Arts and Politics of the Situationist International 1957–1972
Author | : Edward John Matthews |
Publisher | : Rowman & Littlefield |
Total Pages | : 277 |
Release | : 2021-10-01 |
ISBN-10 | : 9781793647092 |
ISBN-13 | : 1793647097 |
Rating | : 4/5 (92 Downloads) |
Book excerpt: Arts and Politics of the Situationist International contextualizes the SI within a comprehensive aesthetic and theoretical framework that integrates its concepts and practical activities with previous critical thinkers, political activists, artists, and poets. The SI belongs to a history of radical gestures and cultural practices concerned with re-imagining everyday life and overcoming alienation. This book regards the SI as a critical interdisciplinary endeavor in the history of consciousness, particularly as a moment in an ongoing western-European trajectory of aesthetic negation dating back to the early nineteenth century. The chapters search for origins of the SI in French Symbolist poetry, Dada and Surrealism, Hegelian-Marxism, and Lefebvrian social theory in an effort to provide a clearly-defined ‘something’ out of which the SI developed as an increasingly radical collective of artists, writers, and theorists.