Formed in 1957, the SI had its origins in Marxism, Dada, Surrealism, Pataphysics, and the Letterists. Their methods were the dérive and détournement – appropriation of space and matter, respectively – and potlatch, gifting by sacrifice. Originally an avant-garde group, they became more politically defined after a number of expulsions by founding member Guy Debord, author of The Society of the Spectacle (1967). He was in the later incarnation of the SI involved in May ’68. Wark writes: ‘perhaps Debord did everyone a favor by forcing the issue, by choosing paths, rather than allowing the movement to sink, like so many others, beneath the weight of its incoherence.’

Wark states that ‘theory lags behind the situation that calls for it’. Bucking that trend, this book appeared last year in time for the London riots. Some reviewers laboured the comparison with May ’68, so Wark steered it to a more pertinent mass movement. He appeared at Occupy Sydney to be interviewed for an online video, in which he points out the relevance of his new book, while wearing a hat bearing the title of his last one, Gamer Theory (2007). That book deploys the Situationists, among others, in an effort to foment discussion around the socio-political role of video games. Not surprisingly, video games emerge none the wiser.

His new book opens with an anec-dote about a giant, flying, inflatable dog turd. With this self-congratulating cheekiness, Wark is more in his element. ‘It’s time to start scheming on how to leave the twenty-first century,’ he writes, to which it is hard not to retort that we only just got here. He apes (détourns) the Situationist double-take, distilling high theory down to fortune-cookie aphorisms and allegories that are catchy, if a little cagey: ‘hypocrisy is the hush money vice pays to virtue’; ‘capital produces […] the author as sole proprietor of a soul as property’. He occasionally overdoes it, at one point resulting in an imitation Goya: ‘Considered as the husk of a once-viable unitary project, Situationist materials may yet have some juice in them that has not been sucked dry in a three-way necrophilia with the museum and with scholarship.’

What Wark gets from this husk is a flair for self-reflexivity rivalling the post-structuralists or any Tex Avery cartoon. His book is a grand gesture of reciprocity, an attempt to match and build on the ‘uncanceled gift’ of the SI. Certain motifs – pinball, starlings, Tintomara’s dance, potlatch, and Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938) –  show how playfulness and elaboration were integral to the SI, and necessary to understand them now. The dust jacket, which unfolds to reveal an illustrated guide to the key figures of the movement, is another example of this lucidity. It also pays tribute (potlatch) to the interesting relationship between the SI and comic strips, which produced, among other artefacts, André Bertrand’s alternately funny and unreadable Return of the Durutti Column (1966).

At its most blatant, Wark’s garrulousness with his topic (and the reader) becomes a kind of Situationists for Dummies:

Here are some techniques for discovering the way into the total semantic field that they détourned, alone or in combination: alcohol (Debord), opium (Trocchi), psychosis (Chtcheglov), mania (Spur), synaesthesia (de Jong), fatigue (the dérive), obsession (Constant), love (Bernstein), revolution (May ’68), solitude (late Debord).

An insistence on the first-person plural, grammatically and in spirit – ‘It has become an impertinence to say we’; ‘We later cities know we are mortal. And yet in the name of property we would keep back the very sea’ – cajoles the reader into submitting (along with the author) to being intellectually foxed. Having explained the plagiaristic side of détournement, Wark admits with childlike mischief: ‘Needless to say, the best lines in this chapter are plagiarized. Or rather, they are détourned. (It hardly counts as plagiarism if the text itself gives notice of the offence – or does it?)’

Ingratiating as it is, this motile cleverness is in character with its subject. As Henri Lefebvre, who figures prominently in the book, writes in Introduction to Modernity (1962), ‘question marks proliferate, but not at random’. Wordiness is balanced by a willingness to self-caricature, as in the goofy outburst ‘let a thousand internationals bloom’, or in Wark’s confrontation with the carnival mirror image of Foucault: ‘Reading Foucault is like taking a master class on how the game of scholarship is to be played, and with the reliable alibi that this knowledge of power, of knowledge as power, is to be used in the interests of resistance to something or other.’

Like the camera in La Chinoise, this book prides itself on sidestepping and second-guessing, inasmuch as it détourns its ‘inhabitants’. Focus is shifted from Debord, who has so far drawn the majority of critical attention, to Asger Jorn, Michèle Bernstein, Constant Nieuwenhuys, Jacqueline de Jong, and Alexander Trocchi, among others. Jorn comes across as particularly heroic: he supported every offshoot of the SI at one point or another.

Personalities are constructed quickly and efficiently. Through impeccable research, Wark comes out as a master of calculated biographical quirk. Ralph Rumney, son-in-law to Peggy Guggenheim, was the sole member of the London Psychogeographical Society; Debord’s favourite comic strip was Prince Valiant; Ronald Porambo robbed drug dealers. They are ‘actors’ turned ‘whirligig fashion’, though not ‘without revealing anything about them’. In teasing out their ideas, rope is given to any baroque flourishes, of which there are many.

The purpose of this becomes clear in the conclusion when Wark trumpets low theory: ‘Lefebvre, not Lacan; Jorn, rather than Althusser; Debord, not Foucault’. This alternative canon could also include Charles Baudelaire (as essayist rather than poet), Mikhail Bakhtin, Farber, and J. Hoberman. Each had his own version of the ‘situation’ as opposed to the ‘spectacle’: the comique absolu and signficat, the carnivalesque, termite art, andvulgar modernism. Given this lineage, it is odd that Wark should talk up low theory as though it deserves more attention, when by definition it is subterranean. On the other hand, it is because of this that people need to be reminded of its existence: ‘Low theory returns in moments, not of disappointment, but of boredom. We are bored with these burnt offerings, these warmed-up leftovers.’

While impressive in their scope, the analytical digressions (dérives) in which Wark wades through the individual theories that made up the SI tend to sag under the weight of their own abstraction. This is because negation is key to the Situationists. An anti-ideological stance is taken from their forebears, which, added up, feels like a lot of double and triple negatives, as though theory were being pulled into a black hole: ‘One is tempted to say that Jorn’s value is as subtle as Marx’s, but that would of course mean in Jornian terms that, being equivalent, it had no value.’

Yet it is this aspect of negation and constant renewal that makes the SI so appealing. Negation is the absent centre of Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (1989), Greil Marcus’s book about the Situationist influence on punk: ‘This was music that refused its own name, which meant it also refused its history.’ If the theories Wark elucidates are difficult to retain, it is because they are elusive, agile, self-negating: ‘At best theory, like art, turns in on itself, living on through commentary, investing in its own death on credit.’ As Farber said of the act of criticism: ‘I don’t think you can be mimetic enough.’