The Situationists, Marcuse and the “Great Refusal” of the “Hopeless Cases”: The Socially Marginalized, Rebellion and Revolution

ABSTRACT

This article looks at two theories—developed (roughly speaking) during the same historical period (largely from the 1950s to the 1970s)—which deal with the issue of the socially marginalized, rebellion and revolution: that of the Situationist International and that of Herbert Marcuse. The article examines both the Situationists' and Marcuse’s thought as regards the social structure of advanced capitalist society and the prospects for “proletarian” revolution in the United States and Europe. Further, the article compares and contrasts the Situationists' and Marcuse’s ideas about revolution in the realm of culture. Finally, the article reflects on the relevance of Situationist and Marcusean ideas—concerning the “great refusal” of the “hopeless cases”—in the post-2008 period.

KEYWORDS:

• Situationist International
• Herbert Marcuse
• socially marginalized groups
• proletariat
• 2011 riots

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Julian Eagles is an independent researcher. He holds a doctorate from the London School of Economics. His subject was the origins, concepts and place of Situationist theory in modern European thought. He has previously had articles published in Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, Fast Capitalism and Critical Sociology.

Notes

1 The Situationist International (SI) was created in 1957 and disbanded in 1972. The group—based in Paris—was made up of “artists” who had been involved with various European avant-garde artistic organizations; the group published 12 issues of the magazine Internationale situationniste. The SI’s two key theorists were Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem. Debord’s (1967) La société du spectacle (The Society of the Spectacle) and Vaneigem’s (1967) Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations (The Revolution of Everyday Life) appeared a few months before the outbreak of the May events of 1968 in France—events which saw students occupy universities, workers occupy factories, widespread rioting, a general strike and the construction of barricades in the centre of Paris.

2 Debord argues that the society of the spectacle arose in the 1920s ([1988] 1990, 3).

3 For further details about the concept of “the spectacle,” see Eagles (2012).

4 For a more detailed discussion of the Situationists’ notion of the “new proletariat,” see Eagles (2017).

5 The Frankfurt School emerged from the Institute for Social Research established at Frankfurt University in the 1920s. The institute relocated to the US around the time the Nazis assumed power in Germany. Marcuse remained in America throughout the war and into the post-war period; he continued to make a contribution to “critical theory” up until his death in 1979.

6 Note that Marcuse does qualify his view concerning the working class in the less developed capitalist countries. For instance, he remarks that “ … where the consumer gap is still wide, where the capitalist culture has not yet reached into every house or hut, the system of stabilizing needs has its limits; the glaring contrast between the privileged class and the exploited leads to a radicalization of the underprivileged. This is the case of the ghetto population and the unemployed in the United States; this is also the case of the labouring classes in the more backward capitalist countries” ([1969] 1973, 25).

7 To quote Marcuse: “ … underneath the conservative popular base is the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable. They exist outside the democratic process; their life is the most immediate and the most real need for ending intolerable conditions and institutions. Thus their opposition is revolutionary even if their consciousness is not. Their opposition hits the system from without and is therefore not deflected by the system … ” ([1964] 1999, 256). Also, see Marcuse ([1969] 1973, 55–81).

8 In this article, the Situationists made clear their support for those who rioted in the Watts area of Los Angeles during 1965. As they put it: “[A]ll the ideologists and ‘spokesmen’ of the vacuous international Left, deplored the irresponsibility, the disorder, the looting … and the 2000 fires with which the blacks lit up their battle and their ball. But who has defended the Los Angeles rioters in the terms they deserve? We will. Let the economists fret over the $27 million lost, and the city planners sigh over one of their most beautiful supermarkets gone up in smoke. … The role of a revolutionary publication is not only to justify the Los Angeles insurgents, but to help elucidate their perspectives, to explain theoretically the truth for which such practical action expresses the search” (Knabb 2006, 195).

9 To quote Marcuse: “What we can say of the American working class is that in their great majority the workers are integrated into the system and do not want a radical transformation, we probably cannot or not yet say of the European working class” (1970, 85; italics in the original).

10 As Geoghegan recounts: “When asked in a 1973 interview if the events of Paris 1968 had shown the book on one-dimensionality to be over-pessimistic, Marcuse answered: ‘It seems to me that unfortunately what I said in my book has been corroborated. Unfortunately!’” (1981, 94–95).

11 For a discussion of Lukács’s concept of reification—which the Situationists utilized to develop their concept of the spectacle—see Arato and Breines (1979) and what they term a “minimal consciousness of alienation.” To quote Arato and Breines: “It is perfectly rational for the capitalist to treat labor time, its increase and decrease, as a merely quantitative problem. The worker, too, may (even must) think of labor time and its wage ‘equivalent’ in this way. But in all aspects of his everyday life he is affected by all changes in his labor time qualitatively. Labor time is the ‘determining form of his existence as a human being.’ … The worker’s labor time is integrated into the objective side of production, but it can never become wholly quantitative for the worker. This means that the worker alone recognizes something qualitative on the objective side. This does not alter his alienation, but it has made one aspect of it conscious. Lukács builds the objective possibility of a rupture in the reified world based on the necessity of what we would call a minimal consciousness of alienation. He argues that the worker’s minimal consciousness of a qualitative aspect of the commodity labor time represents the beginning of the dissolution of fetishistic forms” (1979, 134; italics in the original).

12 Concerning the Situationists’ support for student revolts, see Knabb (2006, 288–325, 263–73, 199).

13 For further details, see Eagles (2017).

14 For references to the “conservative majority” in Marcuse’s writings see, for instance, Marcuse ([1969] 1973, 73; 1972, 54).

15 For the Situationists, “[d]étournement [is] the reuse of pre-existing artistic elements in a new ensemble” (Knabb 2006, 67). Also see footnote 56.

16 For further details about the Strasbourg incident, see Gray ([1974] 1998, 68–69).

17 The assumption the Situationists make here is that these individuals actually resist the spectacle. However, the Situationists also argue that these experiments in authentic living are constantly at risk of becoming recuperated.

18 For references to “spectacular domination” in Debord’s writings see, for example, Debord ([1988] 1990, 13, 87).

19 Note that the Situationists add that “[a] situation is also an integrated ensemble of behavior in time” (Knabb 2006, 49).

20 I should add that Ivan Chtcheglov, an early member of the Situationist International and author of the article “Formulary for a New Urbanism,” makes the following remark in a letter (written in 1963 and published in Internationale situationniste, no. 9) to Guy Debord and Michèle Bernstein (also a member of the Situationist group): “I now repudiate my Formulary’s propaganda for a continuous dérive. It could be continuous like the poker game in Las Vegas, but only for a certain period, limited to a weekend for some people, to a week as a good average; a month is really pushing it. In 1953–1954 [when Chtcheglov, Debord and Bernstein were members of the Lettrist avant-garde group] we dérived for three or four months straight. That’s the extreme limit. It’s a miracle it didn’t kill us” (cited in Knabb 2006, 481; italics in the original). Also see footnotes 33 and 40.

21 Once again, the assumption here is that these “hopeless” individuals manage to resist the spectacle’s power of recuperation. Also see footnote 17.

22 For Marx’s exposition of “species-being,” see the “1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts” in Early Writings (1992). Also see Wood (1986, chapter 2) for a discussion of this concept.

23 For references in Marcuse’s writings to the “great refusal” see, for instance, Marcuse ([1969] 1973, 9–11; [1955] 1987, 149–50; [1964] 1999, 256–57).

24 To quote Vaneigem ([1967] 1994, 238): “The guarantee of material security [in post-war consumer-capitalist societies, which are technologically rich and have a welfare state] leaves unused a large supply of energy formerly expended in the struggle for survival.” This “energy”—or put another way, erotic desire—then becomes, in the “spectacular” society, subject to a new form of repression as it is re-channelled in (alienated) roles or through the consumption of consumer goods.

25 Note that Marcuse also remarks that the imagination becomes more creative or “productive” provided consciousness intervenes when pleasurable, unconscious desires are accessed or released. As he writes in An Essay on Liberation: “The imagination becomes productive if it becomes the mediator between sensibility on the one hand, and theoretical as well as practical reason on the other, and in this harmony of faculties … guides the reconstruction of society” (Marcuse [1969] 1973, 44). Furthermore, in a letter to the Chicago Surrealists (October 12, 1972), he criticizes the Surrealists’ method of automatism as follows: “The surrealistic emphasis on automatism, on the creativity of the unconscious, is fallacious … If X starts writing down what ‘comes to him’ automatically, spontaneously, this is a private affair, release of private pains or pleasures, of desires which cannot claim any ‘higher truth.’ Just as there are Ego trips which are without any other than private relevance, so there are Id trips: narcissistic satisfaction. (Besides, I [Marcuse] do not believe that there is such a thing as automatic writing or painting. As soon as writing or painting starts, consciousness interferes with spontaneity—though perhaps in a very devious, unconscious way.)” (Marcuse 2006, 185–86). However, unlike the Situationists, Marcuse does not, I think, believe that with the liberation of erotic desire and the establishment of a new reality principle that consciousness or reason needs to be the dominant partner in a fusion of passion and reason. Also see footnote 31.

26 This quotation comes from Freud’s “Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis” (the “Rat Man” case history), see Freud (1991, 57).

27 Of course, the Situationists depart from Freud in the following respect: they believe that a new reality-principle —different from that prevailing in modern capitalist society—can be established.

28 I should point out here a key difference between the Surrealists and the Situationists: whereas the Surrealists believed that there should be a separation between an “artistic” and a “political” avant-garde, the Situationists did not. The Situationists were insistent that as “[the Surrealists] left it to the ‘communists’ [of the French Communist Party] to advance the cause of revolution” (Vaneigem [1977] 1999, 59) the Surrealist revolt was not adequately linked to the totality of the revolution. The Situationists, who detested the (Stalinist) French Communist Party, declared that they themselves would be a unified artistic/political avant-garde that sought a fusion of art and life.

29 Howls for Sade (1952) was Debord’s first film. As Christopher Gray (a member of the English section of the SI until excluded in 1967) writes: “[Hurlements en faveur de Sade] was a feature-length film, which, far from being pornographic, lacked any images at all; the audience being plunged into complete darkness from beginning to end, apart from a few short bursts of random monologue, when the screen went white. The last twenty-four minutes were uninterrupted silence and obscurity. In France, there was considerable violence when the film was first ‘shown.’ In London, however, when the first house came out at the ICA [Institute of Contemporary Arts], they didn’t even tell the queue for the next performance that there wasn’t anything to see” (Gray [1974] 1998, 3).

30 To quote Breton: “In the streets of Nantes, he [Vaché] strolled sometimes in the uniform of a hussar, an aviator, a doctor. Occasionally he would pass and not seem to recognize you and go on his way without turning round. Vaché never held out his hand to say hello or goodbye … It was at the Conservatoire Maubel that I met Jacques Vaché again [at the première of Apollinaire’s play Les Mamelles de Tirésias on 24 June 1917]. The first act had just ended. An English officer was making a great racket in the orchestra: it had to be Vaché. The scandal of the performance had excited him. He had come into the theatre with a revolver in his hand, and was threatening to fire into the audience” (Breton, cited from Nadeau 1978, 57).

31 Arguably, this stems from the following: the Situationists believe, I think, that liberated unconscious desire will lead to disarray and societal collapse if reason does not assert itself as the dominant partner in a fusion of passion and reason, whereas Marcuse, following the surrealists, does not appear to believe that liberated erotic desire will bring forth a condition of disorder and breakdown if reason is not the dominant partner in a fusion of passion and reason. I should add that a key difference between the Situationists and Marcuse concerns their particular views on Freud’s death instinct. While Marcuse accepts Freud’s later dualistic model of the life instincts and the death instinct, the Situationists reject this and hold (it appears) to Freud’s earlier dualistic model—that of the self-preservation instinct and the sexual instinct. Freud, Vaneigem suggests, made a “mistake” with his notion of a death instinct (Vaneigem [1967] 1994, 162).

32 For Marcuse’s comments about this, see above (in the main text). As regards the Situationists, Vaneigem ([1967] 1994, 258) claims that, “[a]ll true play involves rules and playing with rules,” and that “playfulness … always involves a certain spirit of organisation and the discipline this implies.” He also claims that: “Within [small intimate groups, micro-societies which may require a play leader] … the game can be the sole arbiter of the intricacies of communal life, harmonising individual whims, desires and passions.” Further, the Situationists claim that: “Ordinary life … can be dominated rationally … and play, radically broken from a confined ludic time and space, must invade the whole of life” (Situationist International 1958). What these claims imply, I think, is that the play impulse mediates between passion and reason.

33 For further details concerning the Situationists’ theory of unitary urbanism, see Knabb (2006, 1–8, 52).

34 The Situationists make the assumption that work is universally hated or despised. Furthermore, using—in their own way—Charles Fourier’s notion that if work is playfully organized this activity can become pleasurable (his theory of “attractive labour”), the Situationists claim that while work could be playfully organized, it would not become authentic play as it would not be entirely pleasurable and creative. As Vaneigem writes: “The [workers’] councils will experiment with attractive forms of carrying out necessary tasks, not in order to hide their unpleasant aspects, but in order to compensate for such unpleasantness with a playful organization of it, and as far as possible to eliminate such tasks in favor of creativity (in accordance with the principle: ‘Work no, pleasure yes’)” (Knabb 2006, 369–70).

35 For Marcuse’s exposition of “non-repressive sublimation,” see Marcuse ([1955] 1987, 169–70, chapter 10).

36 As Debord writes in “Theses on Cultural Revolution” (an article published in Internationale situationniste, no. 1, June 1958): “Situationists consider cultural activity, from the standpoint of totality, as an experimental method for constructing daily life, which can be permanently developed with the extension of leisure and the disappearance of the division of labor (beginning with the division of artistic labor)” (McDonough 2002, 61).

37 The Situationists took the concept of “everyday life” from Henri Lefebvre. See Lefebvre ([1947] 1991).

38 The Surrealists, for example, were intrigued by the Papin Sisters. In 1933, these sisters, who had been working as servants, killed two members of the family which employed them. As Hopkins (2004, 50) recounts: “A text in … [Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution] told how these impeccably bourgeois young ladies, having been placed in service by their mother in a respectable Le Mans household, had developed a loathing for their employers and had ended up murdering them with ritualistic precision.”

39 See, for instance, Marcuse ([1955] 1987, 148–50; [1969] 1973, 30, 37–40).

40 Regarding the dérive, Debord writes: “In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there” (Knabb 2006, 62).

41 See BBC News, November 1, 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4392126.stm.

42 See, for instance, Lee Glendinning. 2008. “Greek youths riot after police shoot boy.” Guardian, December 7, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/dec/07/greece; Helena Smith. 2008. “ Murderers: protesters’ fury boils over as boy shot by police buried.” Guardian, December 10, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/dec/10/greece-rioting-police-protesters. For some further details concerning anti-authoritarian radicalism and the Exarcheia district of Athens, see Dimitris Kitis (2015, 1–36).

43 See “An overview of recorded crimes and arrests resulting from disorder events in August 2011” (Home Office 2011). The authors of this text claim that “[t]hose appearing at court tended to be from more deprived circumstances than the wider population of England: 35% of adult defendants were claiming out-of-work benefits (compared to 12% of the working age population); 42% of young people brought before the courts were in receipt of free school meals (compared to 16% of pupils in maintained secondary school); and 64% of those young people lived in one of the 20 most deprived areas in the country—only three per cent lived in one of the 20 least deprived areas” (Home Office 2011, 5). For further evidence that those who rioted (in the main) lived in economically deprived areas see, Kawalerowicz and Biggs (2015, 673–98).

44 See Peter Dreier and Todd Swanstrom. 2014. “Suburban ghettos like Ferguson are ticking time bombs.” The Washington Post, August 21, https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/08/21/suburban-ghettos-like-ferguson-are-ticking-time-bombs/.

45 See, for instance, “Police’s fatal shooting of black teenager draws angry crowd in St Louis suburb.” Guardian, August 10, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/10/police-fatal-shooting-black-teenager-angry-crowd-st-louis-suburb; Jon Swaine. 2015. “Ferguson protests: state of emergency declared after violent night.” Guardian, August 11, http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/10/ferguson-protests-st-louis-state-of-emergency.

46 See, for instance, Anushka Asthanana et al. 2010. “Riots, fire, anger at tuition fees protest—and a defining political moment.” Guardian, December 12, http://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/dec/12/riots-fire-anger-defining-political-moment; Associated Press, 2012. “Quebec rocked by student protests.” Guardian, May 18, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/may/18/quebec-rocked-student-protests.

47 For an analysis of the policy of austerity, see Blyth (2015).

48 See Abby Young-Powell. 2014. “Students protest as university staff prepare for strike action.” Guardian, January 22, http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/jan/22/student-protest.

49 See Sarah Bolesworth et al. 2011.“Tottenham in flames as riot follows protest.” Guardian, August 7, http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/aug/06/tottenham-riots-protesters-police.

50 For an historical account of the “golden age” of post-war capitalism, see Hobsbawm (1994, 257–286).

51 See, for instance, Ashley Armstrong. 2015. “Luxury industry in Britain is worth up to £54bn.” Telegraph, August 31, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/11829702/Luxury-industry-in-Britain-is-worth-up-to-54bn.html; “Rolls-Royce breaks sales record again in 2014.” BBC News, January 6, 2015, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-30692668; Joshi Herrmann. 2015. “Playgrounds for sheikhs and oligarchs: the secret world of London’s luxury hotels.” Guardian, October 5, http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/oct/05/the-secret-world-of-londons-luxury-hotels; and Lucy Kellaway. 2014. “Lucy Kellaway joins the hunting and shooting set.” Financial Times, June 27, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/ed05bb64-f86e-11e3-815f-00144feabdc0.html#slide0. Also, see the Frontier Economics Report (2015).

52 Arguably, the individuals who rioted are part of a social stratum consisting of those, in a “neo-liberal” context, who have been pushed to the margins of society.

53 See, for example, “In pictures: London riots.” Financial Times, August 9, 2011, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/19c3e332-c19b-11e0-acb3-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=uk#slide0; Morrell, Scott, McNeish, and Websteret (2011).

54 The Guardian newspaper/LSE “Reading the Riots” (Guardian 2011) study noted the following: “A report from the Home Office into the crimes and arrests resulting from the riots revealed that 51% (2,584) of the crimes committed during the disorder were against commercial premises … Of the 1,385 shops hit throughout the country the most targeted were electrical stores (265), followed by clothes shops (233).”

55 For instance, the rap musician Snoop Dogg has promoted Adidas products. See, Maureen Farrell. 2010. “Snoop Dogg: From gangster to businessman.” Forbes, August 17, http://www.forbes.com/2010/08/16/snoop-dogg-businessman-business-entertainment-hip-hop-cash-kings-snoop.html.

56 It should be noted that the Situationists détourned (diverted/subverted) various newspaper images of the 1965 Watts riots in the 1966 issue of Internationale situationniste. For example, they took a (mainstream) news image of several youths with a looted cash register—which had the title “Playing with rifled cash register”—and placed this next to the text of their article on these events entitled “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy” (Knabb 2006, 194–203). Also, next to an image of a supermarket in flames they added the title: “Critique of urbanism” (see Stracey 2014, 59, 64). Through their détournement of images of the Watts riots, the Situationists were, I think, attempting a form of intervention to assist the “hopeless cases” to attain an advanced or highly developed revolutionary consciousness.

57 Marx was circumspect about the new kind of activity which he thought humans would embrace in an un-alienated post-capitalist society. The Situationists, however, were emphatic that people would overcome the condition of alienation from their “species being” through real play rather than through the activity of labour.

58 The notion that the personal computer is a “new” means of production, owned by the vast majority (as individuals), has been recognized by capitalists—it is a situation they are attempting to turn to their advantage to further their profit making. Sarah O’Connor, writing in the Financial Times (October 8, 2015) on the issue of the internet “cloud” and the “new world of work,” notes that “[e]mployers are starting to see the human cloud as a new way to get work done. White collar jobs are chopped into hundreds of discrete projects or tasks, then scattered into a virtual ‘cloud’ of willing workers who could be anywhere in the world, so long as they have an internet connection.” She quotes one of the “champions” of work and “the human cloud,” Denis Pennel, as follows: “What we see today is people taking ownership again of the means of production, because you just need a computer, your brain and a wifi connection to work” (see Sarah O’Connor. 2015. “The human cloud: a new world of work” Financial Times, October 8, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/a4b6e13e-675e-11e5-97d0-1456a776a4f5.html#axzz3z3LKCAGU). Now, what could be suggested about the August 2011 riots in cities in England is the following: socially marginalized individuals, through the collective looting of such items as PCs, (partially) seized control of the “new” means of production/consumption. It was the collective character of these events—irrespective of the motivation of individual participants—which, arguably, serves as a challenge (potential or actual) to the capitalists’ quest to turn the PC and “virtual cloud” into a new way of exploiting people for the purposes of profit making.