The situationist International emerged in the late fifties in the middle of Les Trentes Glorieuses, the thirty years after world war II. During those, when a society of consumption arise, urban planners were looking at the city from far above and they defined area following the modernist idea for a better future. Where every part of the city has in purpose and serve only this purpose; To live, to work, to move, to have fun.
While they had good intention, and resolve a lot of salubrity problem, they disconnected the human body with his environment. It was what Guy Debord, one of the thinker of the situationist international, was thinking 1957 and it is what history showed us with the arise of social problem in the seventies, eighties where those modernist ideas were used to justify a lot of rationalist accommodation.
Against this, Guy Debord was thinking that human need to radically change their behavior. To do this, we should reconnect our senses to the cities, and the cities to our senses while we are developing its. He was speaking about unitary urbanism to create a unified milieu that will stimulate our experience.
Furthermore this though should not be understood as a static and unique way of doing but more as a dynamic one. Part of the cities could be a composition of many diverse unique milieus that will act together in harmony. The closest exemple that we can give you to illustrate Guy’s idea could be the medieval city where you could find the place with the blacksmith, the place with the butcher, the place with the bakery,... Each of them connected to the other but yet the senses experience in each of this place were unique and specifique.
Secondly, he explored when the situationist international could act. Of course it is during the leisure time of the middle and lower class when, most of them entertain themselves in front of the small screen. In his idea of revolution, they should be the new force thrown into what he called The battle of leisure.
As exemple, their first experimentation was called the dérive: an exercise of drifting in a city and always searching for new atmosfeer without knowing the end, a kind of métaphore of life. An exercise that can be done by anyone without requiring a leader that we need to follow.
At this time he called to revolutionary artists and intellectuals like the surrealist, dadaist to stop searching for the artistic paradigm. Instead, they should help him to search new ways how people can engage with their life to a point where they are no artist anymore, everyone is a situationist when he sometimes can paint, or play music,...
Behind his ideas, we can really feel his marxist influence, where everything proposal, tackle down in some way the capitalist idea of always more always better and the extinction of social class where he also redefined the artist as a other social class that should not exist. Is it really necessary to read Guy Debord? Of course, he was criticizing every part of a society that was emerging, and we are living right in the middle of a grown up version of Guy's environment where every quality is much better and every defaut is was worse than before...
“In a classless society there will no longer be “painters”, only situationists who, among other things, sometimes paint.”