Erika Harrison

Strange bedfellows don’t get any stranger than this. To the joy of a few dozen graduate students and culture jammers, and the utter bemusement of just about everybody else, the most significant American protest movement in years has been spending time under the sheets with an obscure French avant-garde movement whose ideas are so crazily millenarian they make Jacques Derrida look like Mitt Romney.

I’m referring to the peculiar liaison between Occupy Wall Street and the Situationists – creators of one of those whacked-out intellectual commodities that have constituted France’s most lucrative cultural exports for more than a century.

The link between Occupy Wall Street and the Situationists is the Vancouver-based anti-consumerist magazine and organization Adbusters, whose call to occupy Wall Street kicked off the now-global protests. In a recent interview, Adbusters co-founder and editor Kalle Lassn told Salon’s Justin Elliott, “We are not just inspired by what happened in the Arab Spring recently, we are students of the Situationist movement.”