The importance of the Everyday

Due to their resistance towards a static ideology, Situationist ideas are very difficult to give a definitive explanation and are open to a wide degree of interpretation. However, there are some distinctive features of their work. Typically, they tried to bring to focus the importance of everyday life, "People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have corpses in their mouths." -The Revolution of Everyday Life - Raoul Vaneigem

They argued that increased material wealth of workers would not stop class struggle and ensure capitalism’s continuous existence. They argued that genuine human desires would conflict with alienating capitalist society. Debord saw this as the "society of the Spectacle' asserting that, 'The origins of the spectacle is the loss of the unity of the world, and the gigantic expansion of the modern spectacle expresses the totality of this loss: the abstraction of all specific labor and the general abstraction of the entirety of production are perfectly translated in the spectacle, whose mode of being concrete is precisely abstraction. In the spectacle, one part of the world represents itself before the world and is superior to it. The spectacle is nothing more than the common language of separation. What ties the spectators together is no more than an irreversible relation at the very center which maintains their isolation. The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit, MI: Black & Red, 1970).

To counter this, Situationist tactics included attempting to create “situations” where humans would interact together as people, not arbitrated by possessions. They felt that in these ‘situations’ of community the possibility of a future, joyful and united society.




‘The very development of class society up to the organization of a non spectacular view therefore leads the revolutionary project has become visible what was already essential’
From his image we can see that the Situationists felt that capitalism was to blame for the division and alienation of society.

This led to their subversion of elements of popular culture. They critically analysed capitalism in its consumerist form. They felt that, rather than being repressed, workers were instilled with the notion that purchasing would make their lives complete through mass marketing.



This is reflected in this image, wherein we see a woman surrounded by commodities that she is encouraged to buy, regardless of whether she needs them and ignorant to her human, animal desires, as is reflected in the caption, ‘Thee is nothing they won’t do to raise the standard of BOREDOM’. The use of the pronoun, ‘they’ creates a dichotomy between the worker and the capitalists.