs sense of the word). The principal thesis of Situationism was that art prefigures or anticipates what is possible in the social. This idea, which owes an obvious debt to Surrealism, appealed to a wide range of activist groups throughout the 1960s, especially the so-called âsoixante-huitardsâ who participated in the events of May â68, and still today influence protest movements of all types, but especially adbusters and culturejammers. Although they were orthodox Marxists, the Situationists did not favour state-led communism or Stalinism (to give it its other name), and therefore their relations with the Left were always quite fraught, which was one of the main reasons why the group was so fractious and expulsions so frequent. Their critique of everyday life hinged on the concept of spectacle (see society of the spectacle) developed by Debord in La SociĂ©tĂ© du spectacle (1967), translated as Society of the Spectacle (1970). Debordâs thesis is that capitalist society compensates for the fragmentation of daily life with a numbing image of false unity he calls the spectacle, which alienated workers of all types unknowingly consume and accept as real life. Breaking people out of this ideological slumber and enabling them to access authentic life is the chief purpose behind Situationismâs three key practices or methods: dĂ©rive, dĂ©tournement, and psychogeography. The other major theorist associated with Situationism was Belgian scholar Vaneigem, Raoul, author of TraitĂ© de savoir-vivre Ă lâusage des jeunes gĂ©nĂ©rations (1967), translated as The Revolution of Everyday Life (1983), a kind of userâs guide to the late twentieth century for the younger generation (which is what the French title might be if it were more literally rendered). Vaneigemâs thesis, inspired by Reich, Wilhelm and Marcuse, Herbert, is that capitalism immiserates not by depriving people of their desires, but fulfilling them, or at least appearing to. Thus abundance is the most politically disabling state of all. The problem for Vaneigem is that this type of society relies on passivity and ressentiment or what Sloterdijk, Peter calls cynical reason rather than conscious affirmation. The spectacle or inauthentic hyperreality of late twentieth-century existence the Situationists deplored and hoped could be transfigured by means of dĂ©rive and dĂ©tournement is precisely the simulacrum universe Baudrillard, Jean argues we are condemned to. And though Baudrillard would chide Debord and others for their seeming nostalgia for authenticity, his own work, especially the later pieces, exhibits much the same longing. More importantly, the Situationists were utopia, always looking to the future, and their practices were intended to hasten its arrival not transport them back in time to some mythical past. Further Reading: K. Knabb (ed.) Situationist International Anthology (2007). P. Wollen Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth-Century Culture (1993).