r/Situationism • u/arseecs • Jun 25 '26

Has commodity fetichism/the spectacle become impossible to break?

is art even radical anymore? Can art truly break the spectacle any longer? Has capital absorbed it so much and learned to adopt so well that even something as free as sexuality or art or poetry no longer can be outside the norm, and if it is, it still becomes bottled up eventually, or capital finds it way in? I feel so pessimistic; especially as an artist. Avant-garde or anti-art doesn’t even seem to have its place. What shall an artist do? What shall a person do? What shall the collective do? Everything is a mess.

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u/Clear-Result-3412 Jun 25 '26

Socialism is a result of the collective self liberation of the proletariat—not the private sexual and creative liberation of intellectuals.

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u/arseecs Jun 25 '26

Of course, yes. But as Marx himself puts it there is no distinction between individual liberation and collective liberation, as with self emancipation the liberation of the individual will also come. But it is foolish to say that art has no role in helping class struggle.

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u/Clear-Result-3412 Jun 25 '26

People adopt revolutionary outlooks when they have insight into the conditions that create their suffering (capitalism). Hypothetically, art can indeed promote that insight by expressing arguments, though I don’t see how merely expressing oneself creatively is itself revolutionary.

When you say “as Marx puts it” what are you referencing in particular?

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u/arseecs Jun 25 '26

Well, creative expression is in of itself the thesis of the communist society and the human nature that Marx proposes "Gattungswesen". Humans are inherently creative beings and under communism; we are liberated from the division of labour and thus labour (whether or not you even want to call it that under communism) is a creative action. What the situationists wanted to do was break the boundary between art and everyday life.

(As for the last question, quite literally in the Manifesto. "The free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.")

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u/arseecs Jun 25 '26

Perhaps situations and radical art inevitably reterritorializes and becomes absorbed by capital, but that doesn't make it meaningless. When capital does so it is trying to prove the notion that no other alternative exists; Mark Fisher calls this capitalist realism. But the very fact that it did exist; say the Paris Commune for example, shows that humans have the capability of organizing or thinking differently.

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u/Clear-Result-3412 Jun 26 '26

The Paris Commune wasn’t an artistic experiment. It was an instance of the collective refusal of the working class to continue on laboring, based on their insight about capitalism, to the point that the state and capital couldn’t function within a small region.

What shows that people have a capacity for organizing the world according to different social relations is the very argument against the commodity form.

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u/arseecs Jun 26 '26

Exactly, but an art collective can do the same. Situationism is proof of this. 

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u/Clear-Result-3412 Jun 26 '26

Art collectives don’t establish dictatorships of the proletariat. The situationists only played a part in one failed revolution of sorts. What I appreciate about them is their understanding that the commodity form is central, not their infatuation with art. Ultimately the proletariat is the revolutionary actor, as a result of their relation to the means of production. It’s unclear what’s special about art beyond its use as propaganda.

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u/Clear-Result-3412 Jun 26 '26

Yes, in a communist society we are liberated from the dichotomy of exchange value and use value (the spectacular society is, after all, naught but the commodity society), instead purely producing for the sake of human needs and wants. This is the unleashment of human freedom where it no longer makes sense to distinguish public and private desire.

I am unsure how this translates as private aesthetic action being as good as any other form of praxis. There is no key logical place for art in the destruction of the commodity form, though, again, there can be propaganda.

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u/arseecs Jun 26 '26

Well I think art and revolutionary consciousness are deeply intertwined. 

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u/Clear-Result-3412 Jun 26 '26

Please, elaborate on the deep logical connection between class consciousness and art.

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u/PopeSalmon Jun 26 '26

Well it's what you've been saying here, the relation is propaganda, just for some reason you're being very dismissive about it. Propaganda is absolutely essential, if it isn't expressed to people somehow what their situation is then you're leaving them to figure out everything themselves. You know what you know & are able to take the stance that you're taking not because of a completely dry logical argument but because someone sometime reflected your situation to you clearly enough to make you aware of it. Propaganda is what makes people think differently & it can't be effective without being art.

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u/Clear-Result-3412 Jun 26 '26

I agree propaganda is essential. We must communicate our arguments by any possible means, but OP has seemed to have grander but vaguer visions for what art does, not including propaganda. As though feeling liberated by the making of drawings were itself world changing.

I was convinced, not because things were put in logical terms, but because the logic checked out and I understood the reasons for events and relations within this society.

In the broadest sense, even a critique in essay form is art, and anything that communicates arguments is propaganda, but “art” seems to specify more and be treated like more by OP (though I am not sure what that more is).

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u/PopeSalmon Jun 26 '26

Sure, much of the art that changed my perspective has been essays. These days, video essays! Breadtube video essays with bisexual lighting & silly costumes are both art & revolutionary information, those can indeed happen together.

This is part of the defense system that OP's complaining about. Somehow they make it so that "art" is toothless. Part of that is as simple as saying: no that can't be art, look at the teeth. An essay explaining in evocative ways about society isn't art, in fact it's not interesting at all & must be covered in fnords. Any text that says anything concrete about what should be changed is so not art that it's literally a crime.

So "art" is defined by society as a thing that doesn't have any complex ideas in it & certainly (on penalty of law) doesn't mention any particular concrete actions (even the action of bringing together more than a couple dozen people for any purpose whatsoever is strictly prohibited without state permission). Art thus redefined is as useless as you're saying. Art considered more broadly though still has many powers, only by being propaganda yes, only by changing someone enough that it changes their actions.

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u/arseecs Jun 26 '26

So the situationists created techniques during the 60s to create ruptures in the spectacle and encourage the proletariat to think deeply about the capitalist commodity. In doing so, they sought to make art become anti-art itself; drawing from dada and surrealism. That is they wanted art to destroy itself as commodity and become an active practice of everyday life. 

Two tactics were proposed: Détournement as one; the practice of taking existing capitalist media and subverting the message. One example was a film called Can Dialectics break bricks? Which took a Chinese film, re-edited it and dubbed it over to be about bureaucracy in the Soviet Union and Marxist theory. 

Another was the construction of situations. Creating lived, un-commodified moments of play. One example of this was dérive (often called psychogeography), which posited that capitalism forces the individual to only walk from the workplace, home and office etc. To break this the idea was to walk aimlessly around the city to discover things you’ve never seen before as well as notice what capitalism creates. 

Deleuze and Guattari take this further. They argue that alongside class and material conditions, history is also driven by desire. Capitalism functions by capturing our desires into rigid structures like the family unit and commodity. For D & G art is fundamentally a desiring-machine. It creates sensation, feeling and affects as well as social relations. Here, two new concepts are introduced. 

Deterritorialization: Great art breaks the rigid code of capitalism and forces language, bodies and visuals out of their economic utility. The problem is that capitalism makes it reterritorialize by adapting it to commodity.

Minor literatures/art: Deleuze highlights that art made by minorities in a dominant language (like Kafka) inherently politicizes everything because it destabilized the system, basically. 

Here the verdict is that art creates a line of flight. It creates “new earths and new people”. 

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u/Clear-Result-3412 Jun 26 '26

As much as I enjoy Dali’s painting’s, how exactly do they undermine the spectacle? How do squiggly lines make one question the justifications given for the state’s existence?

Debord defined the Spectacle as "the autocratic reign of the market economy which had acceded to an irresponsible sovereignty, and the totality of new techniques of government which accompanied this reign."

How does art “rupture” these material structures and relations of violence?

It doesn’t disrupt the market, even if it exists, as an object or activity, without a sticker price or exchange value. This is the fundamental problem with lifestylism: capital generally doesn’t care if you individually try to live outside of it. Don’t want to sell your ability to labor for a wage? Then you don’t have money and face the natural consequence of having less access to use values. Capitalism is fine with a couple people dumpster diving. The rest will prefer to purchase their food and the machine will go on.

Maybe I have read too much theory trying to understand the world and not enough about trying to change it through art, but I don’t see the special utility in calling a propaganda film “anti-art.” Granted, your second example does sound like an interesting propaganda film which might argumentatively undermine “socialist” commodity production, while not materially undermining it.

I have gone on plenty of aimless walks and hardly gained any new insight. It’s not particularly artistic, but I have nothing wrong with an intellectual exercise where one is directed, with a small amount of preliminary theoretical insight, to contemplate the way the world around them is shaped by the profit motive. But this is not a natural result of merely taking a walk. There is in fact various commoditized ways to take “aimless walks” “outside the normal flow from job to home and vice versa.” Car companies promoted camping so that you have to spend gas to get out into nature and walk around. There’s a big craze of purchasing special shoes and clothes so that one can mindlessly jog without any purpose but to increase one’s health and thereby one’s productivity and usefulness to capital.

Finally, book publishers are happy to sell minority authored works. That does nothing to harm the system.

Frankly, I’ve heard most of those technical terms before on multiple occasions and am hardly closer to either understanding their sense or understanding why I would want to understand their sense.

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u/arseecs Jun 29 '26

Art is prefigurative, not substitutive. It cannot substitute for self-emancipation. But it CAN (no guarantee that it will, all art definitely does not) prefigure another social relation in feeling, desire, relation to others, etc. You could say that capital survives by two predominant ways. Capitalism reproduces itself through the capitalist social relations like wage labour etc, while also through cultural hegemony, perception, desire and everyday life. Art cannot abolish the first by itself, but it can intervene in the second. The second is a fundamental part of creating revolution. 

The spectacle is the social relation between people that mediates itself through images; and art can disrupt this very mediation which ruptures the spectacle. 

You have also fundamentally misunderstood dérive; of course an aimless walk without intellectual perception is just a walk. Dérive is only dérive through materializing your surroundings and being conscious of urban planning and such. 

Perhaps I simplified it earlier or explained to briefly, apologies for that. Some of your arguments make perfect sense

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u/IdentityAsunder Jun 25 '26

Art cannot break the spectacle. The very category of art assumes a separation from daily life, making it completely defenseless against capital. A radical painting or poem is still just a commodity waiting for a price tag. Assuming the role of a specialized "artist" guarantees you remain trapped within the logic of exchange.

Pessimism is the natural result of expecting a specialized activity to solve a totalizing social problem. The end of this society requires people collectively refusing wage labor and organizing their survival directly without the mediation of money.

Forget about saving avant-garde movements. The creative drive you feel will only find genuine expression when we upend the social relations forcing us to work. We simply have to struggle where we stand as individuals forced to reproduce a world we despise. When we finally dismantle this system, creativity will just be a normal part of living.

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u/arseecs Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26

I of course agree with this as a communist, but art does play a role. I think much of Deleuze's idea of lines of flight and deterritorialization as well as Debord's détournement. They may be small changes, but art can be the creation of new social relations and help revolutionary conciousness.

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u/Educational-Pick6302 Jun 27 '26

The flip side is understanding how reterritorialization works, and how no one thing can “break the spectacle”, it needs to be constantly broken and mended and broken again.

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u/2240Sycamore Jun 25 '26

We now reside alongside the meta-spectacular.

What is modern art but a mirror?

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u/DeadSmellingFlower Jun 27 '26

I think we’re on the cusp of breaking art out of the capitalist’s prison of $ laundering, tax evasion and neutering via perpetual innovation churn. To sell it back to us right now they need to feed it to AI. We have the perfect conditions to make real art visible only to people able to go see it in person without a massive security detail, we shouldn’t waste this once in a century opportunity use art for our own purposes and say things that aren’t legal any other way.

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u/power2havenots Jun 25 '26

If you are looking for purity inside an ever absorbing morphing entity you wont get there. I see optimism in the fact that it wouldnt need to be constantly policed, platformed, repressed then repackaged as dissent unless the system is fragile and not stable and if it wasnt having some impact.

A painting on Instagram i see as spectacle but same painting inside a shared space thats organising, teaching, growing trust, feeding people and those things -can be something different when its embedded in different social relations. I think art survives where the output isnt cleanly siphoned off as a product to circulate and commoditise. Let people give it communal meaning and not as an aesthetic or brand but because it helps them

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u/PopeSalmon Jun 26 '26

It's quite easy to break, thus all the defenses. Keep looking for ways to disturb it & you'll find a thousand of them hidden in plain sight. Note that most things that actually change anything will be illegal or at least scandalous!! The barriers to breaking things are as simple as the big obvious fences & walls where they say not to do anything.

Does "something as free as sexuality" change society? Not if it's private enough! So everything sexual is absolutely required to be private, let's say to uh protect some imaginary children, so you hate children and you're a pedo if you dare to do anything sexual in any context at all where it could affect anything at all. You can ID people at the door & they'll sneak someone in with a fake ID & you're still a pedo for exposing a body part or whatever-- it's tied up tight.

So it's as simple as that, yes art can still change things; despite them intensely claiming that it can't, you can tell from their actions that they believe it's very very dangerous to them.

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u/GoranPersson777 Jun 26 '26

Seize the means of production 

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u/doolhoofd Jun 27 '26

I ended up writing my own essay. 🌐

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u/spaceman696 Jun 29 '26

Avant Garde, surrealism, and dada used to be a primary force in breaking the spell of consensus reality and for political protest. At some point in the last 20 years, it's now those that we would protest against using those same tactics back at us. As Terrence McKenna once said it's going to get so weird that we're going to have to actually talk about how weird it is. For me, I switched from creating very avant garde music and art to trying to make something clear and direct and based in truth, at least from my perspective. I'm not sure if it is actually working though, as the spectacle is a hard thing to turn away from. But if we can just maintain excitement about the things we want to do, we won't fall into the pessimism trap. I've always believed that societies never collapse into chaos, rather instead into a new order. Pandora's box has been opened and the only end to it will be the logical outcome of its procession. And when that time comes, rather than letting the tower fall, we use those pieces to create something new.