Reading Raunig's piece on the SI made me wonder if Pol Pot was the ultimate Situationist - that is his anti-intellectual, anti-bourgeoisie stance which eventually led to a revolution on behalf of the proletariat, in which the only intervention left was to turn the clock back to zero to start from scratch, to create a correction necessary in a society that had lost its way from 'being' into 'having'. As extreme as this may sound (and I'm not condoning for a second what that madman did), Pol Pot's regime certainly invented a disruption of the familiar. Yes, it was an extreme parallel of the Parisian uprisings of May 1968 which, in themselves, also sought ideologically if not misguidedly to bring about a new order through anarchy and violence. However, while in Paris it all ended in tears (gas), in Cambodia it ended in demagoguery.
A further thought- and this one's for you Alanis Morrisette: being ironic is discussing and analysing SI's initial anti-art stance as a key art-theoretical moment/movement in the teachings of Western art theory. Is that the sound of Debord rolling in his grave?
Surely the politicization of the SI was not a surprise to anyone.
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