ABSTRACT
A cursory read ing of pos t s t ruc tura l i s t thought l eaves revolutionary theory without a leg to stand on. The situationist distinction between the real and the spectacle is rendered meaningless by the claim that there can be no real existence beyond that which appears in discourse, and the assertion that the desires and experiences of the subject are somehow more authentic than those represented in the spectacle collapses in the face of suggestions that subjectivity is itself produced by the networks of discourse in which we live. Notions of class, totality, and historical progress are completely undermined, and the idea that all social relations are somehow answerable to a single principle of economic functioning is rendered untenable. But although poststructuralism is in some senses a radical break with the situationist project, a host of
continuities makes it impossible to oppose the two world views completely. The interests, vocabulary and style of the situationists reappear in Lyotard’s railings against theory and Foucault’s maverick intellectualism, and the desiring philosophies invoked by Deleuze and Guattari continue to offer words on the ‘art of living’.1 The breadth of situationist theory and its magpie tactics of appropriation and détournement find their expression in the deconstructive eclecticism of poststructuralist writing, which similarly has no scruples about taking ideas, examples, and forms of expression from anywhere. Many poststructuralist texts are mixtures of poetry and philosophy, fiction and journalism; distinctions between disciplines, styles, and media are removed, and rigorous argument sits alongside unfounded speculation and unanswerable polemic. Like the situationists, they observe that the world now seems to be a decentred and aimless collection of images and appearances, characterise consciousness as fragmented, dispersed, and constructed by the social relations in which it arises, and declare the apparent impossibility of future progress and historical foundation. Situationist vocabularies of play, pleasure, and subversion reappear, and the politics of the everyday, consumerism, the media, the avant-garde, the city, language, and desire are themes common to both. Moreover, many theorists writing in the wake of 1968 continued the situationist search for some irrecuperable perspective from which an increasingly complex and all-encompassing social system could be opposed.
