Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
In the world of Anglo-American criticism, Situationism was once the province of hip theorists, progressive art historians, and a few scattered Marxists. No more, for the nineties saw Situationism come from obscure movement to the defiant avant of our cultural-critical-garde. Not only has the past decade seen the publication of a dozen books, countless articles, dissertations, and both academic and activist web-sites, the Situationists have moved right into the main line of pop-culture. Situationist graffiti turns up as the epigraph for gen-xer Elizabeth Wurtzel's Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women (1988), and, with Rolling Stone darling Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (1989) , it has become the official prototype of punk aesthetics. However, there is more at stake in our specifically academic recuperation of Situationism than the disinterring and popularizing of yet another corpse to feed the machine with books, articles, and conference papers. Rather, Situationism's reception is dominated by a will to make the political desires of cultural criticism coincide with immediate material practice.
Repository Citation
Banash, David. "Activist Desire, Cultural Criticism, and the Situationist International." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 2, no. 1, 2002, pp. 1–18. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol2/iss1/13