Giving the Game Away: Play and Exchange in Situationism and Structuralism

Abstract

Since 1989 Situationism has been the object of renewed critical attention. Recent discussion has, however, tended to neglect the anthropological dimension of Situationist theory, and in particular the key relationship between play and exchange. In fact, this relationship, articulated through the Situationist account of the gift, is essential to an understanding of the antagonism between Situationism and structuralism, whose intellectual and academic hegemony established in the course of the 1960s serves to explain the exclusion of Situationism from the mainstream intellectual history of the period. Furthermore, the confrontation with structuralism and its post-structuralist successors reveals strengths and weaknesses in the Situationist position that account for the current revival of interest in the movement, offering a possible explanation for the contemporary image of the movement as both paradoxically radical and anodyne.

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