Ambivalence or Rejection? A Critical Review of Dominique Routhier’s With and Against: The Situationist International in the Age of Automation
Daniel Geen
30th December 2024
Theory
30th December 2024
Theory
Dominique Routhier’s With and Against is simultaneously a cultural history of post-war France, an art historical account of the Situationist International (hereafter SI), and a critical intervention in philosophical aesthetics and the history of ideas, specifically relating to cybernetics, information theory and technological development in modern capitalism. Routhier’s text takes up the thread of ‘cybernetics’ as it figures within SI (and their predecessor, the Letterist International) theory and practice. The Situationists were responding to the onslaught of technological development and concomitant automation of industrial practices that took place in post-war Europethanks to the injection of American capital under the Marshall Plan. Routhier’s impetus for taking up this thread is twofold: first, because he sees a historiographical lacuna regarding the relationship between situationism and cybernetics; second, because he believes that the Situationist’s critique of cybernetics and technological development offers a historical precedent for our contemporary confrontation with the legacies ofthis technology – namely, artificial intelligence. This review will commend Routhier’sbrilliant scholarship that immerses readers within the historical moment of the SI. I willconcur that the specific problematic of cybernetics is neglected in SI scholarship - if only because of its subsumption under the more general notion of ‘spectacle’, which, for Guy Debord, cybernetics is constitutive. However, I will end by wanting more from Routhier, specifically regarding the lessons this historical account supposedly provides us in the present, in particular regarding the relationship between art and politics in the age of AI. In so doing, I will question the relevance of Routhier’s engagement with Walter Benjamin in diagnosing the fate of art in the age of automation.
I will begin the review by outlining the structure of Routhier’s text and expounding the lines of inquiry he pursues. From this I will briefly detail Benjamin’s theoretical position as expressed in his famous essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ that Routhier uses as a theoretical framework and guiding principle throughout With and Against. Finally, I will question the applicability of a Benjaminian framework to assess the SI’s understanding of the relationship of art, technology and politics, and its ability to make explicit the prognostic purchase of the SI for artists inthe present.
With and Against is bookended by discussions of two ‘Festivals’ of the avant-garde held in France – Marseille in 1956 and Bordeaux in 1965. In Marseille, emergent cybernetic technologies were found in Nicolas Schöffer’s CYSP 1, which, as Routhier argues exhibited the re-emergence of the early-modern ‘automaton’ now ‘cybernetically reloaded’, whilst, by 1965, the Bordeaux festival had ‘Art and Cybernetics’ as a central theme.[1] These festivals are important historical markers for Routhier that enable him to develop a constellated image of post-war France’s cultural, political, and economicsituation as something profoundly affected by new cybernetic theories and technologies. Further, the re-emergence of the automaton at this moment signals, for Routhier, the rethinking of agency and subjectivity occasioned by technologies of automation.[2] Finally, these festivals index the state of the post-war avant-garde as now completely institutionalised and actively instrumentalised by the French state. As tools of the state these Festivals insisted upon a specifically French character to what was essentially a process of Americanisation of French society, and as such, acted as a PR mechanism to manage national sentiment regarding the impact of American capital and the social and technological developments that ensued.[3]
Routhier spends much of the first part of the text engaging archival material and the few historical texts on the Marseille Festival of 1956 in order to make sense of why the French state believed it apt to host such an affair as, when, and where it did. In so doing, Routhier develops an analysis that moves vertically from the micro to the macro, from the Festival’s planning and reception to the aforementioned socio-political trends the Festival was responding to. Horizontally, through his construction of a genealogy ofavant-gardism from Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism to the so-called ‘neo-avant-garde’ artists that partook in the Festival, and against which the SI are diametrically opposed.
The Festival was held in Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse - Marseille (the only building realised from a much vaster project), an apartment block filled with myriad shops and amenities (a school, hairdresser, butcher, a hotel, restaurant etc.) and which, for Routhier as for the Situationists, was the architectural expression of a changing social fabric in which the traditional working class were pitched for embourgeoisement and consumerism. The promise of social mobility relied on a belief that technologies of automation would emancipate workers from the dull and repetitive work of the assembly line, allowing for their ascension into middle-management overseeing their robotic replacements. This fetishistic investment in such technologies found artistic expression in Schöffer’s CYSP 1, which, staged on top of Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse - his ode to work-life balance - demonstrated to the emergent Situationists the state of the‘avant-garde’ as something completely caught within the strictures of the state and capital and, as such, had lost the historic avant-garde’s commitment to revolution; indeed, they had lost the right to be ‘avant-garde’ at all.
Following Peter Bürger’s landmark study Theory of the Avant-Garde, Routhier understands the avant-garde as having two defining characteristics: first, oriented toward an attack on the institution of art and second, the revolutionising of life via its integration with art, with Dada, Surrealism and Constructivism as paradigmatic. Labour was a central critical and orienting mechanism for the historic avant-garde whose apogee in the 1930s coalesced with that of socialist parties across Europe. However, the post-war social-democratic compromise made possible by Marshall-plan investments had succeeded in draining the revolutionary impetus from leftist movements, which also found themselves in a crisis of direction and orientation in light of Stalin’s death, the 1956 invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union, and the publication of Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’. The changing shape of the working class as a result of new technologies of automation alongside the growing disaffection with Marxism that followed from the exposing of Soviet Union atrocities rendered much of the left wanting, and the emerging Situationists sought answers through a revision of traditional Marxism in light of these economic and technological developments and invested much revolutionary potential in art.
I say all of this in order to portray, as Routhier does so meticulously throughout Withand Against, the (art) historical conjuncture in which the SI emerged and insertedthemselves. By historically situating the SI, with Routhier, as exactly between ourpresent age of automation/deindustrialisation and Walter Benjamin’s age ofmechanisation, they act as an excellent case study for assessing how artists respondedto and critically engaged with the changing nature of capital as it transubstantiated into‘spectacle’ – the modicum Debord gave to his historical moment. I believe it is inRouthier’s invocation of Benjamin that one can truly assess the political efficacy ofsituationism and avant-garde art-as-politics and where, I believe, he fails to properlyoutline the most radical elements of the SI programme, accurately described by SadiePlant as ‘a programme of immediate demands to be lived in the present as both themeans and ends of revolutionary activity’.[4]
Routhier’s engagement with Benjamin follows the latter’s insistence that the ‘aura’ ofthe work of art, that is, the fetish of authenticity, is at stake in the age of mechanical reproduction. Photography and film become the privileged mediums through which Benjamin makes this claim and where he argues that this revolution in the superstructure is a belated but symptomatic result from changes in the mode ofproduction - pointing to photography’s reproducibility and cinematic montage’s rhythm of the production line. Recognising that the fetish of authenticity lingered in post-war artistic practice, a central line of inquiry in Routhier’s text is what was the effect on art’s ‘aura’ in the age of automation and is SI practice capable of politicising art in line with Benjamin? The continuation of ‘aura’ was most obvious in the ‘neo-avant-garde’ art that filled these festivals that continued to celebrate the individual-artist-as-genius and who, as such, were valorised as the vector of social change; that is, insofar as they accorded with the interest of state and capital and the intensive technologization of the everyday. Following a Benjaminian line of analysis, these artists engaged with and utilised contemporary technologies (as in Schöffer’s CYSP_1) in their practice, however, they fail to mobilise their artistic practice against art’s institutionalised form. Staying with Benjamin, this incapacity for institutional critique was a result of the neo-avant-garde’s disinterest in instrumentalising technological developments to expose contradictions between art’s institutionalised form (the exhibition) and the society or ‘age’ that instituted it as such (for Benjamin, that of mechanical reproduction). The contradiction then, was between the cult of individuality and authenticity of art and the artist - enshrined in the exhibition form - and the reproductivity of images made possible by technologies of capital. Failing to offer any institutional critique and clinging to the exhibition form, the artists of the Festival Marseille fail both Burger’s and Benjamin’s litmus test and as such are unworthy of the modicum ‘avant-garde’ with all its revolutionary underpinnings.
As Routhier notes in the conclusion, the idea(s) that have ‘supercharged’ his booksurround the fate of art’s ‘aura’ in the age of automation, that is, what is the effect on the bourgeois ontology of art in light of novel technological developments. Although he does not explicitly name Benjamin at this point, his presence is evident in Routhier’sreference to the artwork’s ‘aura’. Yet, what Routhier fails to properly address is that Benjamin’s thesis that the developments in technologies of (re)production expose the unfounded basis of bourgeois art’s aura – its cult value as a product of individual genius etc. – lacks historical realisation. Thus, to ask ‘what is the fate of art’s aura as a consequence of automation?’ begs a response that is both self-evident and cynical from the standpoint of the 21st century: the bourgeois ontology of art persists, while art practice continues to absorb and internalise technologies of AI. Therefore, the question I will ask below is not ‘what’ is the fate of art’s aura, but why it was not fated, as Benjamin insisted.
However, such cynicism does not make the question of art’s radical potentials in this historical conjuncture irrelevant. As such, I will now turn to the radicalism Routhier locates in SI theory and practice. In so doing, I will first illustrate how I understand the Situationists to be implicated in their historical moment – the imperatives of technological advancements and its socio-political implications – drawing from both Routhier’s and my own research. From this, I will return to Benjamin’s account of art to question Routhier’s use of Benjamin and to evaluate the function of this text as a‘reminder’ of a ‘history of contestation’ to technological developments.
Echoing Henri Lefebvre, Routhier recognises that cybernetic theory poses a ‘first degree’ challenge to Marxism in that cybernetics postulates the possibility of‘control[ling] artificially any closed system in a stabilising feedback mechanism’.[5] Although Lefebvre cautions against the extrapolation from this cybernetic postulate to a normative, or even ontological claim, it appears that by the 1960s, for both Debord and Asger Jorn, that cybernetics figured as something like an ontology in that it was the modus operandi of capital in the age of spectacle. As such, Debord writes:
‘If the spectacle – understood in the limited sense of those ‘mass media’ that are its most stultifying superficial manifestations – seems at times to be invading society in the shape of a mere apparatus, it should be remembered that this apparatus has nothing neutral about it, and that it answers precisely to the needs of the spectacle’s internal
dynamics.’[6]
Here one can read Debord’s employment of ‘apparatus’ in its Foucauldian sense (dispositif) avant la lettre, understood, following Agamben, as a heterogeneity of forces –discursive, institutional etc. - that determine a specific character to the process of subjectivation and which are always ‘located in a power relation’. [7] Therefore, mass media, recognised by Debord as passe and ‘superficial’ is nevertheless strategic in realising and sustaining the internal dynamics of spectacle, that is, a moment in capitalism’s history in which a ‘cultural logic of mediation through images’ is foregrounded.[8]
As Routhier makes clear, ‘mass media’ is not the object of critique in Debord’s analysis of the spectacle, rather, mass media is symptomatic, an apparatus in the service ofsustaining capital accumulation. As an apparatus, mass media has a strategic function in reencoding the values, interests, and priorities of the subjects of capital-as-spectacle to (re)produce a society of consumers. Moreover, in the context of a promised emancipation from the production line by technologies of automation and cybernetics,mass media (to continue with this one example) functions, cybernetically, as amechanism of control that can stabilise society, understood as a closed system, in the service of spectacle’s requirements. Hence, Debord later writes that the ‘crushing presence of media discourses’ entails a conditioning of subjects that have no capacity for ‘independent judgement’ and who, as such, are swept along in spectacle’sreproduction of itself: ‘Those who are always watching to see what happens next will never act: such must be the condition of the spectator’.[9]
As Routhier notes, like Marx, Debord begins with the spectacular nature of the commodity in order to delve into the realm of production. Whilst in earlier iterations of capitalism, accumulation could be safeguarded through imperial expansion to open new markets for exploitation and the extraction of surplus value, the political unfavorabilityof imperial pursuits in the post-war context entailed an internal intensification of surplus extraction. This results in what Routhier calls a ‘capitalist humanism’ in whichthe humanity of the labourer is recognised and attended to insofar as they behave as consumers.[10] Technologies of automation continue and stabilise levels of industrialproductivity, which, in conjunction with the formation of welfare states allow for labourers’ increased leisure time. This increased leisure time is in turn cybernetically co-opted by marketing strategies to condition and produce consumers, entailing the internal intensification of surplus extraction.
Hence, although the text begins by illustrating the SI’s ambivalence to novel technologies of automation and cybernetics – as both with and against – by the 1960s the demonstrable efficacy in conditioning subjects to actively sustain a society ofconsumerism entails the perceived totalitarian impulses within technologies of cybernetics to be brought into much sharper relief. As such, the SI viewed the controlling capacities of cybernetics not as a mere postulate, a la Lefebvre, but assomething at least partially realised. Therefore, as Routhier details throughout With and Against, the SI, Debord in particular, was driven by a need to disentangle art from typical forms of representation and image-making as they recognised how capital-as-spectacle had instrumentalised the image in the service of accumulation. This last point has tremendous historiographical import regarding the SI for it appreciates the simultaneity of art and politics within SI practice. It is not the case, as in much canonical histories, from Sadie Plant’s to James Trier’s, that the SI can be bifurcated into an artistic phase followed by a political phase, for this attempted periodisation misrepresents the group’s understanding of avant-garde practice as simultaneously artistic and political.[11] The rejection of art as necessarily a visual practice is not equivalent to a rejection of art tout court in favour of politics. Rather, only in the rejection of art as a practice ofrepresentation could the potential radicalism of art be realised in a historical context inwhich visual representation itself had been co-opted by the dynamics of capital.
The perceived subsuming of society into a cybernetical closed system entailed the SI’s distancing from the Marxian line (held by Benjamin) that the seeds of revolution are necessarily sown in technological development. Moreover, the totalitarian nature of
these technologies and their perceived efficacy of control resulted in a greater scepticism regarding their progressive uses. Thus, it was no longer a simple matter of manipulating technologies in the service of revolution, after which these technologies would be in the hands of the victorious class. Instead, the SI insisted upon the need for aesthetic interventions in everyday life that resisted the cybernetic logic that disruptive actions could be anticipated and placated in advance, whilst also revolutionising the system of values that normalised the necessity of cybernetic technologies.
One such example was the ‘L’Opération robot’ in which students at the University of Strasbourg attending cybernetician Abraham Moles’s inaugural lecture as departmentalchair of social psychology pelted him with tomatoes, following instructions from Debord. Moles, well known to the SI, was a proponent of ‘informational aesthetics’ and sought to empty metaphysics from art, believing that art could become formalizable in the terms of the natural sciences. Moles, for the SI, was a total embodiment of the ideology of contemporary techno-capitalism (hence the modicum ‘robot’), and, as such, their intervention into his lecture can be seen as a moment of the Adornian ‘non-identical’. Their seemingly spontaneous actions acted to subvert the pomp and logistics that undergirds a professorial inaugural lecture, highlighting the cybernetic fetish of organisation as just that, nothing more than a fetish, that could not guarantee the total rationalisation of society. Hence the irony of the intervention: spontaneity, irrationality, and play as pure activity, as that which the cyberneticians believed they could overcome, or ‘stabilise’ in their closed systems, were the very means by which they were undermined. It is here, in the concept of ‘intervention’ that, I believe, the SI was to some extent able to realise an artistic practice that was post-representational but which did not relinquish art completely, as much historical accounts would have it, for the intervention acted to disrupt the systems of values that attended the naturalised order of things. As Routhier puts it, ‘the Moles affair points to a dialectic inversion where scientific rationalism and cybernetic mass control turns into its opposite: riots, mass spontaneity, and, potentially, revolution.’
To sum up, the SI’s interventions can be understood as a post-representational artistic practice, which foregrounded art’s anti-utilitarianism as a political gesture that undermined the cybernetic imperatives of total rationalisation. In attempting to encourage ‘riots’ and ‘mass spontaneity’ the SI sought to explode those anthropological comportments that the ‘apparatuses’ of spectacle sought to repress in the conditioning of subjects apt for consumerism.
It is in this refusal of the logics of technologies of spectacle that I believe an important question emerges for Routhier and for art theory in general: to what extent is Benjamin’s understanding of art still politically illuminating in the age of automation when the possibility of manipulating industrial technologies is not necessarily obvious or revolutionary? This follows as Benjamin saw a radical potential in technologies of reproduction in the service of propaganda and the democratisation of art through mass dissemination. However, the technologies of spectacle – that of automation, cybernetics and now artificial intelligence and machine learning – do not simply operate at the leve of the base, but are fully operational within the superstructure, most explicitly within marketing strategies. Cybernetics is not simply used in the service of industrial production, but the ‘crushing’ media discourses Debord refers to have the demonstrable effect of directly influencing the interests, desires, needs and wants of the subjects they condition; that is, they are demonstrably successful in producing a society of consumers fit for the reproduction of capitalism as it entered its post-industrial era in the West. As such, in the age of automation, in a way that is historically unprecedented, we see the application of industrial techniques to the production of subjectivity itself. At this conjuncture it appears that, for the SI, there was no clear means of manipulating the technologies of automation and cybernetics for revolutionary purposes precisely because of their totalitarian capabilities – hence the problem of Benjamin’s applicability in the case of the SI and in the age of automation.
The SI’s turn to post-representational, interventionist practices retained a critical capacity a la Benjamin in that they resisted the fetish of authenticity that underscored the institutionalisation of art in the exhibition form, moreover, as Routhier makes clear, it is in this institutional critique that the SI belong to the history of the avant-garde. However, against Benjamin, the problems the technologies of automation and cybernetics posed for agency and subjectivity resulted in an undesirability on behalf of the Situationists in manipulating these technologies for any revolutionary end. I believe this refusal to engage the technologies of automation stems from the aforementioned application of industrial techniques to the production of subjectivities that are specifically suited to capitalist consumerism, and so, it seems, that the SI understood the technologies of automation as essential to the real subsumption of society by capitalism. Hence, unlike the neo-avant-garde artists who sought an art-into-life programmatic but ‘with little or no concern that this life was already premised on the existence of capitalist social relations of production’, the SI’s refusal to engage the technologies ofautomation in favour of post-representational, interventionist practices speaks to their efforts to embark upon a revolutionising of the everyday such that the imperatives of automation, cybernetics, capital-as-spectacle were rendered obsolete. It is at this point that I can evaluate Routhier’s claim that this conjuncture provides historical precedent for contemporary struggles against technologies of AI.
The Situationists do provide a useful historical case study for artistic means of resisting capitalist technological development as they increasingly morph into apparatuses of control. However, I believe that Routhier is misguided in his attempt to analyse SI practice through a Benjaminian lens due to Benjamin’s insistence first, on the revolutionary consequence of the resolution of the contraction between art’s aura and mechanical reproducibility and second, on his belief in the possibility of artistic subversion of capitalist technology as revolutionary art praxis. From the perspective of the twenty-first century the explosion of content brought to us by platform technologies has rendered both the exhibition form and the cult of individual genius practically obsolete. This has not opened up revolutionary potentials for art, but instead art has been absorbed into these new capitalist technologies as content, equivalent to any otherpiece of content. As such, the interventionist practices of the SI appear insufficient as an artistic method of critiquing or subverting capitalist technologies for they now require these technologies to reach any audience whatsoever and, once there, exist in seriality with every other piece of content. Therefore, any critical potential of the intervention is easily co-opted and placated by platform technologies which rely on a continual mass production of content in which everything matters as much as everything else or, at best, is momentarily heightened by the whims of virality. In the second instance, as above, the desirability of artistic subversion of novel technologies is not at all clear when such technologies function, categorically, to manipulate and mould subjectivitiesfor instrumental ends.
To conclude then, the merit of Routhier’s text lies in its incredible scholarship – weaving together the minutia of the archive, individual artworks, state policy, artistic treaties,and grand philosophical texts to produce a meticulous representation of the historical moment in which the SI emerged. Where the text fails is in its questionable theoretical paradigm which, I believe, fails to properly capture the SI’s understanding of the relationship between technology, artistic practice and politics. In addition to, and as aresult of this, the purchase of the SI as a historical case study and precedent forcontemporary art’s confrontation with novel capitalist technologies is not at all clear.
1. D. Routhier, With and Against: The Situationist International in the Age of Automation (London: Verso, 2023), 3, 223.
2. Ibid., 26.
3. Ibid., 37.
4. S. Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (London:Routledge, 1992), 3-4.
5. Routhier, With and Against, 230.
6. G. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, §24.
7. G. Agamben, What Is An Apparatus? And Other Essays, 3.
8. Routhier, With and Against, 237.
9. G. Debord, Comments on the Society of Spectacle, 19.
10. Routhier, With and Against, 242.
11. See J. Trier, Guy Debord, the Situtaionaist International, and the Revolutionary Spirit (Boston: Brill Sense, 2019).
12. Routhier, With and Against, 167.
13. Ibid., 209.
14. See T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Continuum, 2004). .
15. Routhier, With and Against, 191.
With and Against is bookended by discussions of two ‘Festivals’ of the avant-garde held in France – Marseille in 1956 and Bordeaux in 1965. In Marseille, emergent cybernetic technologies were found in Nicolas Schöffer’s CYSP 1, which, as Routhier argues exhibited the re-emergence of the early-modern ‘automaton’ now ‘cybernetically reloaded’, whilst, by 1965, the Bordeaux festival had ‘Art and Cybernetics’ as a central theme.[1] These festivals are important historical markers for Routhier that enable him to develop a constellated image of post-war France’s cultural, political, and economicsituation as something profoundly affected by new cybernetic theories and technologies. Further, the re-emergence of the automaton at this moment signals, for Routhier, the rethinking of agency and subjectivity occasioned by technologies of automation.[2] Finally, these festivals index the state of the post-war avant-garde as now completely institutionalised and actively instrumentalised by the French state. As tools of the state these Festivals insisted upon a specifically French character to what was essentially a process of Americanisation of French society, and as such, acted as a PR mechanism to manage national sentiment regarding the impact of American capital and the social and technological developments that ensued.[3]
Routhier spends much of the first part of the text engaging archival material and the few historical texts on the Marseille Festival of 1956 in order to make sense of why the French state believed it apt to host such an affair as, when, and where it did. In so doing, Routhier develops an analysis that moves vertically from the micro to the macro, from the Festival’s planning and reception to the aforementioned socio-political trends the Festival was responding to. Horizontally, through his construction of a genealogy ofavant-gardism from Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism to the so-called ‘neo-avant-garde’ artists that partook in the Festival, and against which the SI are diametrically opposed.
The Festival was held in Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse - Marseille (the only building realised from a much vaster project), an apartment block filled with myriad shops and amenities (a school, hairdresser, butcher, a hotel, restaurant etc.) and which, for Routhier as for the Situationists, was the architectural expression of a changing social fabric in which the traditional working class were pitched for embourgeoisement and consumerism. The promise of social mobility relied on a belief that technologies of automation would emancipate workers from the dull and repetitive work of the assembly line, allowing for their ascension into middle-management overseeing their robotic replacements. This fetishistic investment in such technologies found artistic expression in Schöffer’s CYSP 1, which, staged on top of Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse - his ode to work-life balance - demonstrated to the emergent Situationists the state of the‘avant-garde’ as something completely caught within the strictures of the state and capital and, as such, had lost the historic avant-garde’s commitment to revolution; indeed, they had lost the right to be ‘avant-garde’ at all.
Following Peter Bürger’s landmark study Theory of the Avant-Garde, Routhier understands the avant-garde as having two defining characteristics: first, oriented toward an attack on the institution of art and second, the revolutionising of life via its integration with art, with Dada, Surrealism and Constructivism as paradigmatic. Labour was a central critical and orienting mechanism for the historic avant-garde whose apogee in the 1930s coalesced with that of socialist parties across Europe. However, the post-war social-democratic compromise made possible by Marshall-plan investments had succeeded in draining the revolutionary impetus from leftist movements, which also found themselves in a crisis of direction and orientation in light of Stalin’s death, the 1956 invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union, and the publication of Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’. The changing shape of the working class as a result of new technologies of automation alongside the growing disaffection with Marxism that followed from the exposing of Soviet Union atrocities rendered much of the left wanting, and the emerging Situationists sought answers through a revision of traditional Marxism in light of these economic and technological developments and invested much revolutionary potential in art.
I say all of this in order to portray, as Routhier does so meticulously throughout Withand Against, the (art) historical conjuncture in which the SI emerged and insertedthemselves. By historically situating the SI, with Routhier, as exactly between ourpresent age of automation/deindustrialisation and Walter Benjamin’s age ofmechanisation, they act as an excellent case study for assessing how artists respondedto and critically engaged with the changing nature of capital as it transubstantiated into‘spectacle’ – the modicum Debord gave to his historical moment. I believe it is inRouthier’s invocation of Benjamin that one can truly assess the political efficacy ofsituationism and avant-garde art-as-politics and where, I believe, he fails to properlyoutline the most radical elements of the SI programme, accurately described by SadiePlant as ‘a programme of immediate demands to be lived in the present as both themeans and ends of revolutionary activity’.[4]
Routhier’s engagement with Benjamin follows the latter’s insistence that the ‘aura’ ofthe work of art, that is, the fetish of authenticity, is at stake in the age of mechanical reproduction. Photography and film become the privileged mediums through which Benjamin makes this claim and where he argues that this revolution in the superstructure is a belated but symptomatic result from changes in the mode ofproduction - pointing to photography’s reproducibility and cinematic montage’s rhythm of the production line. Recognising that the fetish of authenticity lingered in post-war artistic practice, a central line of inquiry in Routhier’s text is what was the effect on art’s ‘aura’ in the age of automation and is SI practice capable of politicising art in line with Benjamin? The continuation of ‘aura’ was most obvious in the ‘neo-avant-garde’ art that filled these festivals that continued to celebrate the individual-artist-as-genius and who, as such, were valorised as the vector of social change; that is, insofar as they accorded with the interest of state and capital and the intensive technologization of the everyday. Following a Benjaminian line of analysis, these artists engaged with and utilised contemporary technologies (as in Schöffer’s CYSP_1) in their practice, however, they fail to mobilise their artistic practice against art’s institutionalised form. Staying with Benjamin, this incapacity for institutional critique was a result of the neo-avant-garde’s disinterest in instrumentalising technological developments to expose contradictions between art’s institutionalised form (the exhibition) and the society or ‘age’ that instituted it as such (for Benjamin, that of mechanical reproduction). The contradiction then, was between the cult of individuality and authenticity of art and the artist - enshrined in the exhibition form - and the reproductivity of images made possible by technologies of capital. Failing to offer any institutional critique and clinging to the exhibition form, the artists of the Festival Marseille fail both Burger’s and Benjamin’s litmus test and as such are unworthy of the modicum ‘avant-garde’ with all its revolutionary underpinnings.
As Routhier notes in the conclusion, the idea(s) that have ‘supercharged’ his booksurround the fate of art’s ‘aura’ in the age of automation, that is, what is the effect on the bourgeois ontology of art in light of novel technological developments. Although he does not explicitly name Benjamin at this point, his presence is evident in Routhier’sreference to the artwork’s ‘aura’. Yet, what Routhier fails to properly address is that Benjamin’s thesis that the developments in technologies of (re)production expose the unfounded basis of bourgeois art’s aura – its cult value as a product of individual genius etc. – lacks historical realisation. Thus, to ask ‘what is the fate of art’s aura as a consequence of automation?’ begs a response that is both self-evident and cynical from the standpoint of the 21st century: the bourgeois ontology of art persists, while art practice continues to absorb and internalise technologies of AI. Therefore, the question I will ask below is not ‘what’ is the fate of art’s aura, but why it was not fated, as Benjamin insisted.
However, such cynicism does not make the question of art’s radical potentials in this historical conjuncture irrelevant. As such, I will now turn to the radicalism Routhier locates in SI theory and practice. In so doing, I will first illustrate how I understand the Situationists to be implicated in their historical moment – the imperatives of technological advancements and its socio-political implications – drawing from both Routhier’s and my own research. From this, I will return to Benjamin’s account of art to question Routhier’s use of Benjamin and to evaluate the function of this text as a‘reminder’ of a ‘history of contestation’ to technological developments.
Echoing Henri Lefebvre, Routhier recognises that cybernetic theory poses a ‘first degree’ challenge to Marxism in that cybernetics postulates the possibility of‘control[ling] artificially any closed system in a stabilising feedback mechanism’.[5] Although Lefebvre cautions against the extrapolation from this cybernetic postulate to a normative, or even ontological claim, it appears that by the 1960s, for both Debord and Asger Jorn, that cybernetics figured as something like an ontology in that it was the modus operandi of capital in the age of spectacle. As such, Debord writes:
‘If the spectacle – understood in the limited sense of those ‘mass media’ that are its most stultifying superficial manifestations – seems at times to be invading society in the shape of a mere apparatus, it should be remembered that this apparatus has nothing neutral about it, and that it answers precisely to the needs of the spectacle’s internal
dynamics.’[6]
Here one can read Debord’s employment of ‘apparatus’ in its Foucauldian sense (dispositif) avant la lettre, understood, following Agamben, as a heterogeneity of forces –discursive, institutional etc. - that determine a specific character to the process of subjectivation and which are always ‘located in a power relation’. [7] Therefore, mass media, recognised by Debord as passe and ‘superficial’ is nevertheless strategic in realising and sustaining the internal dynamics of spectacle, that is, a moment in capitalism’s history in which a ‘cultural logic of mediation through images’ is foregrounded.[8]
As Routhier makes clear, ‘mass media’ is not the object of critique in Debord’s analysis of the spectacle, rather, mass media is symptomatic, an apparatus in the service ofsustaining capital accumulation. As an apparatus, mass media has a strategic function in reencoding the values, interests, and priorities of the subjects of capital-as-spectacle to (re)produce a society of consumers. Moreover, in the context of a promised emancipation from the production line by technologies of automation and cybernetics,mass media (to continue with this one example) functions, cybernetically, as amechanism of control that can stabilise society, understood as a closed system, in the service of spectacle’s requirements. Hence, Debord later writes that the ‘crushing presence of media discourses’ entails a conditioning of subjects that have no capacity for ‘independent judgement’ and who, as such, are swept along in spectacle’sreproduction of itself: ‘Those who are always watching to see what happens next will never act: such must be the condition of the spectator’.[9]
As Routhier notes, like Marx, Debord begins with the spectacular nature of the commodity in order to delve into the realm of production. Whilst in earlier iterations of capitalism, accumulation could be safeguarded through imperial expansion to open new markets for exploitation and the extraction of surplus value, the political unfavorabilityof imperial pursuits in the post-war context entailed an internal intensification of surplus extraction. This results in what Routhier calls a ‘capitalist humanism’ in whichthe humanity of the labourer is recognised and attended to insofar as they behave as consumers.[10] Technologies of automation continue and stabilise levels of industrialproductivity, which, in conjunction with the formation of welfare states allow for labourers’ increased leisure time. This increased leisure time is in turn cybernetically co-opted by marketing strategies to condition and produce consumers, entailing the internal intensification of surplus extraction.
Hence, although the text begins by illustrating the SI’s ambivalence to novel technologies of automation and cybernetics – as both with and against – by the 1960s the demonstrable efficacy in conditioning subjects to actively sustain a society ofconsumerism entails the perceived totalitarian impulses within technologies of cybernetics to be brought into much sharper relief. As such, the SI viewed the controlling capacities of cybernetics not as a mere postulate, a la Lefebvre, but assomething at least partially realised. Therefore, as Routhier details throughout With and Against, the SI, Debord in particular, was driven by a need to disentangle art from typical forms of representation and image-making as they recognised how capital-as-spectacle had instrumentalised the image in the service of accumulation. This last point has tremendous historiographical import regarding the SI for it appreciates the simultaneity of art and politics within SI practice. It is not the case, as in much canonical histories, from Sadie Plant’s to James Trier’s, that the SI can be bifurcated into an artistic phase followed by a political phase, for this attempted periodisation misrepresents the group’s understanding of avant-garde practice as simultaneously artistic and political.[11] The rejection of art as necessarily a visual practice is not equivalent to a rejection of art tout court in favour of politics. Rather, only in the rejection of art as a practice ofrepresentation could the potential radicalism of art be realised in a historical context inwhich visual representation itself had been co-opted by the dynamics of capital.
The perceived subsuming of society into a cybernetical closed system entailed the SI’s distancing from the Marxian line (held by Benjamin) that the seeds of revolution are necessarily sown in technological development. Moreover, the totalitarian nature of
these technologies and their perceived efficacy of control resulted in a greater scepticism regarding their progressive uses. Thus, it was no longer a simple matter of manipulating technologies in the service of revolution, after which these technologies would be in the hands of the victorious class. Instead, the SI insisted upon the need for aesthetic interventions in everyday life that resisted the cybernetic logic that disruptive actions could be anticipated and placated in advance, whilst also revolutionising the system of values that normalised the necessity of cybernetic technologies.
One such example was the ‘L’Opération robot’ in which students at the University of Strasbourg attending cybernetician Abraham Moles’s inaugural lecture as departmentalchair of social psychology pelted him with tomatoes, following instructions from Debord. Moles, well known to the SI, was a proponent of ‘informational aesthetics’ and sought to empty metaphysics from art, believing that art could become formalizable in the terms of the natural sciences. Moles, for the SI, was a total embodiment of the ideology of contemporary techno-capitalism (hence the modicum ‘robot’), and, as such, their intervention into his lecture can be seen as a moment of the Adornian ‘non-identical’. Their seemingly spontaneous actions acted to subvert the pomp and logistics that undergirds a professorial inaugural lecture, highlighting the cybernetic fetish of organisation as just that, nothing more than a fetish, that could not guarantee the total rationalisation of society. Hence the irony of the intervention: spontaneity, irrationality, and play as pure activity, as that which the cyberneticians believed they could overcome, or ‘stabilise’ in their closed systems, were the very means by which they were undermined. It is here, in the concept of ‘intervention’ that, I believe, the SI was to some extent able to realise an artistic practice that was post-representational but which did not relinquish art completely, as much historical accounts would have it, for the intervention acted to disrupt the systems of values that attended the naturalised order of things. As Routhier puts it, ‘the Moles affair points to a dialectic inversion where scientific rationalism and cybernetic mass control turns into its opposite: riots, mass spontaneity, and, potentially, revolution.’
To sum up, the SI’s interventions can be understood as a post-representational artistic practice, which foregrounded art’s anti-utilitarianism as a political gesture that undermined the cybernetic imperatives of total rationalisation. In attempting to encourage ‘riots’ and ‘mass spontaneity’ the SI sought to explode those anthropological comportments that the ‘apparatuses’ of spectacle sought to repress in the conditioning of subjects apt for consumerism.
It is in this refusal of the logics of technologies of spectacle that I believe an important question emerges for Routhier and for art theory in general: to what extent is Benjamin’s understanding of art still politically illuminating in the age of automation when the possibility of manipulating industrial technologies is not necessarily obvious or revolutionary? This follows as Benjamin saw a radical potential in technologies of reproduction in the service of propaganda and the democratisation of art through mass dissemination. However, the technologies of spectacle – that of automation, cybernetics and now artificial intelligence and machine learning – do not simply operate at the leve of the base, but are fully operational within the superstructure, most explicitly within marketing strategies. Cybernetics is not simply used in the service of industrial production, but the ‘crushing’ media discourses Debord refers to have the demonstrable effect of directly influencing the interests, desires, needs and wants of the subjects they condition; that is, they are demonstrably successful in producing a society of consumers fit for the reproduction of capitalism as it entered its post-industrial era in the West. As such, in the age of automation, in a way that is historically unprecedented, we see the application of industrial techniques to the production of subjectivity itself. At this conjuncture it appears that, for the SI, there was no clear means of manipulating the technologies of automation and cybernetics for revolutionary purposes precisely because of their totalitarian capabilities – hence the problem of Benjamin’s applicability in the case of the SI and in the age of automation.
The SI’s turn to post-representational, interventionist practices retained a critical capacity a la Benjamin in that they resisted the fetish of authenticity that underscored the institutionalisation of art in the exhibition form, moreover, as Routhier makes clear, it is in this institutional critique that the SI belong to the history of the avant-garde. However, against Benjamin, the problems the technologies of automation and cybernetics posed for agency and subjectivity resulted in an undesirability on behalf of the Situationists in manipulating these technologies for any revolutionary end. I believe this refusal to engage the technologies of automation stems from the aforementioned application of industrial techniques to the production of subjectivities that are specifically suited to capitalist consumerism, and so, it seems, that the SI understood the technologies of automation as essential to the real subsumption of society by capitalism. Hence, unlike the neo-avant-garde artists who sought an art-into-life programmatic but ‘with little or no concern that this life was already premised on the existence of capitalist social relations of production’, the SI’s refusal to engage the technologies ofautomation in favour of post-representational, interventionist practices speaks to their efforts to embark upon a revolutionising of the everyday such that the imperatives of automation, cybernetics, capital-as-spectacle were rendered obsolete. It is at this point that I can evaluate Routhier’s claim that this conjuncture provides historical precedent for contemporary struggles against technologies of AI.
The Situationists do provide a useful historical case study for artistic means of resisting capitalist technological development as they increasingly morph into apparatuses of control. However, I believe that Routhier is misguided in his attempt to analyse SI practice through a Benjaminian lens due to Benjamin’s insistence first, on the revolutionary consequence of the resolution of the contraction between art’s aura and mechanical reproducibility and second, on his belief in the possibility of artistic subversion of capitalist technology as revolutionary art praxis. From the perspective of the twenty-first century the explosion of content brought to us by platform technologies has rendered both the exhibition form and the cult of individual genius practically obsolete. This has not opened up revolutionary potentials for art, but instead art has been absorbed into these new capitalist technologies as content, equivalent to any otherpiece of content. As such, the interventionist practices of the SI appear insufficient as an artistic method of critiquing or subverting capitalist technologies for they now require these technologies to reach any audience whatsoever and, once there, exist in seriality with every other piece of content. Therefore, any critical potential of the intervention is easily co-opted and placated by platform technologies which rely on a continual mass production of content in which everything matters as much as everything else or, at best, is momentarily heightened by the whims of virality. In the second instance, as above, the desirability of artistic subversion of novel technologies is not at all clear when such technologies function, categorically, to manipulate and mould subjectivitiesfor instrumental ends.
To conclude then, the merit of Routhier’s text lies in its incredible scholarship – weaving together the minutia of the archive, individual artworks, state policy, artistic treaties,and grand philosophical texts to produce a meticulous representation of the historical moment in which the SI emerged. Where the text fails is in its questionable theoretical paradigm which, I believe, fails to properly capture the SI’s understanding of the relationship between technology, artistic practice and politics. In addition to, and as aresult of this, the purchase of the SI as a historical case study and precedent forcontemporary art’s confrontation with novel capitalist technologies is not at all clear.
1. D. Routhier, With and Against: The Situationist International in the Age of Automation (London: Verso, 2023), 3, 223.
2. Ibid., 26.
3. Ibid., 37.
4. S. Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (London:Routledge, 1992), 3-4.
5. Routhier, With and Against, 230.
6. G. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, §24.
7. G. Agamben, What Is An Apparatus? And Other Essays, 3.
8. Routhier, With and Against, 237.
9. G. Debord, Comments on the Society of Spectacle, 19.
10. Routhier, With and Against, 242.
11. See J. Trier, Guy Debord, the Situtaionaist International, and the Revolutionary Spirit (Boston: Brill Sense, 2019).
12. Routhier, With and Against, 167.
13. Ibid., 209.
14. See T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Continuum, 2004). .
15. Routhier, With and Against, 191.