Critical Theory’s Reconciliation with Praxis in the Situationist International

• In Event: Critical Theory and the Global Left in the 20th and 21st Centuries

Abstract

In February of 1969, an indignant Theodor Adorno wrote to Herbert Marcuse complaining about university students occupying a room at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. Adorno and Jürgen Habermas had had the police forcibly expel the students, part of the ongoing 1968 Student Protest Movement, after they refused to leave the building. Marcuse’s response was stern: “if the alternative is the police or left-wing students, then I am with the students.” The 1968 protest movement presented a crisis moment for the reception of Critical Theory by young leftists: could this school of thought—which had turned a piercing eye on the alienation of mass culture and everyday life—be incompatible with radical politics? What relationship could critical theory have with political practice?
A template for a revised relationship between critical theory and practice was offered by The Situationist International, an avant-garde artist and activist group active throughout the 1960s in Western Europe and influenced by the Frankfurt School. More than just reflecting on everyday life, the Situationists elevated the practice of everyday life to a theoretical standing that it had not reached before. The Situationists believed that willingly going through the motions of social influence, including limited immersion in hegemonic behaviors, offered theoretical insights on the machinations of ideology and alienation. They also argued that it was through radical interventions in everyday practice that citizens could achieve both theoretical clarity and political change. The Situationists drew on debates from 20th century art movements about art's place in everyday life to propose a revised relationship between critical theory and practice—one which elevated political practice as necessary for critical analysis without superseding theory’s role. While the role of praxis in Situationist theory has been widely discussed (and indeed is a cornerstone of the group’s reception), the influence of art debates on their conceptualization of theory/practice has not been adequately examined.
The paper proceeds in three parts. In the first, I set up the late 1960s Critical Theory treatment of the role of practice in theory, focusing on the writings and political commentary of Adorno and Marcuse. Then, I examine how the Situationist viewed their critical practice in relation to performance art movements such as Happenings, and contrast their understanding of interventionist art to contemporaries like Fluxus. I argue that the Situationist critique of these forms of artistic performance aligns well with Adorno’s rejection of “barren and brutal practicism.” In the third part, I turn to the Situationists’ own proposals for theoretically robust political practice, exemplified by two concepts: the dérive (a form of engaged urban exploration) and constructed situations (an approach to architectural experimentation). I consider how the Situationists proposed to resolve theory’s reflective mode with its critical commitment to emancipatory politics, with an eye to broader Marxist debates on how agents intervene in history. Through this intellectual history, I aim to elevate how social theorizing was unfolding in and at the margins of artistic practice, and how this informed social theory’s own relationship to politics. The Situationists present something of a road not taken in Critical Theory, in which political practice gains equal ground with critical theorizing instead of composing its imperative but deferred conclusion.

Author

• Celia Eckert, Harvard University