'Those who make half a Revolution only dig their own graves' the Situationists since 1969 - Christopher Gray

"Nous vivons en enfants perdus nos aventures incomplètes."
Debard - Hurlements en faveur de Sade

[either “We live our incomplete adventures like lost children” or “We live like lost children, our adventures incomplete” - or both?]

May 1968 and France on the verge of anarchy ... An atmosphere of martial law in Paris and hundreds of factories occupied . . . 140 American cities in flames after the killing of Martin Luther King ... German and English universities occupied . . . Hippie ghettoes directly clashing with the police state ... The sudden exhilarating sense of how many people felt the same way ... The new world coming into focus ... The riots a great dance in the streets ...

Today — nothing. The Utopian image has faded from the streets. Just the endless traffic, the blank eyes that pass you by, the nightmarish junk we're all dying for. Everyone seems to have retreated into themselves, into closed occult groups. The revolutionary excitement that fired the sixties is dead. The 'counter-culture' a bad joke. No more aggression, no more laughter, no more dreams. 'To talk of life today is like talking of rope in the house of a hanged man.'

Yet there were thousands and thousands of people there.

What has happened to us all? The Paris May Days were the end for the S.I. On the one hand, the police state pressure on the French Left after May made any overt action virtually suicidal. On the other, the S.I., because it couldn't think its way beyond the debacle, finally received the cultural accolade it had always dreaded: it entered 'the heaven of the spectacle' by the scruff of the neck, and that was that. The atmosphere in France after May was one of utter defiance coupled with complete impotence, and 'situationism' was the perfect ideological expression of this frustration. The S.I. became famous, and its truth stood out in all its bitterness: a brilliant theoretical critique of society without any grasp of the real problems of what to do about it. What is to be done? Reread Korsch and Duchamp, mon vieux.

The movement disintegrated. The last copy of the magazine came out in late 1969. The only significant text to emerge in four years is La Veritable Scission dans l'lnternationale (1972) by Debord and Sanguinetti — a laboured and increasingly desperate attempt to come to grips with French students' attitude of passive and lifeless worship of revolutionary ideas, but remaining silent on the vital issues of organisation and activity which alone could lead them out of their dilemma. The organisation itself broke up amidst bitter tactical wrangling over 1969-70. Khayati and Vienet resigned. Vaneigem fried, predictably enough. The others went their different ways...

At present there are said to be between two and four members of the S.I. — including poor Chtcheglov in his Central European madhouse. Perhaps one should add there are stories that the SI remained intact and really just disappeared owing to police pressure and is now working on an underground organisation. Sounds a bit like King Arthur and His Knights, but you never can tell. Certainly it seems unlikely that the last has been heard of either Debord or Vaneigem.

The presence of the S.I. never made itself properly felt in either England or America. The English and what could well have become the American sections of the S.I. were excluded just before Christmas 1967. Both groups felt that the perfection and publicisation of a theoretical critique was not sufficient: they wanted political subversion and individual 'therapy' to converge in an uninterrupted everyday activity. Some of this they saw, though on a very limited and local scale, the following year: the Americans as The Motherfuckers and the English as King Mob. Neither group survived that apocalyptic summer of 1968. Henceforward the dissemination of situationist ideas in both countries was dissociated from the real organisation that alone could have dynamised them. On the one hand this led to obscure post-grad groups sitting over their pile of gestetnered situationist pamphlets, happy as Larry in their totally prefabricated identity. On the other, the more sincere simply went straight up the wall: The Angry Brigade, very heavily influenced by situationist ideas (translate Les Enrages into English . . . ) destroying themselves at the same time as they took the critique of the spectacle to its most blood-curdling spectacular extreme.

One of the first English members of the S.I. writes from the States:

Seen from over here, the S.I. has a lot to answer for: it has spawned a whole stew of 'revolutionary organisations', usually composed of half a dozen moralists of the transparent relationship; these have inevitably foundered after a few months — though not without bequeathing weighty self-criticisms to a breathless posterity. Idiots. Worse: curés. Yet their traits are undoubtedly linked organically, genetically, to the original S.I. in its negative aspects: the S.I. is responsible for its monstrous offspring. Somehow or other, the S.I.'s 'original sin' is tied up with a shift from the sardonic megalomania of iconoclasm to the true megalomania of priesthood. Moving, justifiably, from 'culture' to 'politics' the S.I. threw the baby out with the bathwater. One day somebody (I forget who) took refuge up a lamp-post, while freaked on acid, from a derive-cum-discussion-of-Lukacs with a merry band of situationists. How is it conceivable that this act could be greeted with blank incomprehension (and — c'est bien la mot — displeasure) by Debond, drunkard extraordinary? Yet it was so.

What then remains of the S.I.? What is still relevant? Above all, I think, its iconoclasm, its destructivity. What the S.I. did was to redefine the nature of exploitation and poverty. Ten years ago people were still demonstrating against the state of affairs in Vietnam — while remaining completely oblivious to the terrible state they were in themselves. The S.I. showed exactly how loneliness and anxiety and aimlessness have replaced the nineteenth century struggle for material survival, though they are still generated by the same class society. They focused on immediate experience, everyday life as the area people most desperately wanted to transform.

Rediscovering poverty cannot be separated from rediscovering what wealth really means. The S.I. rediscovered the vast importance of visionary politics, of the Utopian tradition — and included art, in ail its positive aspects, in this tradition. People today will never break out of their stasis for the sake of minor rearrangement. There have been too many already. Only the hope of a total change will inflame anybody. Who the hell is going to exert themselves to get another frozen chicken, another pokey room? But the possibilities of living in one's own cathedral . . .

What was basically wrong with the S.I. was that it focused exclusively on an intellectual critique of society. There was no concern whatsoever with either the emotions or the body. The S.I. thought that you just had to show how the nightmare worked and everyone, would wake up. Their quest was for the perfect for the perfect formula, the magic charm that would disperse the evil shell: This pursuit of the perfect intellectual formula meant inevitably that situationist groups were based on a hierarchy of intellectual ability — and thus on disciples and followers, on fears and exhibitionism, the whole political horror trip. After their initial period, creativity, apart from its intellectual forms, was denied expression—and in this lies the basic instability and sterility of their own organisations.

In the last analysis they made the same mistake as all left-wing intellectuals: they thought that everyone else was plain thick. The poor workers don't know what's going on, they need someone to tell them. But people in the streets, in the offices and factories know damn well what's going on, even if they can't write essays about all its theoretical ramifications. The point is that they can't do anything about it. What needs understanding is the state of paralysis everyone is in. Certainly all conditioning comes from society but it is anchored in the body and mind of each individual, and this is where it must be dissolved. Ultimately the problem is an emotional, not an intellectual one. All the analyses of reification in the world won't cause a neurosis to budge an inch. Certainly a massive propaganda campaign to publicise the possibility of a revolution, of a total transformation of the world, is vitally important — but it will prove totally ineffective if it isn't simultaneous with the creation of mass therapy.

Look, after so many, many pages, let's try and be honest, just for a moment. I feel very fucked up myself, and I know it's my responsibility. Yet -whenever I go out on the streets my being somehow reels back appalled: these terrible faces, these machines, they are me too, I know; yet somehow that's not my fault. Everyone's life is a switch between changing oneself and changing the world. Surely they must somehow be the same thing and a dynamic balance is possible. I think the S.I. had this for a while, and later they lost it. I want to find it again — that quickening in oneself and in others, that sudden happiness and beauty. It could connect, could come together. Psychoanalyst and Trotskyists are both silly old men to the child. Real life is elsewhere.