Metropolitan Strategies, Psychogeographic Investigations

The ideas and practices of the Situationist International (SI) and the Italian autonomists of the 1960s and 1970s continue to provide inspiration for developing strategies for contesting capitalism. This essay proposes to bring together concepts from these traditions, working between the Situationist concept of psychogeography and the dérive, with autonomist writings on the shaping of the metropolis. Drawing on the autonomist concepts of class composition analysis and conducting a workers’ inquiry, it will be suggested that they can be usefully combined with psychogeographic investigations and methods to understand the shifting terrain of surplus value production within the metropolis based on an analysis of these transformations to develop new forms of political action and ways to sabotage the accumulation process. </jats:p

'Theories are made only to die in the war of time': Guy Debord and the Situationist International as strategic thinkers

The Situationist International (SI) has been one of the main reference points during the past 40 or more years within social movement organizing, cultural studies, social theory and philosophy. While the SI has been understood in many ways as inheritors and elaborators of an unorthodox Marxist politics drawing heavily from the history of the avant-garde, relatively little attention has been paid to the specifically strategic dimension of their thought and practice. This is surprising, especially in Debord's case, given how much his work also draws from the history of military strategy. This paper will particularly examine the strategic aspects of Debord and the SI's thought and politics and how they rethink the nature of strategy through collective forms of aesthetic-political practice. © 2013 Taylor & Francis