Visiting Situationism

I mentioned Foucault, but I think I got away with it…….

Summer 2026, Situationism

On Visiting Situationism

I arrived in Situationism on a wet Tuesday, which is apparently the only way anyone arrives there, and was immediately struck by the fact that nothing in the city is quite what it appears to be. The main square is dominated by an enormous illuminated hoarding showing a photograph of the main square, and people stand in front of it taking pictures of themselves not looking at it. This, a man in the tourist office explained to me with the weary patience of someone who has said it four thousand times, is the Spectacle. Guy Debord, the city’s founding grump, set the whole thing out in 1967 in a book of 221 numbered theses, the gist being that modern life has quietly swapped living for watching, and that everything you once were has been converted into something you now have, and everything you have has been converted into something you merely look at. I bought a postcard of the hoarding. I don’t know why. That, I suspect, was rather the point.

The first thing you must understand about getting around is that nobody uses the map, and the tourist office doesn’t stock one. Instead you are handed a small pamphlet recommending the dérive, which translates roughly as “the drift” and translates practically as wandering about for nine hours in a state of alert bewilderment until a street makes you feel something. This is psychogeography, the study of how the built environment quietly bullies your emotions, and I have to say the Situationists were entirely right about it, because I once got so oppressed by a shopping precinct in Wolverhampton that I had to sit down. The city’s planners, following a young man named Ivan Chtcheglov who wrote a marvellously unhinged manifesto at the age of nineteen, proposed something called unitary urbanism: cities designed not for traffic flow or property yield but for adventure, with quarters devoted to happiness, to the sinister, to the useless. Nobody has ever built one. There is a lot of that here.

Round the back of the cathedral I found the workshops where they do détournement, which is the local craft industry and involves taking something that already exists and turning it against itself. The technique is simple: you get a perfectly respectable comic strip about cowboys and you replace the speech bubbles with a dense argument about the alienation of labour, so that a man on a horse is suddenly explaining commodity fetishism to his hat. The idea is that culture is a shared inheritance nobody should be allowed to own, and that the fastest route to a thought is through a hijacked one. It is very funny, and, more surprisingly, it works. Every advert you have ever seen graffitied on the Tube owes these people royalties it will never pay.

If you go looking for the business district you will be disappointed, because the city’s most famous piece of public writing is the slogan Ne travaillez jamais — never work — which Debord chalked on a wall in 1953 and which the municipality has since had photographed and framed, an irony we will come to. Raoul Vaneigem, the movement’s warmer soul, wrote a whole book arguing that the real revolution isn’t in factories or parliaments but in the tiny humiliations of an ordinary Tuesday: the commute, the queue, the small talk, the sense of having somehow paid for your own life on the instalment plan. Boredom, the local wisdom holds, is counter-revolutionary. In May 1968 this idea got out of the city walls, jumped to Paris, and briefly persuaded ten million French people to stop going to work, which is the single most impressive thing any book has ever done.

I left on the Thursday, and at the station bought a T-shirt with Debord’s face on it for £24.99, which the shop assistant took entirely without comment, and which is of course the last and cleverest of the city’s precepts: recuperation, the process by which the Spectacle eats its critics and sells them back to you in the gift shop. The Situationist International dissolved itself in 1972, largely out of disgust at how well this was going, having expelled almost everyone who had ever joined it. Nobody has managed to escape the trap they described, but a great many people have found the description useful, which is not nothing. On the train home I looked out at forty miles of billboards and thought about the beach beneath the paving stones, and then I fell asleep and missed my stop.