The Last Avant-Garde

The situationists were (in my personal opinion) non-productive poseurs. Too much bound in the manifesto and not equal to the times they lived in.

Perhaps to one side, at the end of the situationists time, ex-anarchist Daniel Cohn-Bendit started levering the cobblestones up to make barricades and wound up a TV pundit and Co-opeted into the state political arena of the EU. Regis Debray was critical of Situationists. Tariq Ali likewise. I don't think they were as smart, or useful as they thought.

Organised Labour movements have little need of public intellectuals, and their postures.

If Society of the Spectacle is your thing, you might try Jean Baudrillard.

So if we want to look for the counter-culture or the new avant-garde, we're going to have to look somewhere else. I think that, in a culture that systematically stripped all meaning out of life by atomizing it--how can humanity have any meaning if even being human is up to each individual--I think things like religions which offer meaning are going to be very appealing. In today's culture, someone converting to, say, Eastern Orthodoxy (in the West) is very counter-cultural: they are old, odd, hierarchical, are insistent that truth rests not in ourselves but in God, and say that fulfillment comes from ordering our lives based on an external Other not our internal feelings; all of these are opposing current cultural values. Similarly, I think Jordan Peterson is part of the new counter-culture (not that he is E. Orthodox). However we aren't conditioned for "counter-cultural" to look like anything like that, because that has always been seen as "conservative" or "reactionary". But since there is nowhere else for the Enlightenment project to go, it seems like the only possible change is back towards the way we came, and hence, this is the only sort of direction remaining for the advance guard of the culture to go.

[1] https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-vil...

Lots of claims that artists are confined to their media. This assertion is false. Artists mix in new technology, innovate all the time.

A lot of emphasis is put on the history of ideas, establishing a pedigree for the situationists, as if that pedigree lent credibility. This is juvenile.

Unfortunately it's not going to happen any time soon.