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Surviving History: a Situationist archive
Author(s) -
Stracey Frances
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
art history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 19
eISSN - 1467-8365
pISSN - 0141-6790
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8365.d01-2
Subject(s) - spectacle , situationism , reification (marxism) , memorialization , everyday life , history , aesthetics , art history , art , sociology , visual arts , epistemology , politics , philosophy , political science , law
It is the contention of this article that the Situationists were keenly aware that conventional forms of historical memorialization risked participating in the reification of everyday life, which they diagnosed as characteristic of a ‘society of the spectacle’ that reduces social relations to their petrified image. Focusing on a particular Situationist book called Mémoires , this article attempts to reconstruct the Situationists’ strategies of self–archiving, through which they tried to counter a spectacular monumentalization of their own history. In the process I attempt to elaborate the alternative model of an archive indicated in Mémoires – what I term an ‘involuntary archive’– and the implications this has for writing a history of the Situationists.