Science fiction and the Situationist International

Hayes, Anthony Paul 2023. Science fiction and the Situationist International. New Readings 19 , pp. 43-66. 10.18573/newreadings.139

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Abstract

In an interview in the 1980s, Henri Lefebvre made the remarkable claim that his reading of some Anglo-American science fiction (SF) in the 1950s led him to a position similar to that of the Situationists, as pithily summarized in Guy Debord's 1954 graffito, ``"Ne travaillez jamais" ["Never work"]. Lefebvre further claimed that discussions of such SF played a role in his dealing with the Situationists. Unfortunately, there is little evidence of these discussion in the extant work of the Situationist International (SI). Certainly, the Situationists used images and occasionally text from contemporaneous SF comics and novels. But unlike many who followed and were influenced by them—notably Jean Baudrillard—, they never fully reckoned with the critical value of pulp SF. Indeed, the Situationists quickly came to consider SF as a peculiarly modern form of capitalist ideology, presenting a reductive caricature, and demonstrating their ignorance of more radical ideas and currents within the genre. Perhaps most unfortunately of all, the Situationists missed an opportunity to enrich their theories of cultural decomposition and the spectacle by way of an examination of SF as a cultural form which was itself undergoing decomposition in the Situationist sense of the term. It is on these bases—that is, disinterring what the SI thought of SF, alongside of speculatively developing a Situationist critique of the latter—that a more fruitful encounter between the SI and SF can be mounted.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Cardiff University Press
ISSN:	2634-6850
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	13 November 2023
Date of Acceptance:	9 January 2023
Last Modified:	13 Nov 2023 17:57
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/163879

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