"Each era forges its own human material, and if our era really needed theoretical works it would itself create the forces necessary for its satisfaction."

-Rosa Luxemburg, in Vorwärts (14 March 1903)

Now that the situationists already have a history and their activity has carved out a very particular but undeniably central role for itself in the cultural debates of the last few years, some people reproach the SI for having succeeded and others reproach it for having failed.

In order to understand the real significance of these terms, as well as almost all the intellectual establishment's judgments concerning the SI, it is first necessary to reverse them. The SI's element of failure is what is commonly considered to be its success -- the artistic value that is beginning to be appreciated in us; the fact that certain of our theses have come to be sociologically or urbanistically fashionable; or simply the personal success that is virtually guaranteed to any situationist the moment he is excluded from the SI. Our element of success, which is more profound, is the fact that we have resisted the mass of compromises that we have been offered; the fact that we have not clung to our original pilot program but have proved that its main avant-garde character, in spite of some other more apparent ones, lay in the fact that it had to lead further; and the fact that we have thus far been refused any recognition within the established framework of the present order.

We have undoubtedly made many mistakes. We have often corrected or abandoned them, although it was precisely among them that were found the elements which were succeeding or for which the greatest aid was offered to bring them to fruition. It is easy to note the shortcomings in our earliest publications -- the extravagant verbiage, the fantasies left over from the old artistic milieu, the holdovers from the old politics; it is, moreover, in the light of the SI's later conclusions that these earlier shortcomings are most easily criticizable. An inverse factor has naturally left less trace in our writings, but has weighed heavily on us: a nihilist abstentionism, a serious inability among many of us to think and act beyond the first stammerings of positive dialogue. This lack is almost always accompanied by the most abstract and pretentious insistence on a disembodied radicalism.

There is, however, a deviation that has threatened us more gravely than all the others: it was the risk of not differentiating ourselves clearly enough from the modern tendencies of explanations and proposals regarding the new society to which capitalism has brought us -- tendencies which, behind different masks, all lead to integration into this society. Since Constant's interpretation of unitary urbanism this tendency has been expressed within the SI, and it is incomparably more dangerous than the old artistic conception we have fought so much. It is more modern and therefore less obvious, and certainly has a more promising future. Our project has taken shape at the same time as the modern tendencies toward integration. There is thus not only a direct opposition between them but also an air of resemblance, since the two sides are really contemporaneous. We have not paid enough attention to this aspect, even recently. Thus, it is not impossible to interpret Alexander Trocchi's proposals in issue #8 of this journal1 2 as having some affinity -- despite their obviously completely contrary spirit -- with those poor attempts at a "psychodramatic" salvaging of decomposed art expressed for example by the ridiculous "Workshop of Free Expression" in Paris last May. But the point we have arrived at clarifies both our project and, inversely, the project of integration. All really modern nonrevolutionary ventures must now be recognized and treated as our number-one enemy. They are going to reinforce all existing controls.

We must not for all that abandon the extreme point of the modern world merely so as to avoid resembling it in any way, or even in order not to teach it anything that could be used against us. It is quite natural that our enemies succeed in partially using us. We are neither going to leave the present field of culture to them nor mix with them. The armchair advisors who want to admire and understand us from a respectful distance readily recommend to us the purity of the first attitude while they adopt the second one. We reject this suspect formalism: like the proletariat, we cannot claim to be unexploitable in the present conditions; the best we can do is to work to make any such exploitation entail the greatest possible risk for the exploiters. The SI has taken a clear stand as an alternative to the dominant culture, and particularly to its so-called avant-garde forms. The situationists consider that they must succeed to art -- which is dead -- and to separate philosophical reflection -- whose corpse no one, despite all the present efforts, will succeed in "reviving" -- because the spectacle that is replacing this art and this thought is itself the heir of religion. And just as was the "critique of religion" (a critique that the present Left abandoned at the same time it abandoned all thought and action), the critique of the spectacle is today the precondition for any critique.

The path of total police control over all human activities and the path of unlimited free creation of all human activities are one: it is the same path of modern discoveries. We are necessarily on the same path as our enemies -- most often preceding them -- but we must be there, without any confusion, as enemies. The best will win.

The present era can test innumerable innovations, but it is incapable of putting them to good use because it is chained to the fundamental conservation of an old order. Over and over, in all our innovating formulations, we must stress the need for a revolutionary transformation of society.

The revolutionary critique of all existing conditions does not, to be sure, have a monopoly on intelligence; it only has a monopoly on its use. In the present cultural and social crisis, those who do not know how to use their intelligence have in fact no discernable intelligence of any kind. Stop talking to us about unused intelligence and you'll make us happy. Poor Heidegger! Poor Lukács! Poor Sartre! Poor Barthes! Poor Lefebvre! Poor Cardan! Tics, tics, and tics. Lacking the method for using their intelligence, they end up with nothing but caricatural fragments of the innovating ideas that can simultaneously comprehend and contest the totality of our era. They are not only incapable of developing ideas, they don't even know how to skillfully plagiarize ideas developed by others. Once the specialized thinkers step out of their own domain, they can only be the dumbfounded spectators of some neighboring and equally bankrupt specialization of which they were previously ignorant but which has become fashionable. The former specialist of ultraleftist politics [Cornelius Castoriadis, aka Cardan] is awestruck at discovering, along with structuralism and social psychology, an ethnological ideology completely new to him: the fact that the Zuni Indians did not have any history appears to him as a luminous explanation for his own inability to act in our history. (Go laugh at the first twenty-five pages of Socialisme ou Barbarie #36.) The specialists of thought can no longer be anything but thinkers of specialization. We don't claim to have a monopoly on the dialectics that everyone talks about; we only claim to have a temporary monopoly on its use.

Some people still venture to object to our theories by gravely insisting on the necessity of practice, although those who speak at this level of methodological delirium have abundantly revealed their own inability to carry out the slightest practice. When revolutionary theory reappears in our time and can count only on itself to propagate itself through a new practice, it seems to us that this is already an important beginning of practice. This theory is at the outset caught in the framework of the new educated ignorance propagated by the present society, and is much more radically cut off from the masses than it was in the nineteenth century. We naturally share its isolation, its risks, and its fate.

To approach us one should therefore not already be compromised, and should be aware that even if we may be momentarily mistaken on many minor points, we will never admit having been mistaken in our negative judgment of persons. Our qualitative criteria are much too certain for us to debate them. There is no point in approaching us if one is not theoretically and practically in agreement with our condemnations of contemporary persons or currents. Some of the thinkers who are now going to plan and justify modern society have already justified and ultimately conserved more archaic forms of it when they were, for example, Stalinists. Now, without batting an eye, they are going to reenlist, just as coolly and cheerily as before, for a second debacle. Others, who fought them during the preceding phase, are now joining them in a common celebration of innovation. All the specializations of illusion can be taught and discussed by the tenured thinkers. But the situationists take their stand in the knowledge that is outside this spectacle: we are not thinkers sponsored by the state.

We have to organize a coherent encounter between the elements of critique and negation (whether as acts or as ideas) that are now scattered around the world; and between these critical and negative elements that have become conscious and the entire life of the bearers of them; and finally, between the people or the first groups that are at this level of intellectual knowledge and practical contestation. The coordination of these researches and struggles on the most practical plane (a new international linkup) is now inseparable from a coordination on the most theoretical plane (which will be expressed by several works presently being prepared by some of the situationists). For example, the present issue of this journal, in order to better explain aspects of our theses that have sometimes been presented too abstractly, gives a large place to a coherent presentation of items drawn from the ordinary daily news. The continuation of our projects will have to be expressed in fuller forms. This continuation will considerably exceed what we would have been able to undertake by ourselves.

While contemporary impotence blathers on about the belated project of "getting into the twentieth century," we think it is high time to eliminate the dead time that has dominated this century and to put an end to the Christian Era with the same stroke. Here as elsewhere, the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. Ours is the best effort so far toward getting out of the twentieth century.

SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL (1964)

Translated by Ken Knabb (slightly modified from the version in the Situationist International Anthology).

• 1Libcom note: A Revolutionary Proposal: Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds
• 2Trocchi's article, which proposed an international linkup of countercultural artists and dissidents, is not included in the SI Anthology. The English version, "A Revolutionary Proposal" appeared in New Saltire #8 (London, June 1963) and City Lights Journal #2 (San Francisco, 1964), the latter also containing a subsequent more detailed program for his "Project Sigma." Internationale Situationniste #10 (p. 83) contains the following note: "Upon the appearance in London in fall 1964 of the first publications of the 'Project Sigma' initiated by Alexander Trocchi, it was mutually agreed that the SI could not involve itself in such a loose cultural venture, in spite of the interest we have in dialogue with certain of the individuals who may be drawn to it, notably in the United States and England. It is therefore no longer as a member of the SI that our friend Alexander Trocchi has since developed an activity of which we fully approve of several aspects."

The new theory that we are constructing, despite the unusual or mad appearance it takes on in the eyes of contemporary conformism, is nothing other than the theory of a new historical moment that is already the present reality, a reality that can only be transformed through the progressive articulation of a precise critique.

"Will theoretical needs be directly practical needs? It does not suffice for thought to reach its realization: reality must also seek thought."

(Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right [Marx]).

One need only begin to decipher the news such as it appears at any given moment in the popular press in order to obtain a quotidian X-ray of Situationist reality. The means of this deciphering lie essentially in the relationship to be established between the facts and the coherence of various themes that thoroughly illuminate them. The meaning of this deciphering can be verified a contrario by emphasizing the incoherence of various thinkers that are currently taken all the more seriously the more miserably they contradict themselves from one detail to another within the generalized fraud.

Translated by Thomas Y. Levin. From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/world.html

“This dose of pretentious errors obliges us to make a re-examination of [Alain] Resnais… Despite the references he made to André Breton around the time of the release of Hiroshima [mon amour], Resnais has shown his stature by depending on [Alain] Robbe-Grillet… Robbe-Grillet, arrived much too late to destroy the novel, has destroyed Resnais… With the fall of Resnais into the most redundant and shabbiest of spectacles, one is forced to conclude… there is no longer a modern artist conceivable outside of us.”

Michèle Bernstein, Situationist International #7, April 19621

“I totally like the first film entirely conceived and realized by Alain [Robbe-Grillet]. And it is perfectly vain to oppose it to [L’Année dernière à] Marienbad, or to suggest that L’Immortelle was a sort of by-product of Marienbad… Whatever may be said about L’Immortelle, it is a film and can only be a film. Robbe-Grillet will realize other films, and in particular with me.”

Alain Resnais, L’Express, 4 April 1962

“If you read Planète aloud, your breath will stink!”

Situationist International #7, April 1962

“He is the uncontested and incontestable leader of the New Wave… this boy, who has passed his 40th year but still looks like an eternal student, makes his films unobtrusively, by respecting the scenarios that he demands from writers he esteems… This Harry Dickson will live on the screen in adventures more delirious than Fantomas or Rocambole.2 ‘But there will be no winking at the public,’ says the serious Resnais. He will surely make us penetrate into the domain of the dream and surrealism. Frédéric de Tovarniki [sic], journalist at the futuristic journal Planète, works on the scenario.3 It is right that science-fiction will furnish the theme of Resnais’ next film, Je t’aime, je t’aime.4 The author is Jacques Sternberg, science fiction novelist and journalist at the same journal Planète.”5

France-Soir, 23 January 1963

—

First published in Internationale Situationniste #9, August 1964, p. 23. Translated from the French by Anthony Hayes, June 2013. Thanks to Miranda Lello for proofing. Translator's notes below.

From https://thesinisterquarter.wordpress.com/2013/06/11/well-said-s-i/

• 1The translation of this passage, a quote of Bernstein’s article Sunset Boulevard from I.S. no. 7, is a slightly amended version of the translation made by NOT BORED! In Bernstein’s article there is a reference to the earlier Situationist article Cinema After Alain Resnais, in which Resnais was more favourably treated by the S.I. It is in the movement from his 1959 collaboration with Marguerite Duras to his 1961 collaboration with Alain Robbe-Grillet that Bernstein tracks the collapse of Resnais’ insight into both art and the possibility of artistic creation in capitalist societies. Unlike Resnais, Robbe-Grillet had never been considered capable of anything more than the conventional simulation of earlier artistic avant-gardist production – for an earlier Situationist perspective on him see Guy Debord’s article from 1957: One More Try if you Want to be Situationists (the SI In and Against Decomposition.
• 2Harry Dickson was a fictional character, the ‘American Sherlock Holmes’ who appeared in a series of pulp adventures. Originating in Germany in 1907, Dickson is perhaps best known in his French iteration, appearing in over 170 stories between 1929 and 1938.
• 3In the 1960s Resnais and Towarnicki tried and failed to develop a film version of Harry Dickson. The scenario from this venture was published in 2007 by Éditions Capricci as Les aventures de Harry Dickson: Scénario de Frederic de Towarnicki pour un film (non réalisé) d’Alain Resnais.
• 4Je t’aime, je t’aime, written by Sternberg and Resnais, and directed by Resnais, was released in 1968.
• 5The journal Planète often incurred the criticism of the S.I. For instance there is the brief parody of Planète from I.S. no. 7 whose title is quoted in this article, i.e. ‘If you read Planète aloud, your breath will stink!’ (we will endeavor to publish a translation of this soon). Planète, a magazine that combined science fiction stories with articles on speculative ‘science’, is perhaps the progenitor of such English language magazines as Omni and Wired, and is indeed the forerunner of the ideological function of such magazines. In their article Ideologies, Classes, and the Domination of Nature from I.S. no. 8, the Situationists compared Planète’s function to that of the journal Arguments. Whereas Arguments, under the guise of being a journal of ‘eclectic’ and ‘critical’ Marxist theory, was criticized for producing ‘the futile questioning of pure speculation’ (and thus played an important role in the spectacle of criticism), Planète was criticized for haranguing ‘ordinary people with the message that henceforth everything must be changed — while at the same time taking for granted 99% of the life really lived in our era.’ Thus the similarity of function – both journals were mouthpieces of the ideology of ‘progressive’ change (a central tenant of bourgeois ideology in its ‘free market’ and ‘state capitalist’ variants), whilst operating within and by virtue of the parameters of the bourgeois market. Their function as commodities that offered non-threatening change was central to the Situationist critique of them. Thus it was this appearance of modernity that was effectively non-threatening vis-à-vis capitalist modernity that was most egregious in the eyes of the Situationists, whose alternative was encapsulated in their conception of a coherent revolutionary project. Such an appearance would soon be shifted into the spectacle of post-modernism; the babble of ultra-modern theoretical radicalism that apparently interrogated everything all the better to hide the unitary nature of capitalist exploitation and alienation.

1. What does the word "situationist" mean?

It denotes an activity aimed at creating situations, as opposed to passively recognizing them in academic or other separate terms. At all levels of social practice or individual history. We replace existential passivity with the construction of moments of life, and doubt with playful affirmation. Up till now philosophers and artists have only interpreted situations; the point now is to transform them. Since human beings are molded by the situations they go through, it is essential to create human situations. Since individuals are defined by their situation, they need the power to create situations worthy of their desires. This is the perspective in which poetry (communication fulfilled in concrete situations), the appropriation of nature, and complete social liberation must all merge and be realized. Our era is going to replace the fixed frontier of the extreme situations that phenomenology has limited itself to describing with the practical creation of situations; it is going to continually shift this frontier with the development of our realization. We want a phenomeno-praxis. We have no doubt that this will be the first banality of the movement toward the liberation that is now possible.What situations are to be transformed? At different levels it could be the whole planet, or an era (a civilization in Burckhardt's sense, for example), or a moment of individual life. On with the show! It is only in this way that the values of past culture and the hopes of realizing reason in history can find their true fulfillment. Everything else is in decay. The term situationist in the SI's sense is the total opposite of the current usage in Portugal, where "situationists" refer to supporters of the existing situation (i.e. supporters of Salazar's dictatorship).

2. Is the Situationist International a political movement?

The words "political movement" today connote the specialized activity of group and party bosses who derive the oppressive force of their future power from the organized passivity of their militants. The SI wants nothing to do with any form of hierarchical power whatsoever. The SI is neither a political movement nor a sociology of political mystification. The SI aims to represent the highest degree of international revolutionary consciousness. This is why it strives to illuminate and coordinate the gestures of refusal and the signs of creativity that are defining the new contours of the proletariat, the irreducible desire for freedom. Centered on the spontaneity of the masses, such activity is undeniably "political" in the sense that those rebellious masses are themselves political. Whenever new radical currents appear -- as recently in Japan (the extremist wing of the Zengakuren), in the Congo, and in the Spanish underground1 -- the SI gives them critical support and thereby aids them practically. But in contrast to all the "transitional programs" of specialized politics, the SI insists on a permanent revolution of everyday life.

3. Is the SI an artistic movement?

A large part of the situationist critique of consumer society consists in showing to what extent contemporary artists, by abandoning the richness of supersession implicitly present (though not fully realized) in the 1910-1925 period, have condemned themselves to doing art as one does business. Since that time artistic movements have only been imaginary repercussions from an explosion that never took place, an explosion that threatened and still threatens the structures of this society. The SI's awareness of this abandonment and of its contradictory implications (emptiness and a desire to return to the initial violence) makes the SI the only movement able, by incorporating the survival of art into the art of life, to speak to the project of the authentic artist. We are artists only insofar as we are no longer artists: we come to fulfill art.

4. Is the SI an expression of nihilism?

The SI refuses the role that would be readily granted it in the spectacle of decomposition. The supersession of nihilism is reached by way of the decomposition of the spectacle; which is precisely what the SI is working on. Whatever is elaborated and constructed outside such a perspective will collapse of its own weight without needing any help from the SI. But it is also true that everywhere in consumer society wastelands of spontaneous collapse are offering a terrain of experimentation for new values that the SI cannot do without. We can build only on the ruins of the spectacle. Moreover, the fully justified anticipation of a total destruction precludes any construction that is not carried out in the perspective of the totality.

5. Are the situationist positions utopian?

Reality is superseding utopia. There is no longer any point in projecting imaginary bridges between the wealth of present technological potentials and the poverty of their use by the rulers of every variety. We want to put the material equipment at the service of everyone's creativity, as the masses themselves always strive to do in revolutionary situations. It's simply a matter of coordination or tactics. Everything we deal with is realizable, either immediately or in the short term, once our methods of research and activity begin to be put in practice.

6. Do you consider it necessary to call yourselves "situationists"?

In the existing order, where things take the place of people, any label is compromising. The one we have chosen, however, embodies its own critique, in that it is automatically opposed any "situationism," the label that others would like to saddle us with. Moreover, it will disappear when all of us have become fully situationist and are no longer proletarians struggling for the end of the proletariat. For the moment, however ridiculous a label may be, ours has the merit of drawing a sharp line between the previous incoherence and a new rigorousness. Such incisiveness is just what has been most lacking in the thought of the last few decades.

7. What is original about the situationists considered as a distinct group?

It seems to us that three notable points justify the importance that we attribute to ourselves as an organized group of theorists and experimenters. First, we are developing for the first time, from a revolutionary perspective, a new, coherent critique of this society as it is developing now. This critique is deeply anchored in the culture and art of our time, which can in fact be truly grasped only by means of such a critique (this work is obviously a long way from completion). Second, we make a practice of breaking completely and definitively with all those who oblige us to do so, and in many cases with anyone else who remains in solidarity with them. Such polarization is vital in a time when the diverse forms of resignation are so subtly intertwined and interdependent. Third, we are initiating a new style of relation with our "partisans": we absolutely refuse disciples. We are interested only in participation at the highest level, and in setting autonomous people loose in the world.

8. Why don't people talk about the SI?

The SI is talked about often enough among the specialized owners of decomposing modern thought; but they write about it very little. In the broadest sense this is because we refuse the term "situationism," which would be the only pigeonhole enabling us to be introduced into the reigning spectacle, incorporated in the form of a doctrine petrified against us, in the form of an ideology in Marx's sense. It is natural that the spectacle we reject rejects us in turn. Situationists are more readily discussed as individuals in an effort to separate them from the collective contestation, although this collective contestation is the only thing that makes them "interesting" individuals. Situationists are talked about the moment they cease to be situationists (as with the rival varieties of "Nashism" in several countries, whose only common claim to fame is that they lyingly pretend to have some sort of relationship with the SI). The spectacle's watchdogs appropriate fragments of situationist theory without acknowledgment in order to turn it against us. It is quite natural that they get ideas from us in their struggle for the survival of the spectacle. But they have to conceal their source, not merely to protect their reputation for originality from charges of plagiarism, but because this source implies the broader, coherent context of these "ideas." Moreover, many hesitant intellectuals do not dare to speak openly of the SI because to speak of it entails taking a minimum position -- saying what one rejects of it and what one accepts of it. Many of them believe, quite mistakenly, that to feign ignorance of it in the meantime will suffice to clear them of responsibility later.

9. What support do you give to the revolutionary movement?

Unfortunately there isn't one. The society certainly contains contradictions and is undergoing changes; this is what, in continually new ways, is making revolutionary activity possible and necessary. But such activity no longer exists -- or does not yet exist -- in the form of an organized movement. It is therefore not a matter of "supporting" such a movement, but of creating it: of inseparably defining it and experimenting with it. Admitting that there is no revolutionary movement is the first precondition for developing such a movement. Anything else is a ridiculous patching up of the past.

10. Are you Marxists?

Just as much as Marx was when he said, "I am not a Marxist."

11. Is there a relation between your theories and your actual way of life?

Our theories are nothing other than the theory of our real life and of the possibilities experienced or perceived in it. As fragmented as the available terrains of activity may be for the moment, we make the most of them. We treat enemies as enemies, a first step we recommend to everyone as an accelerated apprenticeship in learning how to think. It also goes without saying that we unconditionally support all forms of liberated behavior, everything that the bourgeois and bureaucratic scum call debauchery. It is obviously out of the question that we should pave the way for the revolution of everyday life with asceticism.

12. Are the situationists in the vanguard of leisure society?

Leisure society is an appearance that veils a particular type of production/consumption of social space-time. If the time of productive work in the strict sense is reduced, the reserve army of industrial life works in consumption. Everyone is successively worker and raw material in the industry of vacations, of leisure, of spectacles. Present work is the alpha and omega of present life. The organization of consumption plus the organization of leisure must exactly counterbalance the organization of work. "Free time" is a most ironic quantity in the context of the flow of a prefabricated time. Alienated work can only produce alienated leisure, for the idle (increasingly, in fact, merely semi-idle) elite as well as for the masses who are obtaining access to momentary leisure. No lead shielding can insulate either a fragment of time or the entire time of a fragment of society from the radiation of alienated labor -- if for no other reason than the fact that it is that labor which shapes the totality of products and of social life in its own image.

13. Who finances you?

We have never been able to be financed except, in a very precarious manner, by working in the present cultural economy. This employment is subject to this contradiction: we have such creative abilities that we can be virtually assured of "success" in any field; yet we have such a rigorous insistence on independence and complete consistency between our project and each of our present creations (see our definition of antisituationist artistic production) that we are almost totally unacceptable to the dominant cultural organization, even in the most secondary activities. The state of our resources follows from these conditions. In this connection, see what we wrote in issue #8 of this journal (p.26) about "the capital that is never lacking for Nashist enterprises" and, in contrast, our conditions (on the last page of this issue).2

14. How many of you are there?

A few more than the original guerrilla nucleus in the Sierra Madre, but with fewer weapons. A few less than the delegates in London in 1864 who founded the International Working Men's Association, but with a more coherent program. As unyielding as the Greeks at Thermopylae ("Passerby, go tell them at Lacedaemon..."), but with a brighter future.

15. What value can you attribute to a questionnaire? To this one?

Questionnaires are an obvious form of the pseudodialogue that is becoming obsessively used in all the psychotechniques of integration into the spectacle so as to elicit people's happy acceptance of passivity under the crude guise of "participation" and pseudoactivity. Taking such an incoherent, reified form of questioning as a point of departure, however, enables us to express precise positions. These positions are not really "answers," because they don't stick to the questions; they reply by posing new questions that supersede the old ones. Thus, real dialogue could begin after these responses. In the present questionnaire all the questions are false; our responses, however, are true.

SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL (1964)

Translated by Ken Knabb (slightly modified from the version in the Situationist International Anthology). Translators notes below.

• 1See, for example, the SI's critique of the Spanish Acción Comunista Comunista group in "Contribution au programme des conseils ouvriers en Espagne" (Internationale Situationniste #10, pp. 27-32).
• 2The reference is to Jørgen Nash and others who had recently been excluded from the SI and who were trying to cash in on the situationists' notoriety by producing "situationist art" and founding a "Second Situationist International" (see The Counter-Situationist Campaign in Various Countries). As for the situationists' own conditions, they stated that they had no objection to publishers, film producers, patrons, etc., interested in financing situationist projects, whether disinterestedly or in the hope of making profits, as long as it was understood that the situationists would retain total control over the form and content of the projects. Regarding the publication of radical texts, Internationale Situationniste #10 (p. 70) has the following note: "It is clear that there are presently only four possible types of publishing: state-bureaucratic; bourgeois semicompetitive (though subject to a tendency toward economic concentration); independent (wherever radical theory can be legally self-published); and clandestine. The SI -- and any critical current anywhere -- uses and will continue to use the latter two methods; it may in many cases use the second one (to obtain a qualitatively different level of distribution) because of the contradictions left open by anarchic competition and the lack of enforced ideological orthodoxy; and it is of course totally incompatible only with the first one. The reason is very simple: the competitive bourgeois type of publishing does not claim to guarantee any consistency between itself and its different authors; the authors are not responsible for a publishing firm's operation and, conversely, the publisher has no direct responsibility for their life or ideas. Only state-bureaucratic publishing (or that of parties representing such a bureaucracy in formation) is in complete solidarity with its authors: it has to endorse its authors in everything and its authors also have to endorse it. Thus it represents a double impossibility for any revolutionary expression."

“controlled froth”

the froth-overflow deteriorates your machine.

The extracts which follow are a good example – inscribed in the ridiculous jargon of the specialists of conditioning and [hierarchical] power – of attempts to reverse our perspectives, and sometimes even our formulas.1 The qualitative is very evidently missing here! All the psycho-technique of stupidity applied here to recuperate the refuse of the post-Dadaist era (or of a post-Pirandellian theatre).2 It is about integrating people into the system of submission at all costs, which could be made via the demand for an abstract “participation” which does not deny the spectacle but supports it. Thus, for the delicate, we can foresee a made-to-measure integration in the psychodramas3 of the pasteurised political neo-organisation (Socialisme ou Barbarie, this year), or in the dehydrated artistic scandal.4 The modern spectacle never ceases to create new employment: the greatest refinement of participation in the spectacle is actually offered by these cretins who stage the spectacle of participation.

“The Play-Girls constitutes a semi-improvised spectacle of a quite singular interest.5 Due to a very flexible scenario, Marc’O, author and director, manages to play an active role to the spectators through [the] intrusion into their ranks of a huge cake that is offered by the actors.”

Marc Pierret, France-Observateur,

30 January 1964.6

“It is not the place, here and now, to look for the sufficient conditions to found a truly revolutionary theatre. Nor if it would still be theatre, nor how to show today the plays which are not made tasteless by their preserved cultural setting…

“The institutional directionality of spectacles is the true problem, and there are few chances that it will be resolved through setting out from the simple use of formal avant-garde processes or not…

“The spectacles of participation, on an experimental basis, can be organised from the present by teams made up of dramaturges, certainly, but also psycho-sociologists, artists having an experience of ‘happenings’, comedians or anyone looking to make the theatre the place of a living experience and emancipation.”

Marc Pierret, France-Observateur,

5 March 1964.

“The question of self-management is at the centre of the ideological problematic of the U.N.E.F.7 In the course of these debates, it will act to clarify the actual meaning of the relation actor-spectator and from there found the critique in the perspective of a true dis-alienation.

“The question will be in effect of knowing if the cultural politics of the U.N.E.F. will consist of continuing to distribute tickets at a reduced rate permitting students to access use of the theatre, or if it will orient itself on the contrary toward initiatives in the style of some extremely passionate investigations [recherches] which have been undertaken by the students of Nice concerning a theatre of managed participation with the mise-en-scène elaborated collectively, the representation of the spectacle only constituting itself in the final result before the commencement of another work of collective elucidation.

“Second [piece of] important news: the First Conference of Psychodrama will take place at the Faculty of Medicine from the 31st of August to the 3rd of September under the honorary presidency of [Jacob L.] Moreno, who in the United States, well before the war, was the first psychodramatist. Self-management and psychodrama appears to me to be the most solid platform serving to set out an elaboration of revolutionary dramaturgy.”

Marc Pierret, France-Observateur,

26 March 1964.

MR. GEORGES

LAPASSADE

IS A CUNT8

—

First published in Internationale Situationniste #9, August 1964, pp. 28-29. Translated from the French by Anthony Hayes, May 2013. Thanks to Alastair Hemmens for help with the translation. Translator's notes below. From https://thesinisterquarter.wordpress.com/2013/05/26/controlled-froth/

• 1I have inserted ‘[hierarchical]’ here in translating ‘le pouvoir’. The Situationist International (S.I.) distinguished between the alienated ‘hierarchical power’ of the capitalist spectacle and the ‘power’ or capacities of people, which become alienated as hierarchical power under conditions of capitalist social relations. They most often used the noun, ‘le pouvoir’, to denoted ‘hierarchical power’, whereas the often used the verb ‘pouvoir’ to denote the general and historically conditioned ‘powers’ of people to act and transform their world and conditions of existence. The S.I.’s use of these terms is both a recovery, and their own formalisation, of Marx’s conception of alienation (see in particular The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844). More on this distinction can be found here: Power (Notes toward a Situationist Dictionary).
• 2‘Psychotechique’, also known as ‘theatre language’, is a theatrical rehearsal method developed by Constantin Stanislavsky, the inventor of ‘method acting.’ Also see footnote 3 below.
• 3‘Psychodrama’ is a theatrically influenced psycho-therapeutic technique developed by Jacob L. Moreno. However the S.I. appears to also be using ‘psychodrama’ ironically, with reference to the film and literary criticisms which speak of the ‘psychodramas of narratives’ which focus on the so-called psychological events and developments of characters. No doubt words such as ‘psychodrama’, ‘psycho-sociologists’ and ‘revolutionary dramaturgy’ in the hands of Marc Pierret, constitute some of ‘the ridiculous jargon of the specialists of conditioning and [hierarchical] power’ the S.I. refer to.
• 4‘the psychodramas of […] Socialisme ou Barbarie’ in 1964. In 1963 the Socialisme ou Barbarie group split, between the ‘modernists’ led by Cornelius Castoriadis (then known under the pseudonym Paul Cardan), and the more ‘orthodox’ Marxists grouped around the magazine Pouvoir Ouvrier. Castoriadis’ group essentially abandoned any attachment to Marx’s conception of class struggle as the constitutive antagonism of capitalist societies; indeed Castoriadis went further, blaming Marx for the sins of Marxism, something roundly condemned by the S.I. – see, in particular, the following entries from the 9th number of their journal: Now, the S.I., and The Longest Months. From the latter article: “Since the split of 1963, the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie has struggled to follow in the footsteps of Arguments (cf. ‘We know that your subscription to Arguments testifies to similar preoccupations,’ in the circular of 20 January 1964 addressed by the new editorial committee to the public they want to recover.) But this comes too late, and it is clearly weaker and insignificant. Politically, it is the expression of the furthest left and most fanciful fringe of those managers and mid-level functionaries of the Left who want to have a revolutionary theory of their actual career in society, and also the overtly social career of such a ‘revolutionary theory.’ But whereas [Serge] Mallet and [André] Gorz are professionals at this sort of activity, the people at Socialisme ou Barbarie are visibly amateurs: a relaxing weekend for managers whose real career is elsewhere. The minority which split in fidelity with Marxism accepted the debate on the most false terrain: the ‘modern’ was the privilege of the Cardanists [i.e. followers of Cornelius Castoriadis], and ‘revolution’ the banner of the minority. But in fact, these notions are represented by neither camp, because there cannot be revolution without the modern or modern thought without the reinvention of revolutionary critique. The minority (Pouvoir Ouvrier) is so detached from the trivialities of the era that it has not judged it useful to explain the meaning of the dissolution of Socialisme ou Barbarie, a phenomenon too modern for its taste—not even to inform its few readers (no matter how fervent) of workers’ democracy. In Socialisme ou Barbarie there remains only a few traces of the useful theoretical work made on a number of points over the years. All is drowned in an extraordinary atmosphere of escalating resignation, as everyone rushes to abandon all critical thought. In this shipwreck it seems that the captain alone can spout off euphorically. [Paul] Cardan [i.e. Cornelius Castoriadis], after fifteen years of useless effort to get the dialectic— if only for a brief instant —decides that it is a fruit too immature, and proclaims that ‘we cannot be immediately given a dialectic, for a dialectic postulates the rationality of the world and of history, and this rationality is problematic, as theory and as practice.’ (Socialisme ou Barbarie, no 37, page 27). From this, he can attach with the greatest pride his long disguised inability to grasp the play of contradictions: ‘At the base of this (Marxist) theory of history, there is woven profoundly and contradictorily a philosophy of history, itself contradictory, as will be seen.’ Setting out from such a good foundation one will see everything; and even [Georges] Lapassade can direct psychodramatically such an avant-garde of revolutionary ‘questioning.’” (Note that my translation of this passage differs markedly from Reuben Keehan’s linked above).
• 5Les Playsgirls, a play written by Marc’O, aka Marc-Gilbert Guillaumin, onetime collaborator of Isidore Isou’s Lettrist movement between 1950 and 1953.
• 6Marc Pierret, journalist and collaborator with Georges Lapassade and Socialism ou Barbarie. See Guy Debord, letter To René Lourau, 13 January 1966.
• 7U.N.E.F. L’Union Nationale des Etudiants de France. The National Union of French Students, is a union which represents French undergraduate university students. Notably the S.I. played a decisive role two years later in the Strasbourg university students’ diversion of funds from the local branch of the U.N.E.F. in order to produce the pamphlet On the Poverty of Student Life…
• 8Georges Lapassade was a Marxist academic and collaborator with Arguments – a journal boycotted by the S.I. from early 1961. In particular he was an advocate of ‘participatory’ spectacles. Note the reference to Lapassade in the quote reproduced in footnote 4 above. Also worth noting is this reference to Lapassade from Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Daily Life: “When the most advanced sociologists finally understood how the art-object became a market-value, by what means the famous creativity of the artist yielded to the norms of profitability, it appeared to them that it was necessary to return to the source of art in everyday life, not in order to change it (because this is not their function), but rather to make it the raw material of a new aesthetic which would resist its packaging and thus escape the mechanism of buying and selling. As if there was no way to consume on the spot! We know the result: socio-dramas and happenings through which the claim to organise an immediate participation of spectators results only in their participation in the aesthetic of nothingness. Via the method of the spectacle it is only possible to express the emptiness of everyday life. In terms of consumption, what is better than an aesthetic of emptiness? As it accelerates, does not the decomposition of value itself become the sole form of possible entertainment? The trick is to convert the spectators of the cultural and ideological vacuum into its organisers; to fill the inanity of the spectacle by the obligatory participation of the spectator – the passive agent par excellence. The happening and its derivatives have some chance of furnishing the society of slaves without masters – which the cyberneticians are preparing – with what it requires: the spectacle without spectators. For the artists, in the strict sense of the term, the way of absolute recuperation [récupération] is all mapped out. They will join with [Georges] Lapassade and consorts in the great corporation of specialists. [Hierarchical] power will reward them by deploying their talent to dress up in new and seductive colours the old conditioning to passivity.” Words in bold are in English in the original. From chapter 12, section 2, Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes generations; in English: The Revolution of Everyday Life. The above passage, translated by me, differs markedly from the Donald Nicholson-Smith translation.

In February 1963, the SI published a document entitled Into the Trashcan of History, regarding the dissolution of the journal Arguments. This document featured a reproduction of the situationist text Theses on the Paris Commune1 alongside the watered-down copy that Henri Lefebvre had slyly published under his own name in the final issue of Arguments, paraphrasing in the most outrageous manner the fraudulent carnival of modern thought of which Arguments has been France's purest expression.

*

The following is a list of names of the Arguments collaborators: J.-M. Albertini, Kostas Axelos, Roland Barthes, Abel Benssi, Jacques Berque, Yvon Bourdet, Pierre Broué, T. Caplow, Bernard Cazes, François Châtelet, Jean Choay, Choh-Ming-Li, Michel Colinet, Lewis Coser, Michel Crozier, Michel Deguy, Gilles Deleuze, Romain Denis, Albert Détraz, Manuel de Diégez, Jean Duvignaud, Claude Faucheux, F. Fejtö, Léopold Flam, J.-C. Filloux, P. Fougeyrollas, Jean Fourastié, André Frankin, F. François, G. Friedmann, J. Gabel, P. Gaudibert, Daniel Guérin, Roberto Guiducci, Luc de Heusch, Roman Jakobsen, K.A. Jelenski, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Georges Lapassade, Henri Lefebvre, O. Loras, Stéphane Lupasco, Tibor Mende, Meng-Yu-Ku, Robert Misrahi, Abraham Moles, Jacques Monbartm Edgar Morin, V. Morin, Serge Moscovici, Roger Munier, Pierre Naville, Max Pagès, R. Pagès, Robert Paris, François Perroux, A. Phillip, André Pidival, Alexandre Pizzorno, David Rousset, Maximillien Rubel, Otto Schiller, Walter Schultz, H.F. Schurmann, M. Sheppard, Jean Starobinski, A. Stawar, Jan Tin Bergen, Jean Touchard, Alain Touraine, Bernard Ullman, Aimé Valdor.

*

In view of their plundering at the hands of Lefebvre, the situationist theses on the commune were translated into Italian and published in issue #9 of the journal Nuova Presenza (Spring 1963). Though varying opinions are expressed in the articles of the journal's two directors, it should be noted that both of them mistakenly believe the essence of the SI's theory and its presence in our time to be our interpretation of the 1871 Commune; moreover, neither of them points out that the publication of these theses is but a single detail of a document concerning the SI's practical struggle against the spectacular disguise hiding the really subversive questions (in this case, the demonstration of the complete success of our boycott of Arguments). It is therefore easy for them to speak of "practical weakness" and "lack of historical perspective." This is indeed the question.

Specifically, Internationale Situationniste is the organ of a group of youths who have placed themselves in a position of radical critique of the "society of the spectacle," that is to say modern technological and technocratic organization that manipulates all manifestations of human creativity toward the ends of the consumption industry . . . It continues a theoretical movement that has its roots in early romanticism, developing through Rimbaud, the surrealists, Bataille and Klossowski; beyond its practical weakness, condemned as it is by its lack of historical perspective to succumb to the apparatus of domination and frustration utilized by modern bureaucrats, this movement represents the refusal of the new generations, who find themselves faced with a society founded on mystification and lies.

— Franco Floreanini (The Values of the Commune in the Struggle Against the Totalitarianism of Technocrats and the Ideological Petrifaction of Stalinists and Socialist Bureaucrats).

A few lines do not seem enough for a thorough examination of Lefebvre's interpretation of the Commune, especially if these lines are exclusively devoted to confronting the theses of Situationist International, its point of critical departure. It is now possible to consider their theses, and the critical reexamination of them undertaken by Lefebvre; and in our opinion, the judgment on the former and the latter alike can only be resolutely negative. Attacking the complex historical phenomenon of Stalinism, still not overcome in the Soviet Union or the French Communist elite, both propose a mystical historical form: in the "dictatorship of the proletariat" they seek the autonomy of proletarian forces and the direct and indirect participation of such forms in power, which is lacking in the inflexible bureaucracy and its antihumanism of Stalinism. But without real ideological terms, such a participation finds itself growing into a confused and irrational aspiration, separated completely from its historical and structural problematic. The autonomy of proletarian forces, the principle historical problem of their participation in power, is reduced to the suggestive and transcendent myth of an "everyday game with power," of a popular "festival," of the "autonomy" of popular armed groups. And they don't hesitate to mix this utopian elan with formulas which, quite frankly, seem mediocre and almost superstitious: thus, the so-called originality of a "revolutionary urbanism" which "refuses to accept the innocence of a single monument"; the anti-humanist apology of those who wanted to destroy Notre-Dame, thereby "making this destruction symbolize their absolute defiance of society"; or finally the no less anti-humanist regret concerning the remaining "unaccomplished" acts that were later viewed as "atrocities." A substantial part of this irrational knot, whose natural base is a distant and fictitious historical experience, remains in Lefebvre's consideration, which succeeds only in excluding a few of the most abstract formulas . . . This protest is completely and voluntarily out of touch with today's historical reality. Stalinism . . . is an irrational mystification, a projection of abstract aspirations onto proletarian forces, with a schema similar to that found in the Situationist International's theses on the Commune. It is time for communists to pose the problem of the supersession of Stalinism through a rationalization of political and ideological life by institutionalized forms that will guarantee the dialectic between the forces of the working class and those who will assume the conduct of social revolution.

— Marcello Gentili (Two Irrational Protests Against Stalinism).

*

Under the pretext of a completely imaginary anti-fascism, a few fragments of surrealism's Stalinist tendency attempted to join the situationists in Anvers. Their inevitable ejection was reported by a tract issued in Dutch and French on 27 February 1963: No Dialogue with Suspects! No Dialogue with Morons!

*

The first issue of the German language SI journal Der Deutsche Gedanke appeared in April 1963, under the direction of Raoul Vaneigem. On account of various practical conditions, its address has finally been established: Boîte postale 155, Brussels 31.

*

In June 1963 the SI organized a ‘Destruction of RSG-6’ demonstration in Denmark, under the direction of J.V. Martin. On this occasion the situationists distributed a clandestine reissue of the English tract Danger: Official Secret—RSG 62 , signed ‘Spies for Peace,’ which revealed the plan and function of ‘Regional Seat of Government #6.’ A theoretical text, The Situationists and the New Forms of Action in Politics and Art, was also issued in Danish, English and French. In one area an ugly reconstruction of a bomb shelter was set up; in another were exhibited Martin’s ‘Thermonuclear Maps’ (détournements of Pop Art representing various regions of the globe during World War III).

The situationist movement presents an exhibition — if you could call it that — with an idea. It demonstrates, with the aid of chaotic productions in plaster of Paris, paint splattered tin horses and soldiers bearing slogans demanding the destruction of the RSG6 shelter, which was built as a defense for the English government in case of nuclear war. Of course, their protest is against the world itself and the totalitarian State: they would probably be flattered by people saying that this is not art. Whatever the case, I fail to see how this could be a compliment.
— Pierre Lübecker, Politiken, 3 July 1963.

A more intelligent report by Else Steen Hansen entitled "Homo Ludens" appeared in number 5-6 of the Swedish journal Konstrevy (December 1963).

*

The Situationist Rudi Renson was stopped for no reason at the Danish border while traveling to the above exhibition. Influenced by the scandal evoked for several days by the press all over the country, the border police successively pretended that he had no passport; that he had no money; and that he needed a bath.

While last point was obviously open to conjecture, the falseness of the other two was quickly demonstrated (nevertheless, situationist publications continue to be seized at this border). Renson is currently preparing a collection of SI studies on Architecture and Détournement.

*

In Spring 1963, T. Kurokawa and Toru Tagaki, European delegates of the Japanese Zengakuren movement, made an invaluable contribution to the discussion of new departures for revolutionary organizations. Their address is Zenshinsha, 1-50 Ikebukurohigashi, Toshima-ku, Tokyo.

*

As with all intellectual specializations, poetry must disappear as a practice particular to a class of "technicians" and literary virtuosos in order to manifest itself directly in all creative human acts — including the act of writing; this point is completely missed by the lettrists and the situationists, for whom the abolition pure and simple of grammatical writing and artistic expression is the miracle cure to the crisis of poetic expression.

— Front Noir #1 (June 1963)

*

Aside from a few facts and notions that will undoubtedly become fashionable, discussed with the most vulgar humor, Raymond Borde's book L'Extricable contains the following strange confession: "The heady ideas of surrealism have been reprised by the situationists, but in an uncertain context. They might even provide — who can ever be sure? — the key to revolutionary theory . . ." One can be sure that Raymond Bourde has always been able to place his stylistic exercises in the most certain of contexts (see page 19 of this issue 3 ): the only thing he has ever changed is his delivery.

*

France-Observateur was completely mistaken in writing on 7 February 1963 that Robert Dehoux's brochure Teilhard is an Idiot (even if we completely approve of the title) reveals "an acquaintence with the situationists." Robert Dehoux's autonomy is still demonstrable, and was recently confirmed by his second work, Ecce Ego. It seems that certain critics are so used to seeing copyists feigning ignorance of the SI that anyone who has the good faith to cite the situationists to strengthen their argument is immediately lumped in with us.

*

Attila Kotányi was excluded from the SI on 27 October 1963. Three weeks earlier, he had submitted a text to the situationists that demanded a fundamental theoretical reorientation. This reorientation was extremely retrograde, up to and including mysticism. Its author was unanimously rejected. Only the Danish situationist Peter Laugesen declared that he was not particularly shocked by it. He was therefore excluded at the same time (see the circular On the Exclusion of Attila Kotànyi, distributed in December). Since then, Laugesen has recited the same old story to the Scandinavian press: "They're awful; I know what I'm on about; I was in the wrong place at the wrong time." Kotànyi made at least one step towards Nashism when he tried to spread the rumor that all this was a dreadful misunderstanding, and that he would soon be back in touch with the SI. To that we say no: his text was perfectly clear. And so was ours.

*

In Le Mouvement du Signe, Robert Estivals persists beyond all semblance of reason in trying to understand the SI. Among thousands of other foolish things, he has "predicted and explained its inevitable explosion." For him, this centrifugal motion is revealed by Ralph Rumney's exclusion before we had even published a line. Perhaps it is because he is certainly of those who have "not even had the chance to exclude anyone" (IS #8) that he closes his eyes to the real significance of these exclusions. Does he think that the shockwave produced by the SI's explosion has already reached certain mentally underprivileged zones while he was sleeping? It is always what he presented in a few Parisian publications — at least those in Lettres Nouvelles and France-Observateur — in pretending to have something in common with the situationists. It is clear that the only people who can be misled by this imposture are those who want to be: not only because the situationists are intelligent, or because Estivals, even as a researcher in the CNRS, appears to be unusually weak; but because the situationists do not practice this sort of procedure, as is well known.

*

Nashism has been torn and frayed in two main directions: the Dutch review Situationist Times4 has turned into a marginally less academic art journal, combining high quality illustrations with sometimes very carefully selected themes (such as the labyrinth). The tiny portion allotted to commentary in each issue is unfortunately not on par with this historico-academic effort. In one instance, famous museologist Dr H.L.C. Jaffé gives an Italian quotation of three preliminaries on The Divine Comedy, accumulating no less than six errors in the process (misinterpretations or nonsense).

On this account, it doesn't matter what it shows; maybe even that the journal's unexplained title has a meaning? Elsewhere, Nash and his Swedish friends have mounted a group show on a public highway, showing flaming bears and sword swallowers in a pop art peppered with Scandinavian mysticism. In a recent tract, Nash ambitiously proclaimed himself "the son of God." Like father, like son.

*

At the threshold of an era when science and technology play an occasionally demented role, it must be made clear that the cybernetic and remote controlled games, and the adult activities, that the Groupe de recherches d'art visuel has introduced to the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris on the ocassion of the 3rd Biennale are closer to Luddism than art. These are games worthy of some kind of mathematical fun park. While pretending to modify the work-spectator relationship, the Groupe advocates participation. By throwing the balls, by manipulating various elements, the visitor creates multiple situations. . . .

— Rabecq-Maillard ('Le jeu et l'actualité,' La Nef #16-17, January 1964).

*

Since the split of 1963, the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie has tried to follow in the footsteps of Arguments (cf. "We know that your subscription to Arguments testifies to similar preoccupations," in the circular of 20 January 1964 addressed by the new editorial committee to their desired audience.) But this comes too late, and it is clearly weaker and insignificant. Politically, it is the expression of the furthest left and most deluded fringe of those managers and mid-level functionaries of the Left who want to have a revolutionary theory of their own actual career in society, and also the overtly social career of such a "revolutionary theory." But whereas Mallet and Gorz are professionals at this sort of activity, the people at Socialisme ou Barbarie are visibly amateurs: a weekend away for managers whose real career is elsewhere. The breakaway Marxist minority has accepted the debate on the falsest terrain: the "modern" was the privilege of the Cardanists, and "revolution" the flag of the minority. But in fact, these notions are represented by neither camp, because revolution cannot be separated from the modern, nor can modern thought exist outside of the reinvention of revolutionary critique. The minority (Pouvoir Ouvrier) is so detached from the trifles of the era that it has not found it useful to explain the meaning of Socialisme ou Barbarie's dissolution, too modern a phenomenon for its taste, not even to educate its few fervent readers about workers democracy. There were only very few traces left of the useful theoretical work on numerous points made by Socialisme ou Barbarie over the years. All of it has drowned in an extraordinary atmosphere of bitterness and recrimination, as everyone rushes to the lifeboats of critical thought. In this shipwreck, it seems that only the captain can spout off euphorically. Cardan, after fifteen years of useless efforts, finally masters the dialectic — if only for a brief instant — and decides that it is not ripe enough a fruit, proclaiming that "we cannot give ourselves over to any sort of dialectic, for a dialectic postulates the rationality of the world and of history, and this rationality is problematic, as theory and as practice." (Socialisme ou Barbarie, no 37, page 27). From this, he can attach with the greatest pride his long disguised inability to grasp the play of contradictions: "On the base of this (Marxist) theory of history, there is profoundly and contradictorily interwoven a philosophy of history, itself contradictory, as will be seen." With such a good base, all will indeed be seen, and even [Georges] Lapassade can psychodramatically direct such an avant-garde of the revolution of the "questioning."

*

The SI chose to respond, in December 1963, to an inquiry from the Center of Experimental Art, on the relationship between art and society; but, obviously, refused all participation in the discussions opened between different artistic currents for a "union of artists." More generally, there is even an appeal to the union of all honest people to carry out the hunt for the situationists currently launched by Isou with a proclamation posted at the premises of the Center (and reprised in L'avant-garde lettriste et esthapeïriste):

As certain reactionary groups affirm that machines must be destroyed, other reactionary groups — like the situationists, based on a poorly managed ersatz sub-sub-sub-Marxism — troglodyte, as Lenin put it — affirm that art, as a whole, will be eliminated in the near future . . . In an era when neo-Nazi movements in America and England have revived the swastika and the Sieg Heil, at the same time as the appearance of groupuscules that attack formal and material artistic experiments, as in the most sinister anti-formalist periods of Hitler and Stalin, people concerned with a renewed blossoming of humanity must unite to repel the efforts of vile cretinization of obscurantist nullities of the détourning-troglodyte type.

— Résponse aux déchets obscurantistes "situationnistes"

The people concerned are well and truly unified, because in March 1964, the International Center of Aesthetic Research in Turin, directed by Piero Simondo (excluded from the SI shortly after its formation for crypto-catholicism), presented Isou's pictorial work, prefaced enthusiastically by the Jesuit Tapié, who everyone thought was dead. What beautiful children this lot will bear!

*

A book by Guy Debord has been featured without his permission, and without any warning, in the exhibition Schrift und Bild, in Baden-Baden, then Amsterdam. After an initial protest addressed to the organizers when this maneuver was finally pointed out to us, the Germans in Baden-Baden claimed that it was the responsibility of the Dutch Ad. Petersen, of Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum, while the museum asserted, at the same time, that the choice was that of the German Mahlow, director of the Kunsthalle in Baden-Baden (to be continued).

*

What is necessary in anarchist society is that it awakens everyday in a new, unknown world offering possibilities unlike those of the day before . . . The situationists seem to have understood this and propose, for example, an architectural revolution (the appearance of the city changing daily) that puts people in new situations daily. This is only one aspect, but it makes sense to us that all of life that must be overthrown . . .

— Jeunes Libertaires (March 1964)

*

After the publication in the English journal Tamesis (March 1964) of the text All the King's Men5 (cf. IS #8), translated by David Arnott, two professors from Reading University commented in the same issue on clearly distinct levels of incomprehension.

. . . these people who, in some of their manifestations, appear rather like the anarchists of the 19th century. I think they number around 70, and are spread over thirty different countries. Three members have already been excluded for deviationist measures or otherwise . . . And this, from a certain point of view, will be the most original thing, that the revolution must take place without authority (not only without the authority that the linguistic authorities and the experts have established, but also without the authority of government — with hardly any political organization at all). It is thus that one can see that this pamphlet has been conceived in a completely anarchist way.

— Prof. Lucas

But the phrase what is permitted implies that there is someone who permits, and the author obviously wants to reject even this center of power. And this is why he is anarchistic in a way that has not, as far as I know, been formulated for a very long time . . . Is this gentleman on a collision course with the Marxist view of social revolution, trying to introduce the next stage in the present, by a conscious effort, trying to make modern poetry useful again, for example, from a 21st century perspective? I think so . . . It is only in a superficial way that the article advances an entire series of arguments. It is simultaneously a manifesto and an example of what the manifesto seeks to accomplish. It needs to be grasped in its own terms or not at all.

— Prof. Bolton

*

Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, one of the founders of the SI, who was present at the Cosio d'Arroscia Conference, and who was excluded in 1960, died suddenly in Alba on 12 February 1964. Experimental in every discipline, Gallizio was one of the artists who best represented the furthest point reached by modern art in its creative period. He was torn between the research of its supersession, and a certain attachment to the tastes of this earlier period. Some of these tastes, mainly by peer pressure, eventually made his participation in the SI somewhat difficult; as a result of this, he was better suited to staying independent. Personally incredibly inventive, he was the complete opposite of the falsifying Nashists. The birth of the situationist movement owes him a great debt.

*

In May, students were expelled from the Danish Communist Party for alleged Maoism. In reality, they were reproached for their interest in the theses of the SI.

*

According to Professor Guy Atkins' book Asger Jorn (London: Methuen, 1964):

After Cobra, the most important movement in which Jorn took part was the international situationist movement, which began in 1957. It is interesting to compare two such different movements . . . Each effectively existed for around three years. Cobra was an avalanche that grew until it became monstrous. The SI was exactly the opposite. When it first appeared, it was solid and coherent. It shattered into fragments of marble. Towards the middle of 1962, everyone was being "excluded" by Guy Debord, although Jorn had the good sense to resign in 1961. Cobra produced a common imagery. The SI created a spirit and an attitude, and carried out experimental activity with curious and subtle ideas. Cobra, with its Danish gregariousness, had too little discipline. The situationist were made and then broken by their own discipline.

With the realism of this conclusion, our readers are invited judge the value of attributing other terms to this comparison (Cobra painted men as they are, and the SI, as they should be?).

*

In July 1964, the SI published the tract España en el corazón (Spain in the Heart) in Spanish and French, bringing attention to a new form of propaganda currently being experimented with in Spain.

All SI publications mentioned here may be passed on to anyone who can provide a good reason for wanting them.

Translated by Reuben Keehan. From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/longest.html

• 1https://libcom.org/article/theses-paris-commune-situationist-international
• 2https://libcom.org/article/danger-official-secret-rsg6-spies-peace
• 3Sketch of a Morality Without Obligation or Sanction
• 4https://libcom.org/article/situationist-times
• 5https://libcom.org/article/all-kings-men

Ivan Chtcheglov participated in the ventures that were at the origin of the situationist movement, and his role in it has been irreplaceable, both in its theoretical endeavors and in its practical activity (the dérive experiments). In 1953, at the age of 19, he had already drafted — under the pseudonym Gilles Ivain — the text entitled “Formulary for a New Urbanism,”1 which was later published in the first issue of Internationale Situationniste.

Having spent the last five years in a psychiatric clinic, where he still is, he reestablished contact with us only long after the formation of the SI. He is currently working on a revised edition of his 1953 writing on architecture and urbanism. The letters from which the following lines have been excerpted were addressed to Michèle Bernstein and Guy Debord over the last year. The plight to which Ivan Chtcheglov is being subjected can be considered as one of modern society’s increasingly sophisticated methods of control over people’s lives, a control that in previous times was expressed in atheists being condemned to the Bastille, for example, or political opponents to exile.

I am in a good position to study the group and the role of the individual in the group.

The dérive (with its flow of acts, its gestures, its strolls, and its encounters) was to the totality exactly what psychoanalysis (in the best sense) is to language. Let yourself go with the flow of words, says the psychoanalyst. He listens, until the moment he rejects or modifies (one could say détourns) a word, an expression or a definition. The dérive is certainly a technique, almost a therapeutic one. But just as analysis unaccompanied by anything else is almost always contraindicated, so continual dériving is dangerous to the extent that the individual, having gone too far — not without bases, but without defenses — is threatened with explosion, dissolution, dissociation, or disintegration. And thus the relapse into what is termed ‘ordinary life,’ that is to say, in reality, into ‘petrified life.’ In this regard I now take back the Formulary’s propaganda for a continuous dérive. It could be continual like the poker game in Las Vegas, but only for a certain period, limited to a weekend for some people, to a week as a good average; a month is really pushing it. In 1953-1954 we dérived for three or four months straight. That’s the extreme limit. It’s a miracle it didn’t kill us. We had a constitution — a bad constitution — of iron.

One factor — which verifies our basic theories only too well — has played an enormous part: for several years, the clinic was installed in a castle with gargoyles, a portcullis, thick, reinforced wooden doors, floors (and not tiled floors: most hygienic), a high tower, antique furniture, fireplaces, coats of arms, etc. Since then, however, they have moved us to a modern clinic. Of course, this is easier to maintain, but at such a price! It is practically impossible to struggle against architecture. More and more, they're saying "clinic" instead of "castle" and "patients" in place of "guests." And so on . . . The words work.

On a whim, I accepted the role of the butcher in Audiberti's "L'Ampelour." It's a small role, but it's exhausting! Nothing is more tiring than taking the stage when one isn't well.

In my good moments, when I remember the insufficiency — and yet the perfection — of the Formulary, I pull in my horses. And as much for the each issue of I.S. So much could be made of so little:

Of time — of chance — of health — of money — of thought.

(And also) of good humor — of our hearts in our work — of love — and of precaution.

But the entourage! The standards! The others! The splits! It's complicated.

And this is always the insane demand of the world: be possessed of genius, yes, but live as we do. It's madness. And still they want me to conform to a new label on their files.

Since we are involved in a sumptuous potlatch, here is a title: "Des êtres se recontrent" by J.A. Schade, by far the greatest novel of the twentieth century, unfortunately very hard to come by. Maybe if you look in the classifieds . . . It ends with the little song "that we sang when we were children":

The rich, they go to market by carriage,
The poor, they go by foot.
Us, we amuse ourselves.

It's tough being in this dump and knowing the stakes. I too am becoming a symbol, and even here they agree. Will I stay, will I go, will my speech return or will I lose my memory again?

But I've had enough of angst. I want to change the topic of my text to the meaning of happiness; de Chirico is certainly a precursor from an architectural point of view, but an anxious architectural point of view. We will discover more cheerful things. Or we might demonstrate and denounce de Chirico's angst. In any case, my text wasn't clear enough.

There is nothing left for me to do but to get over this illness, seeing the impossibility of looking after yourself in the clinic . . . It's doubtful; it's been ten years. We are never really animals, not animals at all. Regardless of whether the impossibility of looking after yourself in the clinic is the indefensible opinion of the boss, I nevertheless maintain, absolutely in accord with K., that it is impossible to look after oneself in here. Which one of us the home destroys is not an issue to them. Not on purpose, of course. But who will it be?

I engage in situationist propaganda with one or two of the members of staff. Why not?

And how do I get over this thing? How can I trust anyone enough to get me out? It's virtually impossible.

Getting over it! They scare me! I'm happy to fantasize: they found a way to panic me so they could cart me off. In 1959, two busloads of cops were called (as far as I can remember). In all, 24 cops for your comrade. . . . But you don't think I could be that bad, do you? No one would send 24 cops. Besides, it never happened!

What else can I write, my dear Guy? I am ill. I am complaining: the 400 wishes, the loathing, the delirium, the curses, the "fatal and jealous love," the dangers, the childish impulses, L's2 prophecies of misfortune, and W's3 "listen to your mother."

Now the festivals are a sorry sight. I don't think you'll miss your chance. It's nowhere near as dreadful as everyone else's festivals. Festivals are the best thing here.

On the exclusion of AK4 , what more can I say? . . . These exclusions have to stop. I know it isn't easy: developments have to be foreseen, suspicious characters ought to be rejected in advance. That would be ideal, right? These exclusions have become part of the situationist mythology.

Edited from translations by Ken Knabb abd Reuben Keehan. From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/letters.html

• 1https://libcom.org/article/formulary-new-urbanism-gilles-ivain
• 2Gaëtan Langlais
• 3Gil J. Wolman
• 4Attila Kotányi

1. Why are the masses not concerned with art? Why does art remain the privilege of certain educated sectors of the bourgeois class?

The importance of the theme of the present questionnaire and the limited space allotted for answers oblige us to be somewhat schematic. The situationists' positions on these topics have been elaborated in more detail in the SI's journals (Internationale Situationniste, Der Deutsche Gedanke and Situationistisk Revolution1 ) and in the catalog [The Situationists and the New Forms of Action in Politics and Art] published on the occasion of the "Destruction of RSG 6" demonstration in Denmark last June.

The masses, i.e. the nonruling classes, have no reason to feel concerned with any aspects of a culture or an organization of social life that have not only been developed without their participation or their control, but that have in fact been deliberately designed to prevent such participation and control. They are concerned (illusorily) only with the by-products specifically produced for their consumption: the diverse forms of spectacular publicity and propaganda in favor of various products or role models.

This does not mean, however, that art subsists merely as a "privilege" of the bourgeois class. In the past every dominant class had its own art -- for the same reasons that a classless society will have none, will be beyond artistic practice. But the historical conditions of our time, associated with a major breakthrough in man's appropriation of nature and thus bearing the concrete project of a classless society, are such that major art in this period has necessarily been revolutionary. What has been called modern art, from its origins in the nineteenth century to its full development in the first third of the twentieth, has been an anti-bourgeois art. The present crisis of art is linked to the crisis of the workers movement since the defeat of the Russian revolution and the modernization of capitalism.

Today a fake continuation of modern art (formal repetitions attractively packaged and publicized, completely divorced from the original combativeness of their models) along with a voracious consumption of bits and pieces of previous cultures completely divorced from their real meaning (Malraux2 , previously their most ludicrous salesman in the realm of "theory," is now exhibiting them in his "Culture Centers") are what actually constitute the dubious "privilege" of the new stratum of intellectual workers that proliferates with the development of the "tertiary sector" of the economy. This sector is closely connected to that of the social spectacle: this intellectual stratum (the requirements of whose training and employment explain both the quantitative extension of education and its qualitative degradation) is both the most direct producer of the spectacle and the most direct consumer of its specifically cultural elements.

Two tendencies seem to us to typify the contemporary cultural consumption offered to this public of alienated intellectual workers:

On one hand, endeavors such as the "Visual Art Research Group" clearly tend toward the integration of the population into the dominant socioeconomic system, along the lines currently being worked out by repressive urbanism and the theorists of cybernetic control. Through a veritable parody of the revolutionary theses on putting an end to the passivity of separated spectators through the construction of situations, this "Visual Art" group strives to make the spectator participate in his own misery -- taking its lack of dialectics to the point of "freeing" the spectator by announcing that it is "forbidden not to participate" (tract at the Third Paris Biennial).

On the other hand, "New Realism," drawing heavily on the form of dadaism (but not its spirit), is an apologetic junk art. It fits quite well in the margin of pseudofreedom offered by a society of gadgets and waste.

But the importance of such artists remains very secondary, even in comparison with advertising. Thus, paradoxically, the "Socialist Realism" of the Eastern bloc, which is not art at all, nevertheless has a more decisive social function. This is because in the East power is maintained primarily by selling ideology (i.e. mystifying justifications), while in the West it is maintained by selling consumer goods. The fact that the Eastern bureaucracy has proved incapable of developing its own art, and has been forced to adapt the forms of the pseudoartistic vision of petty-bourgeois conformists of the last century (in spite of the inherent ineffectuality of those forms), confirms the present impossibility of any art as a ruling-class "privilege."

Nevertheless, all art is "social" in the sense that it has its roots in a given society and even despite itself must have some relation to the prevailing conditions, or to their negation. Former moments of opposition survive fragmentarily and lose their artistic (or postartistic) value to the precise extent they have lost the heart of opposition. With their loss of this heart they have also lost any reference to the mass of postartistic acts (of revolt and of free reconstruction of life) that already exist in the world and that are tending to replace art. This fragmentary opposition can then only withdraw to an aesthetic position and harden rapidly into a dated and ineffectual aesthetic in a world where it is already too late for aesthetics -- as has happened with surrealism, for example. Other movements are typical of degraded bourgeois mysticism (art as substitute for religion). They reproduce -- but only in the form of solitary fantasy or idealist pretension -- the forces that dominate present social life both officially and in fact: noncommunication, bluff, frantic desire for novelty as such, for the rapid turnover of arbitrary and uninteresting gadgets -- lettrism, for example, on which subject we remarked that "Isou, product of an era of unconsumable art, has suppressed the very idea of its consumption" and that he has "proposed the first art of solipsism" (Internationale Situationniste #4).

Finally, the very proliferation of would-be artistic movements that are essentially indistinguishable from one another can be seen as an application of the modern sales technique of marketing the same product under rival trademarks.

2. How can art be really "social"?

The time for art is over. The point now is to realize art, to really create on every level of life everything that hitherto could only be an artistic memory or an illusion, dreamed and preserved unilaterally. Art can be realized only by being suppressed. However, in contrast to the present society, which suppresses art by replacing it with the automatic functioning of an even more passive and hierarchical spectacle, we maintain that art can really be suppressed only by being realized.

2. (cont.) Does the political society in which you live encourage or discourage your social function as an artist?

This society has suppressed what you call the social function of the artist.

If this question refers to the function of employees in the reigning spectacle, it is obvious that the number of jobs to be had there expands as the spectacle does. The situationists, however, do not find this employment opportunity the least bit attractive.

If, on the other hand, we take this question as referring to the inheriting of previous art through new types of activity, beginning with contestation of the whole society, the society in question naturally discourages such a practice.

3. Do you think your aesthetics would be different if you lived in a socially, politically or economically different society?

Certainly. When our perspectives are realized, aesthetics (as well as its negation) will be superseded.

If we were presently living in an underdeveloped country or in one subjected to archaic forms of domination (colonialism or a Franco-type dictatorship), we would agree that artists can to a certain extent participate as such in popular struggles. In a context of general social and cultural backwardness the social function of the artist still retains a certain significance, and a not entirely sham communication is still possible within the traditional forms.

If we were living in a country governed by a "socialist" bureaucracy, where information about cultural and other experimentation in advanced industrialized countries over the last fifty years is systematically suppressed, we would certainly support the minimum demand for dissemination of truth, including the truth about contemporary Western art. We would do this despite the inevitable ambiguity of such a demand, since the history of modern art, though already accessible and even glorified in the West, is nonetheless still profoundly falsified; and its importation into the Eastern bloc would first of all be exploited by hacks like Yevtushenko in their modernization of official art.

4. Do you participate in politics or not? Why?

Yes, but in only one kind: together with various other forces in the world, we are working toward the linkup and the theoretical and practical organization of a new revolutionary movement.

All the considerations we are developing here simultaneously demonstrate the need to go beyond the failures of previous specialized politics.

5. Does an association of artists seem necessary to you? What would be its objectives?

There are already numerous associations of artists, either without principles or based on one or another extravagant absurdity -- mutual aid unions, mutual congratulation societies, alliances for collective careerism. Works that on the slightest pretext are proclaimed "collective projects" are fashionable at the moment, and are even put in the limelight at the pitiful Paris biennials, thus diverting attention from the real problems of the supersession of art. We regard all these associations with equal contempt and accept no contact whatsoever with this milieu.

We do believe that a coherent and disciplined association for the realization of a common program is possible on the bases worked out by the Situationist International, provided that the participants are so rigorously selected that they all demonstrate a high degree of creative originality, and that in a sense they cease to be "artists" or to consider themselves as artists in the old sense of the word.

It could in fact be questioned whether the situationists are artists at all, even avant-garde ones. Not only because almost everyone in the cultural scene resists acknowledging them as such (at least once the whole of the situationist program is involved) or because their interests extend far beyond the former scope of art. Their nature as artists is even more problematic on the socioeconomic level. Many situationists support themselves by rather dubious methods, ranging from historical research to poker, from bartending to running puppet theaters. It is striking that of the 28 members of the Situationist International whom we have had to exclude so far, 23 personally had a socially recognized and increasingly profitable role as artists: they were known as artists despite their membership in the SI. But as such they were tending to reinforce the position of our enemies, who want to invent a "situationism" so as to finish with us by integrating us into the spectacle as just one more doomsday aesthetic. Yet while doing this, these artists wanted to remain in the SI. This was unacceptable for us. The figures speak for themselves.

It goes without saying that any other "objectives" of any association of artists are of no interest to us, since we regard them as no longer having any point whatsoever.

6. How is the work you are presenting here related to these statements?

The enclosed work obviously cannot represent a "situationist art." Under the present distinctly antisituationist cultural conditions we have to resort to "communication containing its own critique," which we have experimented with in every accessible medium, from film to writing, and which we have theorized under the name of détournement. Since the Center for Socio-Experimental Art has limited its survey to the plastic arts, we have selected, from among the numerous possibilities of détournement as a means of agitation, Michèle Bernstein's antipainting Victory of the Bonnot Gang3 . It forms part of a series including Victory of the Paris Commune, Victory of the Great Jacquerie of 1358, Victory of the Spanish Republicans, Victory of the Workers Councils of Budapest and several other victories. Such paintings attempt to negate "Pop Art" (which is materially and "ideologically" characterized by indifference and dull complacency) by incorporating only toy objects and by making them meaningful in as heavy-handed a way as possible. In a sense this series carries on the tradition of the painting of battles; and also rectifies the history of revolts (which is not over) in a way that pleases us. It seems that each new attempt to transform the world is forced to start out with the appearance of a new unrealism.

We hope that our remarks here, both humorous and serious, will help to clarify our position on the present relationship between art and society.

For the Situationist International:

J.V. Martin, Jan Strijbosch, Raoul Vaneigem, René Vienet (6 December 1963)

Translated by Ken Knabb (slightly modified from the version in the Sitiuationist International Anthology).

• 1Der Deutsche Gedanke: German-language journal: the only issue (1963) consisted mostly of translations of French SI articles. Situationistisk Revolution: Danish journal edited by J.V. Martin.
• 2André Malraux: French novelist and critic who became Minister of Culture under de Gaulle.
• 3Bonnot Gang: French anarchist bandit gang (1911-1912). See https://libcom.org/tags/bonnot-gang

Abraham A. MOLES – judging by his letterhead: Doctor of Letters (Phil.), Doctor of Science (Phys.), engineer, assistant professor (University of Strasbourg), Professor of the E.O.S.T.1 – has addressed, on the 16th of December, 1963, this Open Letter to the Situationist Group:

Sir,

I learned about the Situationist Group through my friend and colleague Henri Lefebvre.2 The significance of the term “situationist” therefore comes largely from what he has told me and from reading a number of your bulletins, to which I ask you subscribe me.

The interpretation I have here adopted of the word “situation” is purely personal and may not agree with yours. It seems to me that, faced with the personal drama of technological alienation that we perceive on our own account; with the unbridled consumption of the work of art that destroys the very meaning of the term; with a certain number of concepts, such as anesthetic happiness or the planned obsolescence dear to Vance Packard; individuals may ask where can we locate creative originality in a refrigerated society – with or without the mystique of the vacuum clearer, according to Mr. Goldman[n].3 Freedom within society is rolled back little by little to zero, as and when the technocratic cyberneticians – to which I belong – progressively record three billion insects.4

Daily life is a series of situations; these situations belong to a very limited repertoire. Can we extend this repertoire, can we find new situations? It seems to me that this is where the word “situationist” makes sense. A situation seems to me [to be] a system of perceptions linked to a reaction system in the short term. I certainly would like to see in your publications a study on what you call “situation”: [for example] an individual who, for some reason, walks on the ceiling rather than the floor, is he in a new situation? A tightrope walker, is he in a rare situation?

It seems to me that two characters can appreciate this concept. First there is the novelty of a given situation in relation to the complete set of those that we know. For a traveler, a foreign language brings a great many new situations and there is, obviously, a grand metric: the “quantity of strangeness” that he perceives in the exterior world. We currently live in slightly new situations for which we need to create behavior. Here this term has a simple statistical character: that which is the value of X is not the value of Y, but there may be a “marginal situationism” in which individuals systematically search for “slightly queer” perceptions or behaviors.5

An important source of new situations will come from the extraordinary assembly of a large number of ordinary micro-situations; it this which creates the value of Graham Greene’s editorial technique, assembling in a gathered together sequence a great number of banal acts which are found to be extraordinary through their assembly. Each of these elementary situations [positions], correctly, rationally or conventionally linked to the exterior world, appeared perfectly normal: thousands of bourgeois find themselves here at every moment. The particular set of situations is, for him, extraordinary because it is not “customary” that they succeed each other in this order (Ministry of Fear, Stamboul Train, The Third Man).6 I would point out to you that the theoreticians of Information are capable (in pure theory) of measuring the quantity of novelty that such a system brings.

There are, moreover, intrinsically rare situations: for example, homosexuality is statistically less frequent than juvenile and conventional sexuality; the threesome is less [frequent] than lawful copulation. To kill a man – or a woman – is a rare situation, and thus, all the more interesting: the amount attached to the situation, as measured by a certain excursion outside the field of social freedom, is greater than a series of petty traffic violations (see Dostoevsky, because I think that detective fiction only brings, in this domain, a situational statistic (!) – fictitious what’s more). It is here that our freedom within society will soon be reduced to zero, from the moment where technology brings us the control of everyone by everyone, the matrix of elementary acts, and the machine to inventory the content of [the] thoughts of everyone at every moment.

To rarely break out of many norms, or to break a few very often. On this point we see appear thus two “dimensions” of situations: their intrinsic novelty or the rarity of their assembly.

Society controls more and more the first with the combined weapons of social morality, files and cards, medical prescriptions of the pharmacist, etc. It still controls the second badly and it seems to me that we can still live an “original” life in the Situationist sense, through a new pattern of small [and] mundane deviations.7 In their everyday life, the Surrealists had already sensed it although they had discovered that the worst enemy of Surrealism could be physical fatigue or the exhaustion of reserves of intellectual courage.

But it seems to me that – unless [we are] inconsistent vis-à-vis our own acceptance of the automobile, the refrigerator and the telephone, that is to say of the technological civilization in which we live – it is in the axis of technology that we need to look for new situations; and I ask in what way your movement accepts this. It seems to me extremely easy to define new situations based on a technical change; the physical conditions are already realised, or realisable, or reasonably conceivable. For example, living without gravity, living under water, walking on the ceiling, in a general way to live in strange environments are situations with which we are furnished by technology [la technique], in the classic sense of the term.

One might think that technology is far from our daily lives. But I think that would be to ignore that the household possessing a stove thermostat experiences a new situation. It is evident, from these examples, that it is the psychological impact of a situation which creates its value for a Situationist philosophy.

Here a politics takes shape: to ask the sociologists where are the social sources of convention [conventionalisme]. Most obviously, there is sexuality which is certainly open to a great number of new situations. The manufacture, biologically conceivable, of women with two pairs of breasts is, without any doubt, a proposition from biology to tradition. The invention, in addition to the two traditional sexes of one, two, three, n different sexes, offers a sexual combination which follows the theory of permutations and suggests rapidly an immense number of amorous situations (n factorial).

Another source of variation – thus of situations – could be based on the use of our senses. For example the “olfactory” arts have only developed an exclusive and highly sexualized rating system, and rather as an instrument of struggle between the sexes but never as an abstract art. In the artistic domain, a very large number of other situations will follow in the near future from technical capacities – and if American film directors only know how to make Cinerama (even more so Circlorama), perhaps it is legitimate to hope for here a source of new arts.8 The dream of Total Art is conditioned by the poverty of the artistic imagination.

What would become of a society made up of social strata based on those Michael Young calls the “Meritocracy” where they would be inscribed in the laws of the State? This is certainly the function of sociological fiction to prefigure. In fact, everyday life, as we know it, is capable of offering infinitely new situations through differences [écarts] which can appear negligible. I think, for example, of the great rift between men and women based on a random but definitive a priori categorization. It is no longer inconceivable that human beings change sex over the course of their life, and new situations, initially of an individual character and then a social one, are here perfectly conceivable. It seems to me that this would be one of the roles of the Situationist International: to explore them. If we simply assume that the vectors of attraction of men for women, women for men, become symmetrical instead of the temporal asymmetry which is the current statistical rule, we can assume that 90% of Theatre, Film, Literature and figurative art must be replaced.

We could continue this enumeration indefinitely, but it seems to me, in short, that the search for new situations which appears to me, if I understand correctly, one of the objects that Situationism could settle, is relatively easy and should be linked, among other things, to a study of what biological techniques bring, that various taboos leave virtually untouched.

In summary:

1. My interest in your movement comes from the basic idea of research for new situations, in a society constrained by technological happiness,

2. It seems to me that the term “situation” should be better defined or redefined from your own perspective and that a doctrinal report from you on this term would be necessary. In particular, the extent of the novelty value of a situation seems to me an indispensable criterion.

3. It is not difficult to find a great number of new situations – I have listed a dozen above – but we can push the reasoning further. These can be derived:

a) from the transgression of taboos which, within the field of legal freedom, still restrict our practical freedom, in particular in the sexual and biological domain;

b) from “crime” in the sense of the sociology of Durkheim;

c) from numerous strange deviations, but of a small magnitude around the norm;

d) finally, from technology, which is to say from the power of man over the laws of nature.

I pray that you accept, sir, the expression of my best sentiments.

●

Response to Moles, 26 December 1963.

Little head,

It was useless to write to us. We had already noted, like everyone, that the ambition which incites you to depart from your immediate functional use is always unfortunate, because the capacity to think of anything else does not enter into your programming.

Scarcely is it necessary, therefore, to point out that you have understood nothing in any of the situationist materials you have read (in which, evidently, you missed all the basics). Tilt. Redo your calculations, Moles, redo your calculations: here is a satisfaction that no positive result will ever rob you of.

If we looked for your “open letter” – which was lost to us, but which various people have read – it is because we thought that, coming from a being of your type and addressed to us, it could only be a letter of insults.9 Not even! We have no need of knowing if your letter truly reflects the average level of your clumsiness, or if you aimed sometimes at a joke. False problem, because all that you can ever do, in our eyes, is contained in the redundant and coarse joke that constitutes your existence.

Knowing the human appearance which your programmers have cloaked you in, one can appreciate that you dream of the production of women with n series of breasts. One supposes that you have difficultly having sex with less. Your personal circumstances aside, your pornographic dreams seem as ill-informed as your philosophical and artistic pretensions.

Yet there is a point where you were more lost still: despite your letterhead, you are a robot too rustic to make believe that you can take up the role of a university professor. Despite many deficiencies, the bourgeois university – before the cybernetic bureaucratisation that you so elegantly represent – leaves a certain margin of professional objectivity for its teachers. In the case where brilliant students have an opinion opposed to their examiner, sometimes the reality of their studies is recognised all the same; and above all, it should not be possible that extra-curricular grievances held against them are artlessly proclaimed in advance, with the results that can follow. But you, awe-stricken manager of the dusty authority which falls upon you, you cannot let pass the first opportunity to get even. This is how miserably (in the sense “like a coward” and in the sense “this was disastrous”; meditate on the anti-combinatorial value of a word), running at full speed on your little legs, you tried to remove one of our comrades from an examination last June, whose intelligence and humanity you probably envy. You think that we will forget your behaviour because of your failed blow? Error, Moles.

That machines like you are in the end, by way of official channels, superior to someone; that they have power to enforce their inept decisions, and thus the ones who unleash the stimulus. But such power is still fragile after so much ambition! We laugh at you.

Believe, nevertheless, that we will observe all that follows from your career with the attention it deserves.

[signed] Guy DEBORD

—

First published in Internationale Situationniste no. 9, August 1964, pp. 44-48. The letter from Guy Debord to Nicole Beaurain first published in Guy Debord, Correspondance, volume II, septembre 1960 – décembre 1964, Librairie Arthème Fayard, Paris, 14 février 2001. Translated from the French by Anthony Hayes, June 2013. Thanks to Alastair Hemmens for help with the translation. Translator's notes below. https://thesinisterquarter.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/correspondence-with-a-cybernetician/

• 1L’école et observatoire des sciences de la Terre: School and Observatory for Earth Sciences. A French Grande École associated with the University of Strasbourg.
• 2To understand the S.I.’s ‘relations’ with Henri Lefebvre at this time, late 1963, see their circular Into the Trashcan of History!
• 3Vance Packard, an American writer whose three most famous books, The Hidden Persuaders (1957 ), The Status Seekers (1959), The Waste Makers (1960), respectively criticised the advertising industry, social stratification and planned obsolescence. Packard’s arguments, in essence liberal and non-revolutionary, were nonetheless important insights into the changing nature of modern capitalism in the two decades after World War II. Lucien Goldmann was a Marxist academic who had, by turns, influenced and incurred the wrath of the Situationist International. See, in particular, The Avant-Garde of Presence, I.S. no 8 – we hope to present a more accurate version of this translation in the near future.
• 4‘les trois milliards d’insectes’: no doubt Moles deploys this term with some irony, and yet it appears to reveal also his attitude, i.e. to deal with the human race as mere objects of enquiry.
• 5‘slightly queer’: English in the original.
• 6All works of Graham Greene’s. The first are two novels, whereas the third is best known as the screenplay Greene wrote for Carol Reed’s 1949 film, The Third Man, starring Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles. Greene later turned his screenplay into a novella.
• 7‘pattern’: English in the original.
• 8In 1963 Cinerama and Circlorama were two technically advanced film shooting and projection systems. The latter projected onto a fully circular screen, i.e. a 360° view. It is perhaps better known in its iteration as a system used by the Disney Corporation: Circle-Vision 360°. The Situationists had already written on a similar process known as ‘Circarama’ in a 1958 article criticising the tendency of new cinema techniques (and technology tout court) being presented “as a passive substitute for the unitary artistic activity that is now possible” (In and Against Cinema, I.S. no. 1). It is worth noting that the 1960s saw the highpoint of big budget Hollywood films using Cinerama or related systems.
• 9Letter from Guy Debord to Nicole Beaurain, November 29, 1963:

  Dear Nicole,

  We have not received any letter from Moles. As our address has long been changed, the choice of posting to the old one has everything of the pretense.

  The most probable is that he prefers only to use copies – perhaps to avoid an ear bashing? – without having ever posted the original.

  This type of excess [franchise] is not uncommon among such thinkers.

  Sincerely,

  [signed] Guy