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Preliminary Problems in
Constructing a Situation
“The construction of situations begins beyond the ruins of the modern spectacle.
It is easy to see how much the very principle of the spectacle — nonintervention
— is linked to the alienation of the old world. Conversely, the most pertinent
revolutionary experiments in culture have sought to break the spectators’
psychological identification with the hero so as to draw them into activity.
. . . The situation is thus designed to be lived by its constructors. The role
played by a passive or merely bit-part playing ‘public’ must constantly
diminish, while that played by those who cannot be called actors, but rather, in a new
sense of the term, ‘livers,’ must steadily increase.”
—Report on the Construction of Situations
Our conception of a “constructed situation” is not limited to an integrated use
of artistic means to create an ambiance, however great the force or spatiotemporal extent
of that ambiance might be. A situation is also an integrated ensemble of behavior in time.
It is composed of actions contained in a transitory decor. These actions are the product
of the decor and of themselves, and they in their turn produce other decors and other
actions. How can these forces be oriented? We are not going to limit ourselves to merely
empirical experimentation with environments in quest of mechanistically provoked
surprises. 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
simple basic desires, and to the confused emergence of new desires whose material roots
will be precisely the new reality engendered by situationist constructions.
We must thus envisage a sort of situationist-oriented psychoanalysis in which, in
contrast to the goals pursued by the various currents stemming from Freudianism, each of
the participants in this adventure would discover desires for specific ambiances in
order to fulfill them. Each person must seek what he loves, what attracts him. (And
here again, in contrast to certain endeavors of modern writing — Leiris, for example
— what is important to us is neither our individual psychological structures nor the
explanation of their formation, but their possible application in the construction of
situations.) Through this method one can tabulate elements out of which situations can be
constructed, along with projects to dynamize these elements.
This kind of research is meaningful only for individuals working practically toward a
construction of situations. Such people are presituationists (either
spontaneously or in a conscious and organized manner) inasmuch as they have
sensed the objective need for this sort of construction through having recognized the
present cultural emptiness and having participated in recent expressions of experimental
awareness. They are close to each other because they share the same specialization and
have taken part in the same historical avant-garde of that specialization. It is thus
likely that they will share a number of situationist themes and desires, which will
increasingly diversify once they are brought into a phase of real activity.
A constructed situation must be collectively prepared and developed. It would seem,
however, that, at least during the initial period of rough experiments, a situation
requires one individual to play a sort of “director” role. If we imagine a
particular situation project in which, for example, a research team has arranged an emotionally
moving gathering of a few people for an evening, we would no doubt have to
distinguish: a director or producer responsible for coordinating the basic elements
necessary for the construction of the decor and for working out certain interventions
in the events (alternatively, several people could work out their own interventions while
being more or less unaware of each other’s plans); the direct agents living the
situation, who have taken part in creating the collective project and worked on the
practical composition of the ambiance; and finally, a few passive spectators who have not
participated in the constructive work, who should be forced into action.
This relation between the director and the “livers” of the situation must
naturally never become a permanent specialization. It’s only a matter of a temporary
subordination of a team of situationists to the person responsible for a particular
project. These perspectives, or the provisional terminology describing them, should not be
taken to mean that we are talking about some continuation of theater. Pirandello and
Brecht have already revealed the destruction of the theatrical spectacle and pointed out a
few of the requirements for going beyond it. It could be said that the construction of
situations will replace theater in the same sense that the real construction of life has
increasingly tended to replace religion. The principal domain we are going to replace and fulfill
is obviously poetry, which burned itself out by taking its position at the vanguard of our
time and has now completely disappeared.
Real individual fulfillment, which is also involved in the artistic experience that the
situationists are discovering, entails the collective takeover of the world. Until this
happens there will be no real individuals, but only specters haunting the things
anarchically presented to them by others. In chance situations we meet separated beings
moving at random. Their divergent emotions neutralize each other and maintain their solid
environment of boredom. We are going to undermine these conditions by raising at a few
points the incendiary beacon heralding a greater game.
In our time functionalism (an inevitable expression of technological advance) is
attempting to entirely eliminate play. The partisans of “industrial design”
complain that their projects are spoiled by people’s playful tendencies. At the same
time, industrial commerce crudely exploits these tendencies by diverting them to a demand
for constant superficial renovation of utilitarian products. We obviously have no interest
in encouraging the continuous artistic renovation of refrigerator designs. But a
moralizing functionalism is incapable of getting to the heart of the problem. The only
progressive way out is to liberate the tendency toward play elsewhere, and on a larger
scale. Short of this, all the naïve indignation of the theorists of industrial design
will not change the basic fact that the private automobile, for example, is primarily an
idiotic toy and only secondarily a means of transportation. As opposed to all the
regressive forms of play — which are regressions to its infantile stage and are
invariably linked to reactionary politics — it is necessary to promote the
experimental forms of a game of revolution.
SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL
1958
Translated by Ken Knabb (slightly modified from the version in the Situationist
International Anthology).
No copyright.
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