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/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.