“Situationship” almost made it as the OED’s word of the year in 2023. As the name for a relationship that falls short of full commitment, the term is both vague and specific in its designation. How short does a relationship have to fall to achieve situationship? How far from commitment before it fails to be a relationship altogether? This uncertainty makes applying the term both useful and opportunistic. But this combination of features conforms to the ways the concept of situation has been used before. We propose to investigate how the combination works. 

Situation was granted conceptual importance in many nineteenth- and twentieth-century discourses and practices, including pragmatism, psychoanalysis, sociology, and existentialism. According to Karl Jaspers, first a psychiatrist and then a founder of existential philosophy before World War I, it is because we find ourselves in situations that we philosophize to begin with. Sartre had translated Jaspers’s General Psychopathology into French in the 1920s, though he also later made the situation concept a pillar of his own thought. Guy Debord and other situationists both built on and diverged from Sartre’s uses of the concept, which continues to be important in literary theory and political activism (Lauren Berlant, Anthony Reed), performance art (Tino Sehgal), and game design (Brian Upton). Across these cases, situation is readily understood. It retains a vernacular status though it is also sometimes used to indicate a technical matter. It seems to elude general theorization, though this elusiveness may tell us something about theory and its limits.  

This seminar invites papers that consider the striking combination of conceptual capture and open-endedness in historical or contemporary instances. What can the utility and plasticity of situation as a concept tell us about how we conceive of social interaction? What can its status tell us about the limits of theory? How does situation work to describe, model, or structure actions or outcomes? How is it useful to interpretation?  We welcome work that uses situation in individual cases insofar as it illustrates the difference that situation makes.