Our era, marked by a decline in the politicization of art history and criticism, aligns with a period in which many Marxists have gradually diminished their engagement with art and culture. While this correlation might be somewhat surprising, particularly given the historical significance of aesthetic critique within the Marxist tradition, it has resulted in a landscape where art no longer serves as a vehicle for contemplating radical politics and emancipation. In this context, Dominique Routhier’s book, With and Against: The Situationist International in the Age of Automation, emerges as a breath of fresh air.
Drawing on Marxist theories of political economy, Routhier revisits the history of the Situationist International, arguably the most politicized and perhaps the last of all ‘classical’ avant-garde movements. In particular, he attempts to explain how the post-war reconfiguration of capitalism, coupled with an almost blind belief in the emancipatory capacities of technology and automation, led to the disappearance of art’s revolutionary horizon. As artificial intelligence continues to develop, and certain sectors of the left are once again tempted by the belief that technological progress will teleologically lead to revolution, Routhier’s book has become particularly relevant. Through an examination of Situationist pamphlets, documents, artworks, and objects, he reminds us that revolution is not a technological concept, but a political one. Class struggle, he insists, is what ultimately conditions historical development.
With and Against was originally published in English at the end of 2023. The book will be of interest to anyone who still believes in the revolutionary potential of art and art theory for the left, instead of as mere tools for the legitimization of the economic assets of the wealthy. I recently sat down with Routhier to discuss the book’s themes, and the extent to which its key ideas can inform anti-capitalist struggles in today’s increasingly automated world.
[Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]
With and Against, by Dominique Routhier, is now available from Verso Books.
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Hugo de Camps Mora: Your book, With and Against, deals with the intersection between the history of cybernetics and the post-war European avant-garde movement, the Situationist International (SI). Beginning from the title, can you say something about how the SI related to the technologies of their own time?
Dominique Routhier: When I started research for this book back in 2015/2016, #accelerationism was all the rage, and coked-up grad students and art professionals were going nuts about “full automation.” I suspect that the idea of having machines do all the manual work (the majority of which is done by people of lesser privilege than themselves) confirmed their sense of entitlement.
Much of this tech optimism seemed like somewhat naïve rehearsals of Lenin’s idea that communism was soviet power plus electrification. This time around, in the 2010s and to some extent still today, the idea is that future communism is real democracy plus computers. As if democracy had any meaning and technology in and of itself would ever bring us closer to achieving communism. With and Against was conceived as a historicization of this kind of misguided techno-optimism that seems to entice certain parts of the so-called Left. I am continuously amazed that the idea of “progress” that defined the history of the left—particularly the history of the avant-garde from Futurism to Russian Constructivism and beyond—is still haunting the would-be communist minds of the twenty-first century.
I turned to the Situationists because I had an inkling that their critique of cybernetics—the defining technological idiom of the 1950s and 60s and one of the origins of contemporary AI—might prove helpful today. The Situationists, in a sense the ‘last’ of the classical avant-garde movements, brought the problem of “automation” (a term that was coined as late as 1946) to the fore and worked through the internal issues of tech-optimism, artistically as well as theoretically.
To answer your question more directly, when I say that the SI was “with and against,” I mean this in a double sense: first, the SI was split internally about how to relate to new technologies. Some, like the Dutch architect Constant Nieuwenhuys, were highly optimistic about emerging cybernetics and automation, which he saw as great untapped potential for the cities of the future, as boldly envisioned in his master project, New Babylon. Others, like Guy Debord, were also initially fascinated by the prospects of a fully automated society but quickly became much more skeptical of the inherent forms of capitalist domination in new technologies. Secondly, the group’s position evolved from an overall positive “proto-accelerationist” position to a more Luddite one. So, there’s a lot of tension in the history of the SI concerning the question of technology, which makes for a compelling story and shows the limits that tech optimism comes up against in ‘the age of automation’.
Mora: Your book’s subtitle echoes Walter Benjamin’s Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. How would you say these two “Ages” differ, and why did you make such an explicit reference to Benjamin from the beginning?
Routhier: Well, it’s like the most famous essay in art history, right? And it’s also an essay that many Marxists are familiar with, even if they’re not too deep into art. So part of the answer lies in the logic of publishing: I (or my publisher with whom I had to negotiate the final title of the book) was hoping to bring people like yourself—people who are broadly interested in Marxism and culture but not necessarily super steeped in art history or the intricacies of the avant-garde—into the readership. More seriously, though, I realize that this subtitle runs the risk of courting cliché, it was a way of asking what Benjamin’s analysis from the 1930s would look like if it were brought to bear on the post-war moment.
But beyond Benjamin, whose thought has had a significant influence on this book, the specific phrase the “age of automation”, as I use it in the book, refers to a lesser-known Frankfurt School figure, Friedrich Pollock, who in 1957 published a crucially overlooked book called Automation: A Study of its Economic and Social Consequences. In this book, Pollock pointed to the centrality of cybernetics how its application to existing production techniques would alter the organization of, and control over, labor and the working day.
In the 1950s, France was like a laboratory for many of these techniques. As part of the Marshall Plan project, the US was pouring money, technology, and know-how into a war-torn Europe to extend the influence of the capitalist sphere and to ensure their future interests, so a lot of factories were either restructured or built from scratch, with everything from the shop floor to the layers of management organized from cybernetic principles. As I argue in the book, the postwar restructuring of capitalism according to these new principles of “control and communication” impacted not just the world of work but also the world of art, alongside of course, philosophy, politics, government, etc. The SI saw this early on and struggled to come to terms with what we might (following Tiqqun) call the “cybernetic hypothesis.”
Mora: The first thing that comes to mind when one thinks about Situationism is the figure of Guy Debord. However, in the book, you make an effort to shift this focus by pointing to the relevance of figures like Asger Jorn or Mustapha Khayati. What is the reason behind this approach?
Routhier: You’re right; I try to decentre Debord. I do this by situating key events, artworks, texts, ideas, and concepts (the concept of the “spectacle,” not least) within the historical flux in which they originated. This is not to deny that Debord was important to the history of the SI; quite the contrary. It’s just that there’s been so much idolizing of Debord as the “leader” of the SI that it is not just embarrassing but also fundamentally misleading, historically and politically. I mean, Debord was incredibly self-absorbed, but the SI was an anti-Leninist organization that resented the idea of centralized leadership and vehemently rejected the cult of “star” personalities to boot.
So the reason for this approach, to answer your question more directly, is that I think that histories of the SI that focus too much on Debord risk overlooking not just other contributors—like Jorn or Khayati, or someone like Michèle Bernstein, for that matter—but also the decentralized, anti-hierarchical and transnational nature (or at least ambitions) of the SI project, which extended across the borders of France and mainland Europe into Scandinavia, the UK and the US, Japan, and North Africa, among other places.
Mora: For the Situationists, art was to be put in the service of the revolution and everyday life. This meant a negative approach towards the bourgeois institution of art. One example is when Danish painter Asger Jorn refused the Guggenheim prizes. Today, it’s rare to see mainstream artists reject bourgeois art forms, and the art world seems to have become a game for elites. How strong was the SI’s interest in and commitment to politics?
Routhier: To the SI, art and politics were never separate things. Their core contribution to the postwar moment in art was to insist on a politically radical understanding of the concept of the avant-garde as an orchestrated, strategic affront to bourgeois society. So even if some members of the SI, like Jorn, were indeed practicing artists, they would reject the identity of the “artist” and openly mock the bourgeois metaphysics of art any chance they got (the idea of the genius, of authenticity, of originality, etc.).
So, the bourgeois institution of art was, quite obviously, a target of critique for the SI. As I argue in the book, the SI’s founding hinges on the boycott of an “avant-garde art festival” in Marseille in 1956. In that light, Jorn’s refusal to receive the Guggenheim International Award in 1964, two years after he officially cut his ties to the SI, is entirely in line with his Situationist commitments.
Mora: One of the main ambitions of your book is to bring the critique of political economy to bear on the categories of (bourgeois) art history. To begin with, this ambition seems to me to be extremely interesting and pertinent for our days, where it feels that art history and Marxism, as disciplines, have both turned their backs on one another. Why should we be interested in rediscovering art history from a Marxist perspective and vice-versa?
Routhier: First of all, there are great art historians out there who are doing hugely important work. Selva art journal comes to mind here. But as I see it, the general trend is towards still more depoliticized and specialized art history, to say nothing of contemporary art criticism. Conversely, it seems that many Marxists have lost interest in art and culture, which is surprising given the centrality of aesthetics to previous generations of critical theorists.
I am not going to lament this as a tragedy for the Left. On the contrary, I think that the current conjuncture produces some of the best Marxist thought we’ve seen since the 1970s. However, I think the relative disconnect between art and politics on the Marxist left points to a broader problem of “forgetfulness” of some of the most vital undercurrents in the revolutionary tradition, which includes the history of the avant-garde: from Russian Constructivism to Dada through to Surrealism, and further yet to postwar groups such as the Situationist International.
The problem is that the history of the avant-garde, particularly that of the SI, has been equally misunderstood by Marxists and art historians alike. At the risk of vastly oversimplifying here, art historians tend to ignore the avant-garde’s enduring if complicated love-affair with Marxism because it’s too “political” and complicates the belief in pure modernist form evolution, while Marxists, in turn, disregard the avant-garde as an “artistic” appendix to more serious political matters.
But the historical trajectory of the avant-garde, as I see it, was never about “art” per se but about the transformation of everyday life and the abolition of bourgeois social forms, including the state, private property, the family, wage labor, the commodity, and, of course, the art institution and the “work of art” itself.
Early on, much of this critique was theoretically inarticulate or implicit in the political aesthetics of the avant-garde: the épater la bourgeoisie and the iconoclasm. But in a sense, the SI, as the avant-garde in its most “Marxist” moment, anticipated what we might today, following Moishe Postone, refer to as a kind of categorical critique proper. This is to say that the critique of the transhistorical concept of labor also applies to the concept of art. The SI insisted that the history of modernism and the concept of (modern) art emerged with bourgeois society and would disappear alongside it. So even if there was some internal confusion about it, the lesson we should take from the SI as it applies to art history is that art, like work, is not something to “liberate” but something to abolish.
Mora: How does this categorical critique apply to art?
Routhier: Methodologically speaking, the question of the value-form of the commodity and the question of form in modernist art is one and the same question viewed from different angles.
Mora: Your book is often framed as relevant to current debates about automation and AI. What relevance does the SI hold in the current era, marked by advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence?
Routhier: Insofar as my book takes a deep dive into the history of cybernetics, which was one of the historical birthplaces for thinking about artificial life and artificial intelligence, this framing makes sense. Like I said, I am mainly concerned with showing, through the example of the SI, that much of the discourse about AI and automation was already rehearsed, like six or seven decades ago. A lot of what we’re seeing now is a replay down to the exact hyperbolic formulations.
Technology has become more advanced, and computing has become way, way faster. But in essence, it’s the same type of ideology of automation that’s being rehearsed today under the name of AI. Some people on the left get excited whenever there’s a new app for your phone or Open AI reveals their latest gimmick and asks everyone to train their algorithms for them and hype their soon-to-be paywalled products on social media. So, I’m trying to bring it down to earth and say that none of this means that the revolution is imminent or that communism is one step closer than it was 100 years ago. Revolution is a political concept, not a technological one. The most important lesson we can draw from the SI today is that the history of automation is ultimately the history of class rule and its ideology materialized. What they call “progress,” we call class war.♦
