The politics of pleasure: Gender, desire, and detournement in the art of the Situationist International, 1957--1972 (Guy Debord, France)

My dissertation examines the artistic production of the Situationist International (SI), a group of European artists active from 1957 to 1972, in relationship to the movement's sophisticated critique of what Situationist Guy Debord termed "the society of the spectacle." According to Debord, the spectacle corresponded to a specific moment in the history of capitalism when images began to proliferate alongside commodities, generating new, ever more debilitating forms of alienation. I focus on one aspect of the Situationist critique, what I consider to be the crux of their complaint with capitalism as with spectacle: desire.; I argue that the Situationists, in their efforts to counteract the adulteration of desire by the twin forces of capitalism and spectacle and, more generally, to counteract the power that images exercised over human subjectivity, did not dispense with images but rather instrumentalized them via the technique of detournement. The organizing principle of almost all Situationist art, detournement involved the reclamation and defamiliarization of pre-existing visual images.; Chapter 1 considers a written text, Debord's 1967 The Society of the Spectacle. I locate the book in its immediate historical context and explore its intellectual and structural debt to detournement . The remaining chapters discuss visual artifacts. Chapter 2 addresses the found images of eroticized, objectified women that appear in Situationist films and essays. As I argue, the Situationists recruited images of women to critique the commodification and derealization of desire in capitalist society. Chapter 3 examines Memoires (1959), an artist book composed entirely of found words and images, including a large number of architectural plans, facades, and interiors. It is my contention that Memoires constituted a sustained polemic against functionalist architecture, which the SI also believed posed a substantial threat to human desire. Chapter 4 considers a wide range of Situationist self-portraits. The Situationists not only inserted found material into their self-portraits, they also adopted readymade identities (alter-egos), each one an exemplar of masculine virility. As I argue, Situationist alter-egos were intended to mitigate what the SI described as a grave crisis of masculinity precipitated by the accelerated growth of capitalism after World War II.