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The Last Avant-Garde
Alexander Billet reviews Dominique Routhier’s “With and Against: The Situationist International in the Age of Automation.”
The postwar economic boom had pulled the Western world into spectacular realms: rock and roll, cinema, marvelous modern conveniences like washing machines and refrigerators, televisions that beamed the space race into every home. The Situationist International would not be officially founded until the following year, but to its thinkers—many then organized under the short-lived banner of the Lettrist International—Le Festival de la Cité Radieuse was a risible and tawdry attempt by the French state to hijack the avant-garde. More salient, however, is the way in which Routhier contextualizes Fin de Copenhague with the work of revolutionary Russian Constructivist El Lissitzky, and his own visions for what the “book of the future” might look like, in the context of not just new technologies but also new human relations.
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