Situation Event Process: 
‘New Genre Public Art’ and Radical Politics

I’m very happy to be able to say a few words to you under the auspices of the “Public Art and New Artistic Strategies” MFA program.  I’m going to be talking tonight about Situationist theory and practice, a model or strategy developed over the course of the late 1950s and early 60s.  So that may not count as “new” exactly, but the intense and still growing attention and focus on the Situationist International today surely indicates that this model has a claim to relevance.  In a few minutes I’ll be looking with you at two Situationist interventions, the so-called Strasbourg Scandal from 1966 and the Place Clichy action from 1969.  My aim will be to show how, new or not, Situationist theory and practice can be very valuable in helping you to think through the grounds and implications of your own practice.  The challenge of the Situationist call for the “realization of art” is even more relevant to new forms of public art than it is to more traditional forms of object-making.
	Before I get to these two historical examples, I have to prepare the way with a bit of critical art theory.  (I hope no one here is allergic to theory!)  As you all know, an important expansion in the concept of public art took place over the course of the 1990s.  “New genre public art,” as artist and theorist Suzanne Lacy named it in 1995, was a move beyond then dominant conventions of administered “plop art,” or monumental urban decoration.  Grasping the possibilities of art conceived as a social process liberated from the production of traditional objects, the new public art questioned the assumptions behind notions of “the public” and launched an investigation of the forms of communication and interaction by which artists can reach and engage differentiated audiences.  Aspects of this direction were recently given further expression by Nicolas Bourriaud in his much-debated book Relational Aesthetics.  From a radical point of view, this direction is a great improvement over the pluralist forms of modernist object-making most favored by the art market.  But it’s also problematic, in that it becomes ever clearer that the relational approach has begun to merge with the agendas of neo-liberal globalization, in the ideologies of the creative classes and entrepreneurial culture, those motors of gentrification and city branding.
	Undeniably, there is a radical kernel to the new public art, with its emphasis on process and social relations.  As this art becomes more deeply institutionalized, however, it will be necessary to work harder to set free and activate this kernel.  My argument tonight, in short, is that the logic of the interrogations the new public art puts in motion, if followed rigorously, soon lead beyond all institutionalized conceptions of art and open onto that ultimate question of politics, power and human possibilities: the so-called social question.
	
Young Marx, Alienation, and Becoming Human
So, first, I want to show why this is so:  why the logic of new genre public art and the questions it raises necessarily lead to an intersection with radical politics.  I’m going to be drawing from two streams of critical theory: that of the Frankfurt School and that of the Situationist International.  But we need to begin by returning to the source of both – to the early Marx and his theory of alienation, or Entfremdung.  In the letters and essays he wrote for the Franco-German Yearbooks in 1843 and 44 and in the Paris Manuscripts – really the founding documents of critical theory oriented toward social transformation – the young Karl Marx famously tells us what it means to be radical:  “To be radical is to grasp things by the root.  But for people the root is humanity itself.” (EW, 251, tm)  By this he means that what is at stake, behind every local problem of politics or even every debate in art and philosophy, is nothing less that what it means to be human – or, to be more precise, what it means to have the possibility of becoming human.  
	For Marx, drawing on a tradition that goes back through Hegel all the way to Aristotle, the question of what it means to be human is really the question of human potentialities, what he usually calls Wesenkräfte, or “essential powers.”  In other words, all those creative capacities and intellectual powers which, taken together, point to what we human beings could imagine and do, whether we ever actually do so or not.  Under existing conditions, Marx tells us, our potentials are blocked and are realizable only in a very crippled form.  What we need to do is to find out how to liberate and actualize our possibilities.  Now, artists are used to doing this on an individual level.  Art is famously a model, perhaps the model, of self-generating and self-fulfilling activity.  But we need to figure out how to extend this privilege of continuous self-realization to everyone.  It may help to grasp the ideal Marx aimed at by saying that we need to generalize, and to make accessible to everyone, the creative and auto-creative processes mobilized in doing art.
	The core of critical theory, then, has always been the insight that existing class society lacks even the conditions of real freedom and therefore is less than fully human.  Humanity has the capacity to organize itself and its relations with nature in a rational and conscious way.  But so far, it has never done so.  We find ourselves, as if by accident or a bad joke, in a class society that seems to be running out of control – a global system characterized by domination and exploitation, conflict and violence, crisis and war.  Capitalism, to give this system a name, has been astonishingly successful in developing and mobilizing many human potentials.  It has actualized as never before the human capacity to master nature through technology (well, at least until climate change kicks in).  
	Marx wants to give capitalism its due.  With this form of organization, humanity has finally succeeded in liberating itself from nature as fate, as an uncontrollable external or alien force.  But it has done so only at the price of a more intense enslavement of man by man, through waged labor and the commodity system.  Relentless competition within a finite planet reduces everything to exchange value and enforces a vicious circle of accumulation for the sake of more accumulation, production for the sake of more production.  The world is filled with commodities, but at the price of reducing people too to commodity-status.  In this sense, capitalism is still less than human.  It is not a social form adequate to humanity, not a form capable of bringing a fulfilled humanity into the world.  At bottom, it is the legal sublimation of a pitiless war of all against all – a continuation of barbarism.  Under such conditions the vast majority of people remain alienated from their human potentials and have no real control over their own lives.  Their own creation and collective product – ultimately society itself – comes to dominate them as an external power, something alien, a second nature. 
	What would that be, then – a society based on the conscious use of reason aimed at the free satisfaction of real human needs and the free actualization of real human possibilities?  In such a society, all people – and not just a privileged few – would be empowered freely to explore and develop their human potentialities, both as individuals and collectively, with others.  But this can’t happen so long as the individual and the social whole are kept in perpetual conflict.  The project of becoming human is an all or nothing affair; it can’t be based on the exclusion of any groups, let alone the vast majority.  Classless society – society based on mutual recognition and support rather than domination and hierarchy – would be the condition for what Marx calls the “true human community.”  It would be the beginning of a truly human history that sets free the potentials of unalienated social activity, what he sometimes calls “free” or “social enjoyment,” gesellschaftlicher Genuß. (EW, 265).  Only the passage to such a society, Marx says, famously setting Hegel on his feet, would be the “realization of philosophy.”  
	A century later, the Situationists saw that it just as much would be the “realization of art.”  It would be a form of association in which everyone is empowered to become an artist – not in the narrow, specialized sense of a profession, but in the more profound sense of a person embarked on the creative adventure of continuous individual and collective self-realization.  “Communism” was the name Marx gave to this project of human emancipation, this unfolding of human possibility.  The social reconciliation of the conflict between man and nature, the individual and the collective or species, would also make possible the “emancipation of all human senses,” for “the senses of social man are different from non-social [or alienated] man.”  Becoming human, we would literally be able to see and hear differently.  What Marx called “true communism” would set free the “all-around development” of social individuals, a “development in all directions,” as he and Engels put it in The German Ideology.  From that text comes the famous passage evoking the dissolution of the division of labor that would be the social realization of art.  Guy Debord détourned these lines in 1957, in one of the founding documents of the Situationist International:  In a communist society, he writes, “there will be no painters, but at most Situationists who engage in painting among other activities.”
	There of course have been long-going debates about this luminous imagination of communism in Marx’s early writings and about how it relates to the later analysis of Capital and to that rightly discredited will-to-orthodoxy known as Marxism-Leninism.  Many have dismissed the young Marx as “essentialist” or “still too Hegelian.”  There is of course a notion of human essence or nature involved here.  But, as others have pointed out, it is not a static or unchanging human nature.  This is an “essence” that has been fully opened to time and history.  In philosophical terms, Marx’s ontology is contingent – open-ended, dynamic relational, rather that fixed once and for all.  It is also embodied, in the strongest materialist sense.  For Marx, human nature or essence is merely the sum or ensemble of human powers and relations at any given point in history.  Over time, this changes, and human body changes with it, for the development of human potentialities always sets free the development of new and further possibilities.  The process of “becoming human,” then, is no restoration of some previously attained purity or unchanging substratum.  It’s more like the removal of unnecessary blockages to self-realization.  Marx doesn’t claim to know what humanity could be – only to have grasped the socio-material obstacles in the way of this becoming.  So in this case the charge of “essentialism,” which became a kind of unthinking po-mo reflex of the 1990s, largely misses the mark.  An open and relational notion of human self-realization can’t be dismissed so easily.
	Which is not to say, of course, that there is nothing problematic in the exuberant vision of the young Marx, or that all the questions latent in this account have already been definitively answered.  As lucid and appealing as it is, we obviously have yet to figure out how to make the passage to this high standard of humanity; at the very least there are practical problems blocking its realization.  The truth, as opposed to the mere utopianism, of this vision remains an open question or problem – that is to say, an urgency.  And nothing stops us from seeing the solution of this problem as our common task.  
	With the demise of the repressive bureaucratic empire of “really existing socialism” – arguably the very actualization of that false direction the young Marx had already condemned as “crude communism” – there is renewed, one could even say urgent, interest in these early writings and in what is sometimes called “Marxist humanism.”  But these visionary ideas about the social enjoyment of a truly emancipated humanity never ceased to be the main inspiration of what we call critical theory.  They form the core of Frankfurt Institute theory, and are condensed that phrase of Stendhal – “the promise of happiness” – invoked repeatedly by Marcuse and Adorno.  And they are no less at the heart of Situationist critical theory, with its “critique of separation” (in other words of alienation) and its continuous détournement of Saint-Just’s declaration, “Happiness is a new idea in Europe.”  And I would suggest that it is the deeper meaning behind much of the thinking and imagery of the anti-capitalist alter-globalization movement today – the so-called movement of movements.  This famous image, for example, by the British stencil artist Banksy.
	So, critical theory begins when one reaches the root of the problem.  The problem – domination, exploitation, oppression, alienation, the blockage of a passage to a realized humanity – is rooted in the organization of existing society.  The roots are in capitalist modernity and its material basis in capitalism as a world system, call it what you will:  state capitalism, late capitalism, total administration and culture industry, society of spectacle, Empire.  It’s necessary to go all the way to the root, because efforts to address localized forms and expressions of the problem are doomed to fail if they don’t grasp the problem itself at the level of a globalized system, the planetary social totality.  Radical politics sets itself apart by its willingness to grasp the roots of the matter.  
	This doesn’t mean that the economic dimension is the only one that matters, that all reforms are worthless, or that micro-politics is unimportant; but it does mean that the ultimate aim of politics is systemic or macro-level transformation – the rational reorganization of the social totality through some kind of revolutionary passage or process capable of breaking the race to the bottom of enforced competition.  This would be what Engels famously described as “humanity’s leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.”
	Now we can see why new genre public art tends to lead toward the social question and radical politics.  Having grasped art as a social process and having posed the problem of the public, the new public art can’t help but to pose questions of power and privilege, of inequities and exclusions, of hierarchy and institutionality.  These questions lead all the way back to the big question, the social question, the question of the link between social organization and human possibilities.  Simply by following the questions it generates back and down to roots of the matter, the very logic of new public art practices – unless this logic is blocked or held back – soon leads to a process of radicalization.  It may begin by formulating questions in terms of the dominant or liberal common sense; but if it keeps asking – who? and why? and what for? – then these questions will sooner or later burst their liberal frame.  In other words, a committed artistic practice that recognizes itself as a social process soon arrives at the point where the realization of art and social transformation come to form a dynamic unity.  For this reason, neo-liberal forces may sometimes capture and instrumentalize the new public art, but never in a way that fully or permanently neutralizes this latent movement of radicalization.  Recovering and activating this movement, I’m saying, should be a conscious aim of new public artists.

The Situation as Moment of Social Enjoyment
OK, we’re almost ready to turn to the two examples.  I just first want to remind you that the Situationist International, or SI, was formed through the merger of several avant-garde groups in 1957.  By the time of the first intervention we’ll look at, the SI had been working on refining their theory and practice for nine years.  This included an impressive processing of critical theory and the revolutionary tradition in the pages of their journal and in two major works of theory that would be published in 1967:  Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle and Raoul Vaneigem’s Revolution of Everyday Life.  The key theoretical innovation in this time is the category of “spectacle,” which involves a sharp rewriting of Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism from Capital, volume I.  The key practical innovation is the “construction of situations.”
	As I’m sure you know, the construction of situations, as a form of decolonizing everyday life, was a departure from traditional art practices.  For the SI, the time of making objects or writing poetry was over.  Art had to transform itself into practices that contributed to the revolutionary process by directly expanding life – that is, by de-alienating human relations, by breaking the habits and patterns of passivity, isolation, and separation.  The construction of situations, or de-alienated moments of everyday life, is of course a reinvention of the old avant-garde project of directly re-linking art and life.  For the situationists, this was the realization of art – the dialectical overcoming of art as a separate, specialized activity.  This supersession or surpassing of art dissolves art as commodity and vehicle of a profession or career but preserves the critical and utopian impulses of art and gives them a higher form or realization.  Art merges with the revolutionary process of becoming human.  Clearly, this was a much more critical art theory than the hymns to modernism still being produced by Adorno in Frankfurt.
	Let’s look at this category – the “situation” – more closely.  In Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist philosophy, the situation is a given:  it is nothing more or less than the historical circumstances in which one acts and, perhaps, proves one’s freedom.  In appropriating this notion, the Situationists transformed it into an active category.  For them, a situation was an event in the strong sense of an occurrence that breaks open the frozen, naturalized normality of everyday life.  A situation shatters the closedness of alienated experience, the sense that nothing can be changed, and brings together the conditions for something real and human to happen.  By breaking the hold of the relations that keep everything in their assigned places, thereby continuously reproducing the world as the same old thing, a situation opens the way for a free expression of needs and desires – or at least frees people to pose to themselves the question of what their real needs and desires, as opposed those fed to them from above, might be.  
	A sudden, unexpected clearing of the ground, a purging of “dead time,” a situation is a factor of rapid radicalization, a fast track to the social question in its basic forms: Who are we, anyway, and how do we want to live?  Any event that puts people into direct contact with this generally unasked question – the question of people taking conscious control over their own lives – is what we can call a “qualitative event.”  Such an event is necessarily a transformative experience for those who find themselves in it.  
	Moreover, the Situationists held that situations could be constructed or provoked.  In this sense, a situation is something like a potlatch, an event of gift-giving without return, an opening to what lies beyond exchange value, the beach beneath the paving stones, an experience at the point of no return.  And indeed, they hardly did anything else than to try to figure out how to provoke these exemplary moments of a revolutionary cultural process, these small pre-figurations of humanized social life, what Marx called “social enjoyment.”  The two historical episodes I want to turn to now are – you already will have guessed this – examples of the successful construction of a situation, in the sense I’ve just described.

The Strasbourg Situation
The first has come to be known as the “Strasbourg Scandal” of 1966.  This was a collaboration of the Situationist International and a number of radicalized students at the University of Strasbourg.  The basic sequence of events, as well as the SI’s role in them, has been related by the Situationists themselves in their journal.  And brief accounts of the scandal appear in histories of the group, as well as histories of the student movement and the New Left.  By far the most vivid and detailed retelling is that of Greil Marcus, who gives it 13 pages in his book Lipstick Traces.  
	There are five elements or aspects that, coming together, catalyze this situation. We first need to take into account the larger global context.  Behind the aggressive rhetoric and continuous gamesmanship of the so-called Cold War was a shared commitment by both sides to the terms of a new status quo negotiated at Yalta and Potsdam.  But if the Russians and Americans were equally hostile to any prospect of real global revolution, many people in the world did not share this conservatism.  The late 1950s and 1960s were characterized by fierce struggles of national liberation and decolonization in the peripheries of the world system and by waves of uprisings of repressed minorities and the urban poor in the major cities of the capitalist core.  Over the course of the 1960s, these struggles and uprisings – from Algeria, Cuba, Vietnam and the anti-imperialist Tricontinental movement to the “long hot summer” of 1964 and the Watts riots in Los Angeles in the summer of 1965 – had begun first to politicize and then, through the very process of questioning I described, to radicalize student campuses across Europe and North America.
	The next three elements were the ones that contributed directly to the construction of the situation:  the actions of the student agents on the Strasbourg campus; the pamphlet I hope some of you have been able to read, On the Poverty of Student Life; and a poster entitled The Return of the Durutti Column. The fifth element is the circulation of Situationist theory itself.
	In the Spring of 1966, five students, disgusted with what they saw as student apathy and the irrelevant bureaucracy of the major student unions and political organizations, decided to stand for election to the offices of the French National Student Union (or UNEF) on a platform of undisguised hostility to the union itself.  Probably to their surprise, they were promptly voted into the highest offices, and found themselves in control of the union’s local treasury.  Over the summer break, friends of the new union officers made contact with the Situationists in Paris and asked their advice about how best to take advantage of their new power.
	Not very impressed, the Situationists at first kept their distance.  They advised the students to write their own critique of the university and contemporary society and use the union funds to publish it; this would at least enable them to clarify their own ideas and lay the ground for their own autonomy.  The students agreed.  They worked out the main elements of their critique, but then had trouble turning these ideas into an effective text.  The SI sent one of their members, Mustapha Khayati, to Strasbourg to help them with the writing.  The pamphlet that resulted – the full title is On the Poverty of Student Life Considered in its Economic, Political, Psychological, Sexual, and especially Intellectual Aspects, with a Modest Proposal for Doing Away with It – was largely ghost-authored by Khayati but attributed to the Federated General Association of Strasbourg Students (AFGES) and the student union, the UNEF.  It is in fact a concise précis of Situationist theory.
	As those of you who read it will have noticed, the text begins with a blistering and provocative critique of a university system degraded into an apparatus for preparing future bureaucrats and bourgeois functionaries.  The very first line sets the tone:  “It is pretty safe to say that the student is the most universally despised creature in France, apart from the policeman and the priest.”  Students are contemptible not for their actual poverty and misery, but for their indifference to the poverty and misery of others.  But the decline of the university from a place for the transmission of critical culture to an apparatus of mechanical specialization is merely one symptom of life dominated by commodities.  The alienation of the student merely reflects the generalized alienation of all under “overdeveloped capitalism.”  The only human response open to students is to refuse this social totality and ally themselves with the revolutionary forces and movements struggling to liberate humanity from it.  
	These forces are not to be found in the groups and unions allied to the official Communist Parties or their proliferating sectarian splinter groups.  The Situationists were emphatically anti-Stalinist as well as anti-capitalist.  They rejected the bureaucratic police states of “really existing socialism” no less than the liberal pseudo-democracies of the West.  In this they belong to what Richard Gombin has analyzed as gauchisme – what in English is usually called the “New Left.”  The Situationists looked back to those shimmering pages in the Paris Manuscripts of 1844, in which the young Marx describes what real communism would need to be, as a process of total, sensuous emancipation and development “in all directions.”  It went without saying in 1966 that the crude communism established in those totalitarian bureaucratic states wrapped in portraits of Lenin, Stalin and Mao were counterrevolutionary dead-ends that crushed the revolutionary workers’ movements and continued to block the passage to an autonomous humanity.  
	“Humanity,” the pamphlet proclaims, “is historically confronted with the problem of revolution.”  But the real revolution “must once and for all break with its prehistory and derive all its poetry from the future.”  It goes on:
Let the dead bury the dead.  The practical demystifications of the historical movement are exorcising the phantoms that haunted revolutionary consciousness; the revolution of everyday life is being confronted with the immensity of its tasks.  Both revolution and the life it announces must be reinvented.
The learning process of history indicts the old vanguard parties and their ideologies.  The real revolutionary process seeks a total emancipation from the reified totality; it seeks “a new type of free activity” that would be nothing less than the “free construction of life.”
	The pamphlet is full of echoes of the young Marx, but translated into a more contemporary idiom.  The proletariat, for example, is redefined: the revolutionary class now includes not just the wage-slaves of the factories churning out commodities, but everyone “who has no power over his life and knows it.”  The pamphlet ends with a ringing call for the realization of art within the creative movements of the revolutionary process:
In the nineteenth century the proletariat was already the inheritor of philosophy; now it has become the inheritor of modern art and of the first conscious critique of everyday life.  It cannot suppress itself without at the same time realizing art and philosophy.... The radical critique and free reconstruction of all the values and patterns of behavior imposed by alienated reality are its maximum program.  Free creativity in the construction of all moments and events of life is the only poetry it can acknowledge, the poetry made by all, the beginning of the revolutionary festival.  Proletarian revolutions will be festivals or nothing, for festivity is the very keynote of the life they announce.  Play is the ultimate principle of the festival, and the only rules it can recognize are to live without dead time and to enjoy without restraints.
	The provocation unfolded as planned.  The student union treasury was emptied to pay for the printing of 10,000 bound copies of On the Poverty of Student Life and the poster that announced it.  The poster, The Return of the Durutti Column by pro-Situationist student André Bertrand, was an assemblage of détourned cartoons, photos, and reproduced artworks.  It gleefully told the story of the election of the student radicals and promised the imminent appearance of “the most scandalous publication of the century.”  It would be worthwhile to analyze this notorious poster panel by panel, and I encourage you to do that on your own.  Here I only have time to show the most famous panel, the dialogue between two cowboys who speak lines from Situationist Michèle Bernestin’s novel, All the King’s Horses.
First cowboy:  “What is it that you do, again?”
Second cowboy:  “Reification.”
	“I see.  That’s serious work, with big books and lots of papers on a big table...”
	“Nope.  I walk around.  Mostly, I just walk around.”
This was one of countless examples of Situationist irony.  These adventurers may have spent a lot of time drinking and drifting, but the theoretical dimension of their project was, precisely, hard work, with big books and lots of papers on a big table.  The slogan “Never Work” was a refusal of alienated wage-labor, not of labor as such.
	When the students returned from summer break, the walls of the Strasbourg campus were plastered with these posters and graffiti along the same lines.  The pamphlet, hot from the printer, was freely distributed, and at the convocation ceremony the new officers of the student union personally placed copies into the hands of the university rector, the mayor and the Bishop of Strasbourg, and even the chief of police.  In a final, culminating provocation, they then used their authority as union officers to announce a General Assembly of students in December for the purposes of dissolving the student union.
	Within days, the scandal had ignited a firestorm of indignation that raged in the national press for months.  Professors, politicians, priests, pundits and all the self-appointed guardians of public morals rushed to condemn the students and the dangerous and shadowy gang behind them.  Unfortunately for them, everything was perfectly legal.  The system of rules had been subverted, but not a single rule had actually been broken.  Confirming the claims of the pamphlet, the old régime fell back on arbitrary power to try to suppress the scandal.  The student union was closed and placed under court custody and a judge removed the legally elected students from their offices.  
	But it was too late for that.  The scandal had gone international.  An insatiable desire for the notorious pamphlet had been created.  It was quickly translated into other languages and was soon being read and discussed on campuses all over the world.  Over the next year, more than 300,000 copies of the text were printed and in circulation, and this doesn’t count the new pamphlets – Ten Days that Shook the University was the title of the best known of these – written to celebrate the provocation.  Its impact is difficult to judge with certainty, but some participants and analysts of the student movement consider it a landmark of student radicalization in the run-up to the events of May and June 1968, when the street battles defending the student occupation of the Sorbonne University spread to the factories and rapidly developed into a wildcat general strike of 10 million workers.  Both Richard Gombin, in his classic analysis of the French New Left, The Origins of Modern Leftism, and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, in his Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative, acknowledge the influence of the scandal and the ideas it helped to disseminate.
	What I want to emphasize is the structure of the scandal as a situation, a qualitative event.  This was a masterly demonstration of the possibilities of détournement, of occupying and re-functioning existing structures and procedures with radical aims.  The SI and the students had used the spectacular logic of the commodity system – the established forms and rules for securing legitimacy and obedience and the conventional strategies of marketing and promotion – to construct not yet another spectacle but the negation of spectacle: a genuine situation in which everything was called into question.
	Greil Marcus captures this process of radicalization beautifully.  “At the University of Strasbourg in the fall of 1966,” he writes,
there was only one conversation. Governed by the same principle of expansion that governed the conversation in Berkeley in the fall of 1964 or Poland in August 1980, in Durruti’s Barcelona in July 1936 or Huelsenbeck’s Berlin in January 1919: on Monday people began to question rules and regulations, the next day the institutions behind the rules, then the nature of the society that produced the institutions, then the philosophy that justified the society, then the history that created the philosophy, until by the end of the week both God and the state were in doubt and the only interesting question was the meaning of life.
This, then, is what distinguishes a real situation: the hold of the given, the hold exerted by the reified structures of life over movement of life itself, is broken.  It suddenly becomes clear that since we made this world, we can make it different.  The choice is not how we best can make our way in the world as it is, how to accommodate ourselves to the given.  The choice is: are we ready or not to make our own history, to become human.
	I said before that the fifth element of this scandal was the circulation of Situationist theory.  What I mean is this.  In his account, Marcus implies that the SI was at an impasse in 1966.  They had, he implies, withdrawn into the realm of theory and had isolated themselves from any kind of effective practice or contact with real social agents.  Closed off, they polished and perfected their theory and were satisfied to gloss other peoples’ revolts and gestures of refusal.  So they badly needed this contact with the students to revitalize their project.  I see it a bit differently.  Developing a coherent critique of contemporary capitalism is a daunting undertaking, not at all a short-term project.  It took Debord and his collaborators a decade to attain that “theoretical coherence” that calls irresistibly for a practical organization.
	Not only that, but the theory had to be expressed in a suitable form and idiom, a style, if you will, that speaks effectively to the contemporaries for whom it is written.  What was happening by 1966 is that, after a decade of underground circulation – more than that if you count the bulletins of the pre-Situationist Letterist International – these ideas were finally beginning to take hold in the imagination of a wider public.  Situationist theory was beginning to move in step with its reality.  But the explosion of radicalization that turned the Strasbourg Scandal into a real situtation would not have been possible without the years of theory-building and experimentation, and the slow disseminations of their ideas.  
	I doubt things are any different in this respect today.  The construction of situations is certainly possible, but needs to be grounded in a coherent systemic critique.  The excitement and impact of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s books Empire and Multitude owes much to the general recognition that here, after decades of relative de-politicization and the so-called “End of History,” here are elements of a theory and critique that can be put to work.  Of course the context of real, material struggle – the first element I pointed to – is also crucial.  But as we know, we live in a world in which struggles and movements have returned, with a vengeance.  All this cannot help but impact the idea and practices of public art.

The Place Clichy Situation
The second example is relatively more modest, but demonstrates another kind of possibility.  The account of it the SI published in the twelfth and final issue of their journal in September 1969 is concise, so I want to read it aloud to you in full. The two images accompanied the text.

The Return of Charles Fourier
At 7PM on Monday 10 March 1969, exactly in the moment when a “general strike” – carefully limited to 24 hours by union bureaucrats – was scheduled to begin, the statue of Charles Fourier in the Place Clichy was returned to its plinth, which had been empty since the Nazis had removed the first version of the statue.  An engraved plaque at the base of the statue explained its origin:  “In tribute to Charles Fourier, from the barricaders of the rue Gay-Lussac.”  Never before has the technique of détournement reached such a domain.
The work of putting it place was accomplished at one of the Place Clichy’s busiest times, in front of more than a hundred witnesses, many of whom crowded around it, but of whom none was particularly shocked, even on reading the plaque (in France people who have seen May 1968 don’t let themselves be shocked easily).  The statue, an exact replica of the original, was made of plaster but finished in bronze.  To a first glance, it looked real enough.  Even so, it weighed more than a hundred kilos.  Soon, the police had learned of its presence and put it under guard through the next day.  At dawn the following morning, it was removed by technical services of the Prefecture.
A commando of around twenty “unknowns,” as Le Monde put it on March 13 had sufficed to pull off the operation, which lasted a quarter of an hour.  According to one witness, quoted in France-Soir on the 13th, “eight young people aged twenty deposited the statue using wooden beams.  A nice performance, if one knows it took no less than 30 guardians of the peace and a crane to leave the plinth empty again.”  And L’Aurore, telling the truth for once, remarked that the whole thing was notable because “the enragés don’t usually go in for paying tributes.”
So this situation was a kind of gift to the Parisians who had triggered a near revolution the year before.  The Situationists, even in the old days of the Letterist International, were passionate lovers of the city of Paris, whose residents had risen up so many times in the last two hundred years.  They explored the city continuously, and knew it intimately, from the secret sanctuaries of the Left Bank to the Spanish anarchist bars of Aubervilliers.  The famous urban drift or derive was at heart a project of mapping the secret histories of resistance written on the walls and stones of the city.  So they would have noticed something like a missing statue of Charles Fourier in the Place Clichy.  Fourier was a visionary socialist of the early 19th century.  His utopian notions of “social enjoyment” shared at least the exuberant sprirt of the young Marx’s, and the Situationists often paid homage to Fourier in their own writings.  Asking and digging around, they found out that the statue had been removed during the Nazi occupation.
	According to Andrew Hussey, one of Debord’s recent biographers who conducted interviews with all the protagonists still alive in 1999 and 2000, a teacher at the École des Beaux Arts who was close to the SI, fabricated an exact copy of the original statue, presumably working from photos.  The state, shaken and nervous after its close call the year before, was unwilling to allow what it rightly interpreted as a provocation – especially not one signed by “the ones who barricaded the rue Gay-Lussac.”  I mentioned that the student occupation of the Sorbonne University had rapidly spread out from the Latin Quarter and developed into a wildcat general strike by 10 million workers – a serious threat to any state and established society.  The role of the Situationists and their “Council for the Maintenance of Occupations” is a highly interesting one, but one I unfortunately can’t go into here.  I’ll just show you an image that sums up the intensity of the revolt and helps to understand why the state’s response to the restored statue in the Place Clichy was basically predictable.  Here is the rue Gay-Lussac on the morning of 11 May, after the so-called “night of the barricades.”
	So this situation constructed in the Place Clichy is really paying tribute to those who made the real situation, the revolutionary situation of May and June 1968, which according to all the official analysts was strictly impossible and never should have taken place.  And look what happened a year later:  the French state was easily provoked into literally repeating an act of political suppression committed by the Nazis.  You could hardly ask for a clearer confirmation of everything the Situationists had been saying.  But here, a year after those weeks of hope and their defeat, after the slow slide back into alienated normality, this self-exposure by the state surprises no one.  It is however, a good joke, a fine ludic gesture performed before a hundred witnesses and for the larger public of all those who had participated in the recent insurrection.  We could say that this intervention is a kind of astonished and admiring echo, a dénouement lovingly prolonging these experienced moments of an extraordinary reach for humanity.  The message is unmistakable:  take heart, it is possible to play the game in earnest.

Conclusions
OK, let me try to sum up and draw some conclusions.  You will have gathered that I’ve juxtaposed Situationist theory and practice to the new public art mainly in order to encourage you to be more ambitious and rigorous.  Don’t despair to go to the roots of the matter:  it’s possible, it’s been done and can be done again.
	But my other aim has been to underscore the importance of grounding a practice in an adequate theory.  If you haven’t developed a coherent perspective on the global context, the social totality, then local interventions in the public realm will lack the depth needed to generate real situations.  In any case, they won’t be able to link up effectively with radical politics or the movement of movements.  Here it’s not enough to adopt some theory or other as a dogma, a set of answers given in advance to all possible questions.  It’s necessary to have the patience and discipline to appropriate theory in the strong sense:  to work through and critically process accounts of contemporary reality, and to make them your own by your own insights into their strengths and weaknesses.  That’s hard work and takes time.  But in this way one attains the critical autonomy needed to intervene effectively and construct situations, even on a local level.
	A second point has to do with the relation between situations and what we can call a radical or revolutionary process.  Situations, we’ve seen, are qualitative events, ruptures of normality that activate the social question and clear the ground for something to happen.  But these moments of radical opening don’t just appear out of nowhere, though it often seems so.  They are in fact prepared by balance of forces and tendencies of a context, and by sustained processes of contestation and struggle.  The larger context is macro-historical and beyond our control as artistic or cultural agents.  But we can contribute effectively to processes that contest the given order.  If they show nothing else, the Situationists have at least demonstrated this.  Situations or radical qualitative events have to be seen, then, as emphatic moments within the movements of a larger process – a process from which the events themselves draw their energy and meaning.  As cultural agents, our best contributions to this process of “expanding life” will come from a continuous dialectic between critical theory and inventive practice:  each corrects and spurs on the other in a virtuous circle.  In this too the Situationists have proved to be exemplary.
	Closing thought:  Please don’t interpret this as a call for mere repetitions of Situationist precedents.  That would be less than autonomous and in any case would be impossible, for conditions today are in crucial respects much different from those of the 1960s.  But certainly the category of “situation” remains valid today.  Those who want to construct them will find their own ways of reinventing the “poetry of the future.”  When they’ve found their way to a theoretical coherence that calls for a practical organization, then they too will be in a position to reconstitute the avant-garde tradition as a vector of de-alienation, a valid mode of becoming human.