The Situationist International, Surrealism, and the Difficult Fusion of Art and Politics
This article has two inter-related aims. Firstly, I want to contribute to the growing debate about the politics and political theories of the Situationist International and Surrealism. Through a presentation of an episode where the later situationists distanced themselves from the surrealist favourite Chaplin, I will attempt to account for the way the surrealists and the situationists respectively engaged in politics, how they tried to locate themselves on the left and tried to navigate in a environment dominated by the French Communist Party. After a discussion of the complicated relationship between Surrealism and the Communist Party and Trotskyism, I analyse how the situationists after World War Two attempted to continue the project of the inter-war avant garde without repeating what they considered to be failures of Surrealism. I present the situationists' repudiation of the unconscious and their conscious effort to leave the art world in favour of ultra-left politics outside the confines of the Communist Party. Secondly, I want to offer some hypotheses as to why the Situationist International has been marginalised within theories of the avant-garde. Through a discussion of Peter Burger's important Theory of the Avant-Garde, I look into the strange omission of the situationists within accounts of the avant-garde and I unravel the roots of the situationists' and Burger's categorical critique of the neo-avant-garde.