'Everyone will live in his own cathedral' the Situationists 1958-1964 - Christopher Gray

YOUNG GUYS, YOUNG GIRLS
Talent wanted for getting out of this and playing
No special qualifications
Whether you're beautiful or you're bright
History could be on your side
WITH THE SITUATIONISTS
No telephone. Write or turn up:
32 rue de In Montagne-Genevieve, Paris 5e.

- Internationale Situationniste 1, 1958

Summer of 1958: number one of a new, unusually glossy avant-garde magazine, Internationale Situationniste, began to appear around the Latin Quarter of Paris. Its contents were quite as terrifying as its name. Surrealism, the cinema, automation, town-planning, politics, games theory, the Beat Generation and the freedom of the press were all, in rapid succession, dismissed as being beneath contempt. Western culture and civilisation in their entirety were, so it seemed, totally bankrupt. Yet there was something in which these 'situationists' believed—only its nature was far from clear. What were 'the transcendance of art', 'the construction of situations', 'drifting', 'psychogeography', 'unitary urbanism' and 'revolutionary play'? Why choose pinups of girls in raincoats, on beaches, or supine on the backs of horses to illustrate these concepts? Why the maps of Utopian countryside, the photos and detailed diagrams of modern cities? Why the line drawing of an apparatus for generating Gaussian distribution? ... And how could you feel such disgust with everything ... ?

Intellectual terrorism has never been anything particularly surprising on the Left Bank. What was unusual was that Internationale Situationniste seemed to have financial and organisational backing on a par with its megalomania. It wasn't just a 'magazine'. The articles presented a coherent and interwoven attack on the whole of contemporary social life and culture. Half were written collectively and left unsigned. Editors and contributors were French, Dutch, Belgian, German, Scandanavian, Italian and Arab; all apparently belonging to the same international organisation. Physically the magazine was well co-ordinated. The layout was eminently sober, the paper the highest gloss, and the covers glowing gold metal-board. These, which must have been ludicrously expensive, were apparently to stop the thing getting wet in the rain. And it was dead cheap. And there was no copyright.

Basically the first number revolved around an attack on art. The situationists central thesis was that art, in all its traditional forms, was completely played out. Dada had marked the end of western culture; no major self-regeneration was possible. At the same time western civilisation had reached the point where mechanisation and automation had, potentially at least, eliminated the need for almost all traditional forms of labour, opening up perspectives of unprecedented leisure. The situationists suggested that this leisure could only be filled by a new type of creativity—a creativity that started where 'art' left off. Imagination should be applied directly to the transformation of reality itself, not to its symbols in the form of philosophy, literature, painting, etc. Equally, this transformation should not be in the hands of a small body of specialists but should be made by everyone. it was normal everyday life that should be made passionate and rational and dramatic, not its reflection in a separated 'world of art'. "The modern artist does not paint but creates directly... Life and art make One." (Tristan Tzara).

The situationists, however, were not just art theorists. The cultural crisis was a symptom of a far greater breakdown.

"A new form of mental illness has swept the planet: banalisation. Everyone is hypnotised by work and by comfort: by the garbage disposal unit, by the lift, by the bathroom, by the washing machine. This state of affairs, born of a rebellion against the harshness of nature, has far overshot its goal—the liberation of man from material cares—and become a life-destroying obsession. Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit. A totally different spiritual attitude has become essential—and it can only be brought into being by making our unconscious desires conscious, and by creating entirely new ones. And by a massive propaganda campaign to publicise these desires.

(Gilles Ivain, Formula for a New City, I.S. 1, 1958)."

The situationists programme was based on what they called 'the construction of situations'. In the first place this meant the bringing together and fusion of various separated art forms in the creation of a single unified environment. Nor was this process restricted to a new focusing of contemporary artistic activity. All the great artistic visions and masterpieces of the past should be pillaged and their contents made real: 'subverted', as the situationists called it, as part of a real script. All scientific knowledge and technical skill could be brought into play in the same way. For the first time art and technology could become one: put on the same practical footing with reality. Working out the widest possible unified field of such 'situations' would reveal the true dynamic and shape of the city. Most utopian visionaries since Fourier paled before the situationists:

"Everyone will live in their own cathedral. There will be rooms awakening more vivid fantasies than any drug. There will be houses where it will be impossible not to fall in love. Other houses will prove irresistably attractive to the benighted traveller . . ."

(Formula for a New City)

The point was not just the creation of an exterior environment, however vast or however lovely.

What we should be aiming at is a sort of situationist-oriented psychoanalysis. Those concerned having to discover within themselves desires for particular environments in order to make them real—the diametrically opposed attitude to that taken by the various neo-Freudian groups. Everyone must search for what they love, for what attracts them...

(The Construction of Situations: An Introduction, I.S. 1, 1958).

The point was the conjuring up and the mastery of immediate subjective experience. "Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organisation of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us." (From an article by Guy Debord in the same number.) Thus the situationist project, as originally outlined, was the liberation of desire in the building of a new world—a world with which we will be permanently in love.

This put them in much the same position as the first Surrealists—and beyond Surrealism in the same position as a liberated psychoanalysis. Or, more simply, in exactly the same position as children. For their underlying philosophy was one of experiment and play—but play equipped with the whole of twentieth century technology. Ultimately all that was involved was the simplest thing in the world: wanting to make your dreams come true. And its enemies were equally simple: sterile subjective fantasy on the one hand and, on the other, its objective counterpart: the world of art.

Rediscovery of the complete cultural turning-point reached by a number of small avant-garde groups during the years 1910 to 1925—above all by the Dadaists and the Surrealists —was the main achievement of the Lettrist movement. The Lettrists, another movement almost totally unknown in this country, evolved in Paris during the years immediately after the Second World War. Starting from Dada, from the complete dissolution of artistic form, they developed in a number of different directions. One group was concerned with Dada-type cultural sabotage, another with inventing a new activity to replace art; another, crystallising around Isidore Isou, concerned with aesthetics and art in itself.

Perhaps the most famous stunt pulled off by the first two groups was their sabotage of the Easter High Mass at Notre-Dame in 1950. Just before the High Mass, a small group of Lettrists, including one who had previously intended to be ordained, slipped unobserved into the back of the cathedral. In a sideroom they caught, gagged, stripped and bound one of the priests. The ex-Catholic Lettrist put on the priest's vestments and, just before the service was about to begin, gravely ascended the steps to the main pulpit. A moment's respectful silence. "Freres, Dieu est mort," [Brothers, God is dead] he said; and began benignly to discuss the implications of this conclusion. Several minutes passed before the congregation actually registered what was happening. He managed to escape out of the back of the cathedral but the congregation caught up with him on the quais where they proceeded to try and lynch him. The Lettrist, alas, was forced to surrender to the police in order to save his neck.

Their taste for this kind of contribution to culture led to a complete break between the anti-and-post-artistic factions and Isidore Isou and his followers. The leftwing of the Lettrists had, after a hectic summer in 1952, just wrecked Chaplin's press conference for Limelight in the Ritz Hotel and left for Brussels when they heard that !sou had denounced them to the newspapers. They promptly denounced him back, called themselves L'Internationale Lettriste and set up their own magazine, Potlach. If until this time lsou had been the dominant personality in the Lettrist movement, L'Intematianale Lettriste saw the rising of the star of Guy Debord.

Debord, born in 1931, was at this time producing some brilliantly nihilistic anti-art. Memoires, his first essay in 'subversion', was a book put together entirely from prefabricated elements whose happiest touch was its binding in sheets of sandpaper. The book couldn't be put away in book-shelves because whenever it was taken out it ripped the covers of the books on either side. The same period saw his first film Hurlernents en faveur de Sade (1952). This was a feature length film which, far from being pornographic, lacked any images at all; the audience being plunged into complete darkness from beginning to end apart from a few short bursts of random monologue when the screen went white. The last twenty-four minutes were uninterrupted silence and obscurity. In France there was considerable violence when the film was first 'shown'; in London, however, when the first house came out at the ICA they didn't even tell the queue for the next performance that there wasn't anything to see. Intellectuals really are a hopeless lot.

Socially, L'Internationale Lettriste was defined both by its refusal to work, and thus its penury, and by its grandiose desire to regenerate the nature of immediate experience. The tensions implicit in this are obvious. Total despair was never far away. Debord related how one night they were all drunk and stoned in someone's apartment. It was way into the night and almost everyone had crashed. Debord was smoking kif by himself when suddenly he thought he could smell gas. He walked down a corridor to the kitchen at the far end of the apartment. Two friends were sitting drinking in silence at the kitchen table. All the windows were shut and the gas was turned on full. They had hoped that the whole sick crew would die painlessly in their sleep. This was just symptomatic. They were drinking and doping a lot of the time. There was more than one attempted murder and several suicides. Someone jumped out of several hotel room windows before they finally made it.

Not that their way of life was one of unbroken hippie gloom. Over the whole mid-fifties there was sustained work on their 'activity to replace art'. In 1953 Ivan Chtcheglov, then aged nineteen and using the pseudonym Gilles lvain, wrote a short manifesto called Formula for a New City. The text was a badly needed shot in the arm for French Surrealism—increasingly bogged down in virtually conventional art and cultural rehabilitation since the end of the twenties. Chtcheglov's central theme was that the city was itself the total work of art, the total work of real life so long sought for. Need for total creation has always been inseparable from the need to play with architecture: to play with time and space. Only in the possibilities offered by the real distribution of time and space can all dreams become true and become one. This manifesto seems one of the most brilliant single pieces of writing produced since the heyday of modern art just after the First World War. Unfortunately his own visions were to prove too much for Chtcheglov: he ended up in the lunatic asylum a few years later.

Before this, however, he was to play a leading role in developing the two main practical techniques used by the Lettrists at this time: drifting and psychogeography. The first could be described as a sort of free association in terms of city space: the idea being simply to follow the streets, go down the alleys, through the doors, over the walls, up the trees and into the sunlight, etc., that one found most attractive; to wander, alone or with one's friends, following no plan but the solicitation of the architecture one encountered. Drifting was an attempt to orient oneself in the absence of any practical considerations: to find the types of architecture one desired unconsciously. Amongst other adventures, they found down by the Seine a door leading to what was supposed to be a small tool store but was in fact a concealed entrance to those parts of the Paris catacombs that are closed to the public; apparently a large proportion of the total area. Hopefully many happy hours were spent with the matches, the skulls and the rats.

'Psychogeography' was the study and correlation of the material obtained from drifting. It was used on the one hand to try and work out new emotional maps of existing areas and, on the other, to draw up plans for bodies of 'situations' to be interlocked in the new Utopian cities themselves. During the same period they were also toying with new forms of communication and deconditioning within the city: L'Internationale Lettriste were the first artists to understand the enormous potential of graffiti as a means of literary expression today. A number of the slogans they chalked or painted up—'Never Work', 'Free the passions', 'Let us live'—were to turn up again, more than twenty years later, on the walls of the Latin Quarter in May 1968. They also painted slogans down their trousertegs and across their ties and shoes. The two latter items they tried to sell.

The actual transition from L'Internationale Lettriste to L'Internationale Situafionniste doesn't seem to have marked any major change in the nature of their activities. 1957 saw Debord's Rapport sur la construction des situations, the first theorisation of the new concepts of situation and spectacle, and they wanted to be dissociated once and for all from lsou and the other art-ridden Lettrists definitively. On the 28 July 1957 delegates from L'Internationale Lettriste, from the largely Scandanavian and German Mouvement pour un Bauhaus Imaginiste and from a dubious London Psychogeographical Committee met at a formal congress at Cosio d'Arroscia in Italy and decided to amalgamate. L'Internationale Situationniste was born.

Sex. It's O.K., says Mao, but not too much of it.

graffiti, Censier, '68

The first few years of the SI were devoted to a systematic exposition of Lettrist philosophy and lifestyle; to getting a magazine out regularly, and distributing it internationally. The number of card-carrying members of the SI at this time seems to have been around thirty or forty people, but presumably many more were involved on a less formal basis or were just very considerably influenced. Most were in their late twenties and were living off the usual expedients of what was still 'bohemian' life: grants, small pockets of bourgeois money, petty crime, hustling, and occasional labour in culture or elsewhere.

At this point the SI really was an international movement. Autonomous groups were functioning over most of Europe. The Scandanavian, Dutch, German and Italian sections organised their own demonstrations and produced their own publications—the German Spur ran into trouble with the police—while issues of the Paris magazine appeared steadily, all equally sober, equally luxuriously produced, each with its glowing metal covers a different colour. The terrorism, wit and general megalomania held good. So did the flow of photographs of girls, soldiers, bombings, comic strip frames, maps of cities and diagrams of labyrinths, cathedrals and gardens.

In Italy, Pinot-Gallizio invented 'industrial painting' --painting produced mechanically, by the roll. A leaflet by Michele Berstein read:

Among the advantages no more problems with format, the canvas being cut under the eyes of the satisfied customer; no more uncreative periods, the inspiration behind industrial painting, thanks to a well contrived balance of chance and machinery, never drying up; no more metaphysical themes, machines aren't up to them; no more dubious reproductions of the Masters; no more vernissages. And naturally, very soon, no more painters, not even in Italy ... (IS 2, 1958).

Industrial painting was exhibited and sold, pokerfaced, in Turin, Milan and Venice that year.

Their dominant intellectual concern was still with the fusion of all art forms in a new Utopian town-planning while their experiments with architecture and the use of cities continued to provide a practi-cal means of self-expression, a real group cohesion on the level of everyday life. Large-scale drifts, sometimes using several teams linked by walkie-talkies, were undertaken; psychogeographic studies and architectural plans were worked out in detail. "We are only at the beginning of urban civilisation ... Twentieth century architects should be building adventures..." (IS 3, 1959). Debord made two more films, shorts this time, Sur le passage de quelques personnes a travers une asset courte unite de temps (1959) and Critique de la Separation (1960-61). Neither got beyond elitist avant-garde screen-ings. The only other films to which they bear the slightest resemblance are the early films of Resnais—and for good reasons. Close examination of both would show that Resnais knew Debord's films very well and had quite cynically ripped them off.

During this initial period the SI rose to some sort of underground fame, particularly within Northern Europe, though almost exclusively as a group of anti-art theoreticians and revolutionary architects. They were invited to participate in a number of exhibitions and events; generally they refused or just went along to cause trouble. The few attempts they made to work under official patronage invariably ended in disaster. Plans for the conversion of Claude-Nicholas Ledoux's complex of buildings at la Saline-de-Chaux, for the detailed study of Les Hanes and for a labyrinth to be built in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam all proved too crazy for the various authorities concerned and had to be scrapped.

What the SI in Paris was trying to work out was a new revolutionary critique of society: to discover forms of organisation and activity more effective than the slapstick anarchy of the Lettrists. Henri Lefebvre had been their first mentor in social revolution. Once a leading French Communist Party theoretician, Lefebvre had resigned from the Party and become increasingly anarchistic; his basic contention was that contemporary society wasn't suffering from any shortage of consumer goods but from a new poverty, a poverty of everyday life, and that revolution today must be focused on the regeneration of this area. The SI, though they relied increasingly on this concept of everyday life, tended to reject Lefebvre's philosophy as being basically academic and personal relations between them deteriorated and finally petered out. In 1960 they passed under the influence of Paul Cardan and Socialisme ou Barbaric (Solidarity in England), a neo-Marxist group devoted largely to redefining the nature of capitalist exploitation during its present bureaucratic and consumer-oriented phase, though also far more involved in the realities of shopfloor agitation and struggle against the unions than either Lefebvre or the SI.

The working class gradually became something less of an abstraction. They began a systematic re-interpretation of European revolutionary history: of Fourier and the Utopians, of the young Marx, of the anarchists, of the Commune, of the terrorists, of all the massacred ultra-left social experiments that broke out amidst the proletarian and peasant uprisings of the first third of the twentieth-century. Their attack on leaders and all hierarchical political organisations became increasingly savage as did their insistence on popular spontaneity, violence and the ability of a revolutionary proletariat to evolve adequate political forms on the spot.

Socialisme ou Barbaric left them with their central, if somewhat summary, political concept: that of the various attempts at workers' total self-management which, under the name of Workers Councils, have emerged from the revolutionary wars of the twentieth-century as the most consistent experiments yet made in integrally democratic organisation: St. Petersburg 1905, Turn 1920, Catalonia 1936, Budapest 1956.

Socialisme ou Barbarie also left them with the need for developing a new revolutionary critique of political economy: of the commodity-form denounced by Marx as the basis of all our social and individual alienation. They developed what was to become their most famous single concept—that of the spectacle, Used from the very first as a term to designate contemporary culture—French: spectacle a spectacle, a circus, a show, an exhibition—a one-way transmission of experience; a form of 'communication' to which one side, the audience, can never reply; a culture based on the reduction of almost everyone to a state of abject non-creativity: of receptivity, passivity and isolation. Now they saw that the same structure applied not only to cultural and leisure 'activity', not only to political organisation (whether that of the ruling classes or that of the so-called 'Left') but that this experience of passivity, isolation and abstraction was the universal experience imposed by contem-porary capitalism: an experience radiating from its basic alienation, the commodity. Henceforward, consumer capitalism was to be simply the society of the spectacle.

The first thing this meant was that the situationists could no longer see themselves as an art movement of any sort at all: art was no more than the consumer good par excellence. Any work of art, however radical, could be digested by modern capitalism and turned into the opposite of all it had meant to those who originally created it. From the point of view of Paris—increasingly that of Debord whose intransigence was reinforced by the appearance of Raoul Vaneigem (born 1934)—all the other sections were dabbling far too much in 'experimental art' and courting the danger of being separated from what was essentially a total programme. Modern society wouldn't find any difficulty in reabsorbing individual works of art as the latest chic revolutionary consumer good; and thus the rejection of consumer society made by the whole group would be compromised.

The situation exploded in the first series of the 'exclusions' for which the Si was to become notorious. "The architects Alberts and Oudejans, by accepting a commission to build a church at Volendam, have automatically excluded themselves from the S.I." Exclusion followed exclusion over 1961 and 62, in the best surrealist manner. The chaos only ended with the virtual disintegration of the Scandanavian, Dutch, Italian and German sections. At the same time a number of situationists who were becoming personally famous as artists—Constant in Amsterdam, Asger Jorn in Scandanavia, Alex Trocchi in London—either dropped out or drifted away to follow individual careers. All these exclusions and break-ups, which set off a whole myth as to the situationists fanaticism and glacial arrogance, really revolved around whether it was possible to create anything in contemporary society strong enough to withstand the massive pressures brought to bear upon it or whether the only thing was denunciation, expose.

The following texts came from this initial, predominantly 'artistic' period of situationist activity.