By James Rushing Daniel.

 

Dominique Routhier, With and Against: The Situationist International and the Age of Automation (Verso, 2023)

In the contemporary art world dominated by glitzy international fairs and heavily licensed celebrity artists, it’s sometimes hard to fathom that art once held more serious political ambitions. Throughout the history of the avant-garde, from Dada to Fluxus, artists, in vastly different national contexts and through a variety of media, sought to critique — and, sometimes, transform — political culture. As philosopher and art critic Boris Groys contends, "The early artistic avant-garde was not interested in producing images that could be bought and sold everywhere…. [It] was the unity of politics and aesthetics, the new space of universal politics and culture that would unite mankind beyond its cultural differences." Indeed, decades before the emergence of Art Basel, various radical artistic traditions and avant-garde artists held a comparatively more prominent place in the public imaginary and offered vital statements on both capitalism and technology. 

Art theorist Dominique Routhier’s first book With and Against: The Situationist International and the Age of Automation examines one such group of artists, evoking a time when art was relatively independent of global finance, but when politically agentive artists were examining capital’s vast potential for domination. The book takes up the work of the Situationist International (SI), a group of anti-capitalist artists and critics that emerged in Paris and operated from 1957 and 1972. In a variety of public acts or "situations," art pieces, and textual works, mostly collected in the journal Internationale Situationniste, the group sought to oppose the prevailing conditions of mid-20th century consumer society. 

Breaking with direct and explicit political Marxism, SI focused on the terrain of cultural production, understanding political economy and aesthetics to have merged in the technological revolutions of the post-war period. The group, crucially, also attended to the accelerating role of technology, automation specifically, in post-war life. Through a variety of works during the group’s tenure, including sculptures and "situations," what journalist Sergio C. Fanjul calls "moments of creative liberation in daily life," the group sought to dramatize how post-war life had become machinic.

Attending specifically to this engagement, Routhier weaves a compelling and incisive history of revolutionary avant-garde artists’ attention to the regime of automation in the post-war period. The result is not only a valuable deepening of the history of one of the most significant anti-capitalist groups of the 20th century avant-garde, but a welcome call for continued revolutionary engagement with the regimes of technology that increasingly manage our lives.

In 1967, Debord wrote The Society of Spectacle, a book arguing that life under capitalism has been reduced to a system of appearances. We live in the realm of the spectacle, a condition in which the image has become the dominant form of reality, mediating relations between individuals and supplanting our past. Routhier reads in Debord’s concept an essentially Marxist critique: "capital (or value) is increasingly fixed in the form of an image." Such a reading breaks with a strictly materialist view of political economy and insists upon reading capitalism through aesthetics. In approaching the concept this way, Routhier strives to understand aesthetics not merely limited to the domain of art but a crucial component of capitalist domination, particularly in contexts such as ours where our experience of reality comes from a screen in our pocket. 

In returning to SI’s engagement with technology, Routhier offers a thoughtful take on art’s political possibilities. If capitalism, as Debord argues, is indeed operative at the level of the image, then (at least some) interventions must likewise be enacted at the level of the image. SI enacts such a response through engaging with capitalism on the aesthetic level.

Ultimately, for Routhier, this is a matter of vital interest today insofar as consumption, fundamentally propelled and constituted by aesthetic regimes, is a central driver of capitalism.

Beyond the issue of aesthetics, technology is likewise central to this understanding of capitalism. Routhier argues that, throughout its work, SI engaged with the entanglement of technology with post-war life, an entanglement that has since been termed "the cybernetic hypothesis." The "cybernetic hypothesis" was formalized by the French-Italian radical collective Tiqqun to denote the regime of technological control and dominance that emerged following the Second World War. The cybernetic hypothesis, the group contends, "proposes to conceive biological, physical, and social behaviors as something integrally programmed and re-programmable." Routhier argues that a core aspect of SI’s aesthetic project was grappling with this problem. 

And here is the key intervention of Routhier’s book — while scholars of the SI have often interpreted the group as opposed to the idea of technological progress, Routhier positions the group as more ambivalent about technology than generally acknowledged. SI, in his view, was "paradoxically with and against the forces of technological progress." For Routhier, this paradox is central to understanding the group’s engaged but ultimately uncertain position. SI, as Routhier tells it, was not simply critical but entangled with the development of cybernetic history, namely the latter’s contributions to technology and its shaping of class relations. Accordingly, Routhier’s project, is to understand how art and technology were mutually informing during this crucial period and, hence, to place aesthetics at the heart of the revolutionary position.

In 1956, Debord went to war against the artistic establishment in France. That year, Lettrist International (LI), a precursor to SI founded by Guy Debord and artist Gil J. Wolman, published Ordre de boycott, a circulated print announcement of an avant-garde festival that called for a revolution in artistic production and denouncing the "reactionary vulgarization" of contemporary art. While he notes that most scholars record this as a minor note in the trajectory of SI, Routhier places the act as a central movement of the group’s deviation from their late modernist contemporaries (as named in the document): Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco, filmmaker Agnés Varda, and painters Alexey Adamov and James Pichette, and art critic Michel Tapié. As Routhier argues, the tract illuminated the ways in which the French state operationalized art to bolster its nationalist project.

The document specifically featured a pastoral image of a milkmaid and a cow, which Routhier traces to prior works of Dada artist Tristan Tzara. For Routhier, this element of kitsch presaged a core tactic of SI, détournement, the repurposing capitalist imagery as critique. As he contends, the sampling of the image, "poses the problem of the historical impasse of the avant-garde under the new changing circumstances of the production, distribution, and consumption of art." As the book contends, this sampling represents the opening of a tactical project, a recognition of techno-capitalist strategy and a targeted, aesthetic response.

Beyond Ordre de Boycott, Routhier offers incisive readings of several of SI’s machinic sculptures, or "electronic pseudo-organisms," which dramatized critical insights into the nature of automation. Routhier begins the book with an exploration of Nicolas Schöffer’s CYSP 1, short for Cybernetic Spatiodynamic, a 1956 work that, in Routhier’s words, sought to evoke "a virtual premonition of the future post-organic or inhuman order of things." Evoking the multicolored bars of Piet Mondrian, the sculpture comprises a circular steel plinth supporting a structure of metal bars on which are affixed dozens of colored, semaphore-like paddles. The impression the work gives is that of an early computer, a computational, signifying machine in constant motion. For Routhier, these works resonate with the "deep-seated bourgeois imaginary of technology and progress as intrinsic to the capitalist mode of production." In other words, such works did not critique technology as such but, rather, participated in them and, as such, dramatized the interpenetration of technology, image, and capitalism.  

Routhier’s most engaging case study concerns the collaboration of Guy Debord and Danish artist Asger Jorn. Debord and Jorn’s coproduced 1957 book Fin de Copenhague is a phantasmagoric assemblage of sampled and repurposed clippings offering a critique of capitalist excess and its immersive effects. Writer and critic Rick Poyner calls it "a premonition of the most disenchanted and deconstructed pages of Adbusters half a century later." As Routhier analyzes it, the book charts the drift from an international culture of machinic automation to one of "leisure and consumption." It also indexes the intermingling of capitalist production and artistic creation (a project Routhier traces to El Lissitzky), "it co-opts the style in which it communicates, appropriates the modes of perception it privileges, and subverts the aesthetic categories that correspond to and mediate its social rule." As With and Against contends, such a method offers an ambitious unwinding or dismantling of the work of art in the age of rising automation.

In Routhier’s reading, both Fin de Copenhague and the subsequent critical work of Asger Jorn signalled a dissatisfaction with doctrinaire Marxism and the workerist critique of technology. Jorn sought a different strategy than Marx to intervene and reconfigure capitalist power at the level of its aesthetic operation. As Routhier understands this task, automation so profoundly transforms contemporary life and, critically, displaces the worker. Accordingly, workers are not simply marginalized but removed from the sphere of employment. In such a repositioning, automation raises the question of how (or, indeed, whether) the Left might be able to respond. 

For Jorn, the answer is art itself. He accordingly sought to move beyond traditional Marxist questions of labor and alienation and, instead, create "a different kind of surplus value irreducible to the value form of the commodity." Routhier reads Fin de Copenhague not as a work of art in the traditional sense but "a performative strategy" that seeks to take on capitalism’s merging with technology at the level of the commodity.

In the crowded field of recent work on the Situationist International, Routhier’s focused history stands out as a deeply researched and compelling account of the avant-garde’s revolutionary potential and its important, though understudied, tessellation with technology. Most significant and relevant in this investigation is the insistence that the technological and aesthetic concerns of SI are relevant for an understanding of capitalism’s operation. Debord, Routhier argues, follows Marx in descending into the "hidden abode of production" by placing consumption, and the image, at the heart of capitalism.

If there is a frustration with the text, it is the tight focus of this history that resists offering up answers to the various conundrums of the contemporary political moment. Why, for instance, would we want a radical politics from art today, particularly when art seems inextricable from Sotheby’s and the blockchain? But Routhier seems to suggest that something is missing in the contemporary divorce of art and politics. He details in numerous case studies how SI sought to engage in something approaching the "universal politics and culture" that Groys claims was at the heart of the early avant-garde project. More precisely, through SI, Routhier stresses the need to engage in a revolutionary action at the level of everyday life, at the place where politics, aesthetics, and technology meet. Yet, Routhier is judicious here. He certainly does not suggest that today we might simply borrow avant-garde tactics wholesale. A crucial impediment to such appropriation, one that indeed marked the end of SI, is institutionalization. From its origins, the group fought against the institutionalization of art in Ordre de boycott. Routhier likewise suggests that SI’s dissipation was related to its own institutionalization in the 1960s. 

Art today is likewise captured by a whole host of deep-pocketed institutions. Rather, the message of the book is a more subtle one, a call for a historically literate revolutionary thinking and action on technology in an age where such things are generally overlooked. While such an approach may well not have universal application, it is nevertheless relevant to our increasingly mediated and automated lives. As Routhier argues, the book aims to remind today’s "artists, intellectuals, and revolutionaries" that our current moment, one now seemingly at the beginning of an era of mass automation, "has a history and, more importantly, a history of contestation."

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Rushing Daniel is a lecturer in the Interdisciplinary Writing Program at the University of Washington. His work focuses on issues of agency and inequality at the intersection of writing studies, rhetorical theory and critical theory. His research has appeared in Philosophy and Rhetoric, Composition Studies and The Los Angeles Review of Books.