"People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth." -- Raoul Vaneigem
With all the sturm und drang about the Internet's potential for revolution and repression, I can't believe that the arrival in the iTunes store of the
Situationist App has gone so unnoticed. Wait. Yes I can. I blame Charlie Sheen. Society of the spectacle and whatnot.
"Launch of the first anarchist iPhone app," read the subject line of the email pitch I received on Monday. Not surprisingly, that
caught my attention.
But I opened the email and discovered that the app in question was a Situationist one. I had to chuckle, because even as a tech journalist, there's just no escaping that unfinished PhD. My French translation exam was pulled from
La société du spectacle, and much of
my work drew heavily on Situationist theory.
I knew it would be impossible for me to write an app review for ReadWriteWeb without delving into that theory and without sounding a tad screechy and pedantic.
So I did the next best thing as a recovering academic. I made snide comments to myself when the few blogs that did mention the app's release didn't talk
at all about Situationism. They did not mention the spectacle, the
détournement, the
dérive, or most pertinent perhaps to this new app, "the situation." There was no discussion of the "revolution of everyday life."
As I thought about such revolutions being spurred on by an iPhone app, I chuckled even more, terribly amused by my own little jokes about what Guy Debord's reaction would be to the whole thing. They're terrible jokes actually. Mean ones. Look what graduate school did to me.
The email pitch for the Situationist app described it as "more of a political satirical app" and only offers this for historical background: "It is named after the movement that sparked the May 68 Paris riots, the Situationist International, and is the brainchild of Benrik, artists and authors of the satirical bestseller 'This Book Will Change Your Life'."
That is the great revolutionary promise of the Situationist "situation" -- transforming your life. The app draws on the Situationist idea that the creation of liberatory situations can help free us -- even if just temporarily -- from (political, social, religious, capitalist) constraint. "Boredom," as the Situationist slogan goes, "is counter-revolutionary." Situations, on the other hand, are radical, radicalizing, revolutionary.
Cue: and now "there's an app for that."
The Situationist app is geo-based, alerting users when they're in the vicinity of one another and prompting them to interact in a random (but pre-selected) situation:
"Hug me for 5 seconds exactly."
"Give me the money in your left pocket."
"Tell me I'm beautiful."
"Let me inspect the contents of your bag for bombs and such."
"Ask me what I think of the war."
"Help me rouse everyone around us into revolutionary fervour and storm the nearest TV station."
You can suggest additional situations, which are all moderated before being approved. And "you can of course report anything dodgy." Vive la... something.
It's not fair, I'll admit, to lambaste an iPhone app for failing to be revolutionary -- I mean, come on. It's an iPhone app ("revolutionary" would be HTML 5 for sure!). And the Situationists themselves fared little better when it came to overthrowing the system. "The Situationists disbanded prematurely," reads the
iTunes description of the app. That's not a political condemnation on the part of the developers, but rather a lament as apparently Debord and the gang missed out on "the greatest opportunity to subvert daily life in a long while: the mobile phone."
RIP Situationism. Oh, and RIP Audrey's dissertation.
Image credits: "Angry Birdsky" by bortwein75
