Walter Benjamin’s Situationism climaxed Western Marxism by igniting May 1968.

Evidence

A shrewder judgement saw the May Revolt in a somewhat different light, not as the end but the climax of this tradition. Peter Wollen’s Raiding the Icebox is the only work whose power bears comparison with Jameson’s as a route map of twentieth-century culture. A central episode in its narrative is the story of the Situationist International, the last of the historic avant-gardes ‘whose dissolution in 1972 brought to an end an epoch that began in Paris with the Futurist Manifesto of 1909’. But Situationism, nurtured on Lukács, Lefebvre and Breton, was not only this. In theoretically igniting the explosion of May 1968, Wollen remarks, ‘we can equally see it as the summation of Western Marxism’. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 177

Categorization

• XREF: Periodization of the avant-garde epoch (1909 Futurist Manifesto to 1972 SI dissolution) is a usable anchor for Jameson’s own periodization disputes. — connects to: Adorno saw mass art as reconciling audiences to the status quo, unlike Benjamin. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 630