Introduction

The above quotation to some extent encapsulates the Situationists' perspective on revolutionary theory. Put simply, the Situationists did not believe in either waiting for a revolution or deferring the living of life until after this possibly hypothetical point. The claim that ‘everybody wants to breathe’ describes the existence of a human spirit which can be truly revolutionary when brought to the surface. ‘Nobody can breathe’ depicts the ‘spectacular’ world in which we live, mired in the illusion of mainstream society and gasping for the ‘air’ of liberation. ‘We can breathe later’ refers to the outlook of many of Vaneigem's contemporaries who saw pleasure, desire and other such concepts – elements of the ‘living of life’ without ‘dead time’ – as somewhat trivial distractions which could wait until after a definitive social and political revolution had swept away the existing order. This approach – the Situationists and today's ‘horizontals’ alike would argue, and I would tend to agree with them – underestimates the value of creating spaces within the reality of one's current lived existence and, as such, chipping away at the nature of this reality to bring about wider changes.

The overall theme of this paper is what I perceive the legacy of the Situationists to be with regard to their impact on certain political movements today.