ABSTRACT
This chapter makes a twofold argument about the role of style in the Anglicisation of Situationist practice in the 1960s. First, fascinated by contemporary youth subcultures, the English Section and its precursors understood style and particularly vernacular style as a direct application of avant-garde sensibilities to everyday life. The second argument of the chapter is that the English Section and subsequent British Situationists offered a counter-reading of the Situationist International's (SI) style of negation. The English Section sought to develop an avant-garde practice that might extend beyond self-identifying avant-garde groups, that might circumvent the problems of aesthetic production and recuperation, and that might offer new forms of revolutionary subjectivity. The first Heatwave sought evidence of revolutionary stirrings in youth culture, for which a young English activist Charles Radcliffe looked towards the Provo movement in Holland. In Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord is interested only in youth revolt's position in the totality of social relations.
