Situationist International

Situationist International (SI) - international, 1960s-70s
aka Situationiste Internationale
The SI was an international group of revolutionary socialists, founded in France by former members of the Lettrist International.
The Situationists fused Marxism with an analysis of the power of modern culture and the emptiness of everyday life under capitalism

to be updated

From; 'What Next' no. 30, 2005

The Story Of Our Origins

Some sections of "le roman de nos origines" from La Banquise No. 2 ( 1983 ) in english translation.

These three sections are from the second part of the article.

Written in English by David Blanchard, 1995. First published in Drunken Boat. Also published in Revolutionary Romanticism; edited by Max Blechman, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1999.

Internationale Situationiste, aka International Situationist: the journal of the Situationist International - Issues 1-12

If the SI's activity had not recently led to some publicly scandalous and threatening consequences it is certain that no French publication would have reviewed our recent books.

Situationist International on Films

-On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Period of Time
-Critique of Separation

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On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Period of Time

Pre-Situationist International Documents

A series of documents by later SI members.

-The Alba Platform
-What was the Bauhaus?
-A User's Guide to Détournement
-Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency's Conditions of Organization and Action
-Formulary for a New Urbanism
-Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography

A lot of the texts in the library come from the "SI Anthology" whose contents are set out below, BUT there's lot of other stuff that doesn't...

Situationist International Anthology

Edited and translated from the French by Ken Knabb 1981 (2nd printing 1989; 3rd printing 1995) 406 pages

PREFACE (updated)

La Société du Spectacle was first published in 1967 by Editions Buchet-Chastel (Paris); it was reprinted in 1971 by Champ Libre (Paris). The first English translation was published by Black & Red in 1970. It was revised in 1977, incorporating numerous improvements suggested by friends and critics of the first translation.

Buy Society of the Spectacle now

Ideology and the Wage System

Capitalism transforms life into the money necessary for living. One tends to do any particular thing towards an end other than that implied by the content of the activity. The logic of alienation : one is an other; the wage system makes one foreign to what one does, to what one is, to other people.

Preface

STARTING FROM SCRATCH

1

IN A MOMENT of universal history, the Situationist International imposed itself as the thought of the collapse of a world, a downfall that has now begun under our very eyes.

2

I. Capitalism: A Society Without Culture

1

Culture can be defined as the ensemble of means through which a society thinks of itself and shows itself to itself, and thus decides on all aspects of the use of its available surplus-value. That is to say, it is the organization of everything over and beyond the immediate necessities of the society's reproduction.