The social space for the consumption of leisure. The circular grey surface that can be seen toward the top left of the picture (Milwaukee Stadium) is occupied by the 18 members of two baseball teams. In the immediate surrounding area, there are 43,000 spectators. They themselves are surrounded by an immense area in which their empty cars are parked.

The most superficial and constantly reiterated platitude of leftist sociologists during recent years is that leisure has become a major factor in advanced capitalist society. This platitude is the basis of countless debates for or against the importance of a reformist rise in the standard of living, or of workers’ participation in the prevailing values of the society into which they are becoming increasingly integrated. What is counterrevolutionary about all this verbiage is that it equates free time with passive consumption, as if the only use of free time was the opportunity to become an increasingly full-time spectator of the established absurdities. The illusions manifested in a particularly ponderous symposium of these sociologists (Arguments #12-13) were soundly refuted in two articles in Socialisme ou Barbarie #27. In the first, Pierre Canjuers wrote:

“While modern capitalism constantly develops new needs in order to increase consumption, people’s dissatisfaction remains the same as ever. Their lives no longer have any meaning beyond a rush to consume, and this consumption is used to justify the increasingly radical frustration of any creative activity or genuine human initiative — to the point that people no longer even see this lack of meaning as important.”

In the second article, Jean Delvaux noted that the issue of consumption has not superseded the qualitative distinction between the poor and the wealthy (four out of five wage workers still have to constantly struggle to make ends meet). More significantly, he pointed out that there is no reason to worry about whether or not the proletariat participates in the prevailing social or cultural values, because “there no longer are any such values.” And he added the essential point that the present culture, “increasingly separated from society and from people’s lives (painters painting for other painters, novelists writing novels read only by other novelists about the impossibility of writing a novel) — this culture, insofar as it has any originality, is no longer anything but a constant self-denunciation: a denunciation of the society and a rage against culture itself.”

The emptiness of leisure stems from the emptiness of life in present-day society, and it cannot be filled within the framework of that society. This emptiness is simultaneously expressed and concealed by the entire cultural spectacle, in three basic forms.

The “classic” form of culture continues to exist, whether reproduced in its pure form or in latter-day imitations (tragic theater, for example, or bourgeois politeness).

Secondly, there are the countless degraded spectacular representations through which the prevailing society presents itself to the exploited in order to mystify them (televised sports, virtually all films and novels, advertising, the automobile as status symbol).

Finally, there is an avant-garde negation of the spectacle, a negation which is often unconscious of its basis but which is the only “original” aspect of present-day culture. The “rage against culture” expressed within this latter form ends up arriving at the same indifference that proletarians as a class have toward all the forms of spectacular culture. Until the spectacle itself has been negated, any audience watching the negation of the spectacle can no longer be distinguished from that suspect and unhappy audience consisting of isolated artists and intellectuals. When the revolutionary proletariat manifests itself as such, it will not be as a new audience for some new spectacle, but as people actively participating in every aspect of their lives.

There is no revolutionary problem of leisure — of an emptiness to be filled — but a problem of free time. As we have already said: “There can be no free use of time until we possess the modern tools for the construction of everyday life. The use of such tools will mark the leap from a utopian revolutionary art to an experimental revolutionary art” (Debord, “Theses on Cultural Revolution,”1 Internationale Situationniste #1). The supersession of leisure through the development of an activity of free creation-consumption can only be understood in relation with the dissolution of the traditional arts — with their transformation into superior modes of action which do not refuse or abolish art, but fulfill it. In this way art will be superseded, conserved and surmounted within a more complex activity. Its traditional elements may still be partially present, but transformed, integrated and modified by the totality.

Previous avant-garde movements presented themselves by declaring the excellence of their methods and principles, which were to be immediately judged on the basis of their works. The SI is the first artistic organization to base itself on the radical inadequacy of all permissible works; and whose significance, and whose success or failure, will be able to be judged only with the revolutionary praxis of its time.

Translated by Ken Knabb. Text from: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/freetime.html

• 1https://libcom.org/article/theses-cultural-revolution-guy-debord

In 1959 the situationists joined forces with the Stedilijk Museum in Amsterdam to organize a general manifestation, both drawing on the museum site itself and going beyond its framework. This entailed transforming rooms 36 and 37 into a labyrinth, at the same time as three days of systematic dérive were to be undertaken by three situationist teams operating simultaneously in the central area of Amsterdam conurbation. A more conventional supplement to these basic activities was to consist of an exhibition of certain documents, along with permanent taped lectures, relayed continuously, and only changed at the end of every twenty-four hours. the execution of this plan, finally decided on 30 May 1960, called for the reinforcement of the Dutch Situationists by a dozen of their foreign comrades.

On 5 March the director of the Stedelijk Museum, W.J.H.B. Sandberg, approved the definitive plan while revealing two sudden reservations: 1) the Amsterdam Fire Brigade would be called to give their approval of certain potentially dangerous aspects of the labyrinth; 2) a part of the resources necessary for the construction would not be supplied by the museum but by external organizations — notably a 'Prince Bernhard Foundation' — to whom the S.I. would have to make direct appeal. Beyond the comic aspect of the first and the air of compromise of the second, the same obstacle could be glimpsed: by the direction of the Stedelijk Museum adopting a partly irresponsible attitude, third parties would be given to judge in our place, and without appeal, on the necessary character of such and such a detail of our construction. And this precisely when the nature of the undertaking called for the accumulation of many unusual processes to make a leap ahead in a new type of manifestation. In addition, the work having to begin in situ, and restrictions perhaps being introduced at any moment in its elaboration, to go on under these conditions would have meant underwriting the falsification of our project in advance.

Himself party to the refusal, Asger Jorn succintly set out, at the Situationist meeting held the same day in Amsterdam, and which was to come to an immediate indecision, the overall conditions:

Sandberg precisely represented that cultural reformism which, linked to politics, has come to power everywhere in Europe since 1945. These people have been the ideal managers of culture within the existing framework. To this end they have favored, to the hilt, minor modernists and the enfeebled young followers of the modernism of 1920-1930. They have been able to do nothing for true innovators. Currently, threatened on all sides by a counter-offensive of avowed reactionaries (see, since then, the attacks of the Belgian Senate on 10 May on official support for 'abstract' painting), they were trying to radicalize themselves at the precise moment they were caving in. Sandberg, for example, had been violently attacked, two days before, in the Amsterdam municipal council by Christians who want to bring back figurative art (cf. the Algemeen Handelsblad of 4 March). His succession to the Stedelijk Museum could be considered an open question.

Jorn considered, however, that he had had the possibility of choosing which side he wanted to be on:

Sandberg in the labyrinth, along with us, would have been able to find himself or to lose himself. But the ineffectual search for compromises to safeguard his past efforts prevented him from falling in with good company. Sandberg dared not break with the avant-garde, but neither dared he assure the conditions which were the only ones acceptable to a real avant-garde.

At the end of Jorn's report the meeting ended unanimously with the S.I.'s refusal to be involved, a refusal transmitted in writing on 7 March. It permitted only those of its members who thought it useful, to profit individually from Sandberg's good will: as Pinot-Gallizio did in exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, in June, of his industrial painting, already shown in Paris last year.

The labyrinth, whose plan had been established by the Dutch section of the S.I., assisted on some points by Debord, Jorn, Wyckaert and Zimmer, presents itself as a circuit which can vary, theoretically, from 200 meters to 3 kilometers. The ceiling, sometimes 5 meters high (white section of the plan), sometimes 2.44 meters (grey section), may drop in certain places to 1.22 meters. Its fitting out involves neither interior decoration of some kind nor a reduced reproduction of urban ambience, but tends to form a mixed environment, never seen before, through the mélange of interior characteristics (furnished apartment) and exterior (urban) ones. To do this it brings into play artificial rain and fog, and wind. Passage through the adapted thermal and luminous zones, the sound interventions (noises and speech controlled by a battery of tape-recorders), and a certain number of conceptual and other provocations, is determined by a system of unilateral doors (visible or openable from one side only) as well as by the greater or lesser attractiveness of individual locations; this ends up increasing the occasions for getting lost. Among the pure obstacles we may cite Gallizio's tunnel of industrial painting and the detourned hoardings of Wyckaert.

The operational dérive around Amsterdam must be related to the micro-dérive organized in this concentrated labyrinth. Two groups, each containing three situationists, would dérive for three days, on foot or eventually by boat (sleeping in hotels along the way) without leaving the center of Amsterdam. By means of the walkie-talkies with which they would be equipped, these groups would remain in contact, with each other, if possible, and in any case with the radio-truck of the cartographic team, from where the director of the dérive — in this case Constant — moving around so as to maintain contact, would define their routes and sometimes give instructions (it was also the director of the dérive's responsibility to prepare experiments at certain locations and secretly arranged events).

If it was accompanied by the surveys of the terrain to be interpreted later during the workings of unitary urbanism, and if it was to have a certain theatrical aspect through its effect on the public, this dérive operation was fundamentally intended to actualize a new game. And the S.I. had had to go against economic custom in writing into the manifestation's budget an individual salary of 50 florins per day of dérive.

It is only the conjunction of these two operations which is capable of revealing their new nature. The S.I., then, did not consider that the dérive on its own, which could have been maintained in Amsterdam, would have been sufficiently meaningful. Likewise, it is not desirable to build the labyrinth in the museum of a certain German town which is unsuitable to the dérive. Furthermore, the very fact of utilizing a museum brings with it a particular pressure, and the west face of the Amsterdam labyrinth was a wall specially constructed in the guise of an entrance to breach this: that hole in the wall had been requested by our German section as a guarantee of non-submission to the logic of the museum. The S.I. has also adopted, in April, a plan by Wyckaert profoundly modifying the use of the labyrinth studied for Amsterdam. The labyrinth shall not be built inside another building but, with greater flexibility and in direct relation to urban realities, on well-situated wasteland in a selected city, so as to become the setting off point for dérives.

Structural plan of the unbuilt labyrinth.

Translated by Paul Hammond. Text from https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/diewelt.html

In the period of the dominant culture's dissolution, Paris was the main center of research, the point of concentration for experiments by individuals coming from all modern countries, where the same total problem of culture had developed. This role, which Paris held almost continuously until the end of the second world war, has now come to an end.

Without going into every condition that has favored the geographical polarization of the new currents of modern culture and their reversal, we will content ourselves to remark that the cultural avant-garde of our era has been strongly bound, not only ideologically but practically, to the general affirmation of freedom: initially during its negative phase, because it expresses precisely the negation of the dominant organization of life; and then — and all the more — during the phase of constructive research, with the attempted invention of new instruments and new uses in social life.

This freedom, which can obviously not exist under an authoritarian political regime where the material authority of culture appears even in the wretched author of The Voices of Silence [André Malraux], has in fact already been eliminated in the last regime. Capitalist society itself is therefore democratically governed by leftist personnel, and to this reformist and progressive style corresponds the unofficial but practically monopolized reign of impotence and repetition in the cultural sector that rather than mimicking the grandeur of the past, mimics the experience of novelty (cf. the outcome of a magazine like Les Temps Modernes compared to its initial pretensions). In the same movement, the political extremists of this Left above all do not want to disrupt the social order; and the intellectual extremists above all do not want to disrupt the conventional frameworks of an empty culture, nor the tastes of modernist spectators. The permanent crisis of the French bourgeoisie, even when it reached the culminating point of May 1958, did not find the revolutionary solution it needed. Paris has become more of a museum than a city, complete with security guards.

Despite their noisy bickering, all of France's 'progressive' organizations essentially agree between themselves — as they do with their cousins lucky enough to hold power: the basis of this accord, the greatest interest of blood ties, is the preservation of the dominant society. At best, they propose a few minor adjustments. Since the political regime has changed, this fundamental accord has been reinforced and enlarged once more. It is expressed, and remains expressed, by the absolute decision to keep the peace.

Almost every revolutionary thinker who has learned the history of the last thirty years of the workers' movement in one go has been seized by a passion for renewal in reading Kruschev's disclosures to the Twentieth Congress of his party. But these people have not gone far enough — or fast enough — and most are already tired, or have returned to the eclecticism that they discover with amazement.

Bourgeois leftists can call themselves extremists with a sense of ease, because what they imagine as the most extreme revolutionary violence (the bureaucratic reassurance of the French Communist Party) is not so far from their habits; and also to affirm, as great lords, their indifference toward the decor of the moral and patriotic order of France in the hour of Algeria. But this leftism does not seem to be up to the task of forcing a single convention into question, even at the lowest level. Thus, Kast and Doniol-Valcroze (France-Observateur, 25-2-60) responded to criticisms concerning futility and the accumulation of social thought in their films by saying that 'if it must have material engagement with cinema, then it concerns people,' and not films.

The absolute lack of assistance of French 'revolutionary' organizations to the insurgent Algerian people naturally produces the generalization of purely individual reactions (deserters, French agents with ties to the F.L.N.). In the presence of these facts, the Left shows what its worth: Bourdet panics at the idea that Francis Jeanson's network helps to discredit 'the entire Left's peace action' when this discredit is inscribed in six years of total abstention. The moralist Giroud, in L'Express on 10 March, was amazed more than anything else at assisting a great many irresponsible children to desert ('How many twenty year old boys have made up their minds with enough force to lucidly carry out one of the gravest acts that can be committed by man?'). Can't they wait? Not just pacifists, but deserters at their age? We hear talk in the national community of not giving up, of not crossing the threshold. When the threshold is that of prisons where Gérard Spitzer, Cécile Decugis and Georges Arnaud reside, the left has the good taste to not raise their voices in defense. Those who think that there is anything left to 'betray' outside the cause of international exploitation can certainly be intimidated for a long time by the blame of treason.

A few aspects of the political present have hastened the end of Paris' privileged role in experimental culture. In any case, this withering was inevitable. The international concentration in Paris expresses nothing but old habits. The new globally unified culture can only be developed where authentically revolutionary social conditions appear. With the victory of the new form of society, it is no longer fixed at such and such a privileged point; it spreads and changes everywhere. In the end, it cannot be strengthened in the majority of the nations of the white race. Before the worldwide blending of races that is both inevitable and desirable, yellow and black people who are beginning to take their destiny into their own hands have taken their place at the forefront. In the self-realized emancipation of colonized and developing peoples, we recognize the possibility of skipping the intermediate stages experienced elsewhere, as much in industrialization as in culture and very use of a free life for all. The Situationist International accords paramount importance to linking up with the avant-gardist elements of North Africa, Latin America, and Asia: for the future and beyond.

Translated by Reuben Keehan. Text from https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/paris.html

At the level of everyday life, this intervention would be translated as a better allocation of its elements and its instants as "moments," so as to intensify the vital productivity of everydayness, its capacity for communication, for information, and also and above all for pleasure in natural and social life. The theory of moments, then, is not situated outside of everydayness, but would be articulated along with it, by uniting with critique to introduce therein what its richness lacks. It would thus tend, at the core of pleasure linked to the totality, to go beyond the old oppositions of lightness and heaviness, of seriousness and the lack of seriousness.

Henri Lefebvre, La Somme et le Reste

In the programmatic thinking outlined above by Henri Lefebvre, the problems of the creation of everyday life are directly affected by the theory of moments, which defines as "modalities of presence" a "plurality of relatively privileged moments." What relation do these "moments" have with the situations the SI has set out to define and construct? What use can be made of the relationship between these concepts to realize the common possibilities that are now emerging?

The situation, as a created, organized moment — Lefebvre expresses this desire as "the free act defined as the capacity . . . to change a 'moment' in metamorphosis, and perhaps to create one" — includes perishable instants, ephemeral and unique. It is a totalizing organization that controls and favors such chance instants. From the perspective of the Lefebvrian moment, the constructed situation, then, is pitted against the instant, but at an intermediary stage between instant and moment. And so, while it is repeatable to a certain degree (as direction or "way"), the constructed situation is not in itself repeatable as the "moment."

Like the moment, the situation "can be extended in time or be condensed." But it seeks to found itself on the objectivity of artistic production. Such production breaks radically with durable works. It is inseparable from its immediate consumption as a use value essentially foreign to conservation as a commodity.

The difficulty for Henri Lefebvre is to draw up a list of his moments (why cite ten of these and not fifteen, or twenty-five, etc?). The difficulty with the "situationist moment" is, on the contrary, marking its precise end, its transformation into a different term within a series of situations (the latter perhaps constituting a Lefebvrian moment), or even into dead time. In effect, the "moment" posited as a rediscoverable general category involves, in the long term, the establishment of an increasingly complex list. Less differentiated, the situation lends itself to an infinite number of combinations. A situation, and its cut-off point, cannot be so precisely defined. What will characterize the situation is its very praxis, its intentional formation.

For example, Lefebvre speaks of the "moment of love." From the point of view of the creation of moments, from the situationist point of view, one must envisage the moment of a particular love, of the love of a particular person. Which means: of a particular person in particular circumstances.

The maximum "constructed moment" is the series of situations attached to a single theme — that love for a particular person — a "situationist theme" is a realized desire. In comparison to Henri Lefebvre's moment, this series of situations is particularized and unrepeateable, yet greatly extended and relatively durable in comparison to the unique-ephemeral instant.

In analyzing the "moment," Lefebvre has revealed many of the fundamental conditions of the new field of action across which a revolutionary culture may now proceed: as when he remarks that the moment tends toward the absolute and departs from it. The moment, like the situation, is simultaneously proclamation of the absolute and awareness of passing through it. It is, in actual fact, on the path toward a unity of the structural and the conjectural; and the project for a constructed situation could also be defined as an attempt at structuring the conjunction between the two.

The "moment" is mainly temporal, forming part of a zone of temporality, not pure but dominant. Articulated in relation to a given place, the situation is completely spatio-temporal (cf. A. Jorn on the space-time of life, and A. Franklin on the plane-ification of individual existence.) Moments constructed into "situations" might be thought of as moments of rupture, of acceleration, revolutions in individual everyday life. On a more extended — more social — spatial level, an urbanism that almost exactly corresponds to Lefebvre's moments, and to his idea of choosing these and leaving them behind at will, has been proposed in the "states-of-the-soul quarters" (cf. "Formulary for a New Urbanism"1 By G. Ivain, Internationale Situationniste #1) — disalienation being the explicit goal behind the arrangement of the "Sinister Quarter."

Lastly, the problem of the encounter in the theory of moments, and of an operational formulation of the construction of situations, suggests the following question. What admixture, what interactions ought to occur between the flux (and resurgence) of the "natural moment," in Henri Lefebvre's sense, and certain artificially constructed elements, introduced into this flux, perturbing it, quantitatively and, above all, qualitatively?

Translated by Paul Hammond. Text from https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/moments.html

• 1https://libcom.org/article/formulary-new-urbanism-gilles-ivain

The fourth conference of the Situationist International will be convened in London at the end of September 1960.

●

Lorenzo Guasco's studyof the SI's experimental activities in Italy, published in Turin in January 1960, is a load of rubbish. For example, Guasco discovered nothing of real interest in Pinot-Gallizio's work, and anything that he did find interesting was completely unrelated. Steadfastly manipulating this hodgepodge with a misguided zeal, no doubt to the taste of some art dealer or other, Guasco reveals his stupidity with each paragraph, and ends up interpreting the notion of collective art as a great day for metaphysics. This proves once again that despite the best of intentions, fragmentary critics of bourgeois aesthetics (described by the 1958 Address by the Situationist International to their assembly in Brussels as "fragments of art critics, critics of fragments of art..."), can't possibly understand the total unity of a movement like the SI.

●

The meaningof a text on unitary urbanism, written by Debord and published by a gallery in Essen on 9 January 1960, turned out to be greatly altered by several editorial cuts. Is it really necessary to remind everyone that when we declare ourselves uninterested in any notion of private property when it comes to ideas or phrases, it means that we will let absolutely anyone publish part or all of such and such a situationist writing without any reference or even attribution, as long as our signatures are not included? It is completely unacceptable for our publications to be reworked — unless it is done by the SI as a whole — and still be presented as the responsibility of their authors. Our signatures should be removed after the smallest modification.

●

Jorgen Nash's experimental book Stavrim, Sonetter (Copenhagen: March 1960) is the latest in the series of publications begun by the SI in Scandinavia with Permild and Rosengreen.

●

The Architects Alberts and Oudejans placed themselves immediately and beyond any possible discussion outside the SI when they agreed to build a church in Volendam1 .

Our Dutch section made suitable arrangements to make their opinion of this indivisible event known.

●

Despite the seemingly endless array of positions on the Chessman affair,2 not one has yet taken its real nature into consideration. This can lead only to a redoubling of the same old arguments about the death penalty.

Chessman's death occurred at the most developed stage of capitalist society, and thus participates in the overall problem of the spectacle. Asserting itself with increasing power and persistence, the relatively new matter of the industrialized spectacle has in this case lent its support to the old matter of capital punishment, which, like most other legal penalties, had until recently been moving in the other direction, toward its inevitable disappearance. This alliance produced a televised gladiator contest whose chief weapon was not the sword, but petty juridical sophistry.

Each of Chessman's reprieves was granted by a different juridical authority; and the only reason that the serial was finally brought to an end was that its spectators were growing bored (which, after twelve long years and just as many best-sellers, has to be expected). With Chessman's antipathy toward the conventional American way of life, the public and the organizers of public emotions finally gave him the thumbs down (Chessman's final reprieve alone came from outside the spectacle: it was brought about by local diplomatic considerations, and was therefore no longer any fun). Outside the United States, the general indignation at the time was ambiguous, as it involved both access to this spectacle — exploited to the full by every mode of information — and a lack of familiarity with the rules of the game: not only with regard to the opinion inclined to favor a particular combatant, but, in the name of old moral standards, it was the spectacle itself that was often called into question.

This reaction principally expressed the delay with which these countries are moving toward the same goal: the modernization of capitalism and the human relations prevail within it. For example, to the degree that in its economy and its politics, this is still a partially old-fashioned country, no-one in France has yet witnessed a man being put to death in the full light of day after twelve years in prison (he would be more likely simply disappear after a more or less secret period of torture). Chessman is interesting not so much as a victim in general, but because of his participation in the world of Brigitte Bardot and the Shah of Iran, as an element of misfortune and a victim of this world: the world of the representation of life for the passive masses excluded from life.

The society that will reach the pinnacle of human behavior will not have do it in the name of such and such a humanist mystification or outdated metaphysics; realizing each and every condition of the free creation of its own history, it sends all the forms of the spectacle — be they sublime or inferior — back from whence they came: to the museum of antiquities, to the side of the State.

●

Since 1958, Belgium has been the theater of the following incidents:

1. Hornu, 27 December 1958: two wounded.
2. Quaregnon, December 1958: one dead (Hacène Kitouni, FLN supporter)
3. Jemappes, 1959: one wounded (Nor Tayeb, FLN supporter)
4. Elonges, 12 May 1959: one dead (Houat Ghaouti)
5. Quiévrain: one dead (Lounas Sebki, FLN supporter)
6. Charleroi: falied assassination attempt on Chérif Attar (FLN supporter)
7. Mons: one dead (Saïd Moktar, MNA leader allied with the FLN)
8. Bléharies: Berthommier (arrested with a bomb)
9. Brussels, 9 March 1960: assassination of Akli Aïssiou
10. Liège, 25 March 1960: assassination of G. Laperches; and a failed attempt on P. Legrève in Ixelles.

These attacks, committed at regular intervals in Belgian territory, targeting Algerians, workers and political refugees, can only mean one thing: the establishment of an atmosphere of terror against Algerian immigration. Indeed, subversive activities by Algerian FLN members settling in Belgium are non-existent. With the tacit approval of the Belgian government, arms and explosives deals are frequently negotiated by such intermediaries as Puchers. Furthermore, the Algerians assassinated did not have the least importance within the Front. The obvious goal is to panic the Algerians and therefore to provoke a violent response; this would allow the Belgian police to deport those residing in Belgium, and to no longer accept refugees from France. The police use the pretext of attacks already committed, the responsibility for which is nevertheless clear, to deport Algerians on a daily basis (twenty deportations since Akli's assassination), and thus play the game of the French system.

●

The exhibition "Antagonisms," organized in February at the Museum of Decorative Arts by the "Congress for Cultural Liberty Arts Committee," was the expression pure and simple of French chauvinism's last great effort to assert itself in the arena where it still thinks has the means: in art history, with a resurrected and cobbled together "School of Paris" whose circumference extends no further than the center of Paris itself. This inanity revives everything — primarily the hope of creating a Malrauxian Paris within the new Washington empire, a sort of Greece always ready to play host to its more timid conquerors and collectors. You only have to see Julien Alvard3 pouring out his heart in the imposing catalogue to have a fair idea of the prevailing cultural decomposition, which is more and more often presented in intellectual terms that are themselves already rotten.

After pointing out that "this is no simple laughing matter," he declares that "Luther is very much a precursor to the painters identified by gesture and splatter." He then quotes the priest Georges Mathieu,4 before gleefully casting him into heresy. Besides Luther, he also expropriates Ruskin, Nietzsche and, of course, Stéphane Lupasco.5 In fact, a hundred more modern thinkers find themselves mentioned, all incorrectly.

In this orgy of references, it's not hard to see the curious manner with which expressionism is at once acknowledged and conjured away, transplanted in its entirety to Paris, and at the same time accidentally displaced (pages 15-16). With this resolve to skim over the German and Northern European character of expressionism, and the discomfort that it causes for a charlatan as clumsy as Alvard, Nolde's6 importance is reduced to the inclusion of a solitary woodcut among all the paintings reproduced in their blurry catalogue. And even this is attributed to Kirchner,7 as, we suspect, the guard dogs at the museums of the "Congress for Cultural Liberty" never shy from taking cultural liberties, especially when their work is embarrassing. In the same way, the omission of two major figures — Hegel and Kierkegaard — from Alvard's extensive philosophical jumble is astonishing to say the least; evidently due not to the author's lack of journalistic information, but rather to the pusillanimity of all involved, saying as much about modern art as it does about this abhorrent Congress and its raison d'être.

In sum, the massive bankruptcy of the "Antagonisms" exhibition is that of the committee in question — and those like it — when faced with present-day questions of culture. The evidence is provided by what was clearly predictable: the danger of unconditional partisans of confusion — those who are directly linked to this confusion in culture and social life — coming up with a general statement made in the name of confusion and the style of Alvard.

Translated by Reuben Keehan. From: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/is4.html

• 1The Mariakerk, which opened 1962 and is still in operation. See photo accompanying this article.
• 2Caryl Chessman, the alleged "Red Light Bandit," executed on 2 May 1960. Chessman continually maintianed his innocence, and during his twelve years on death row wrote four bestselling books, one of which, Cell 2455, Death Row, was later filmed.
• 3Julien Alvard, prominent postwar French art critic and journalist.
• 4Georges Mathieu, eccentric French tachist painter.
• 5Stéphane Lupasco, Rumanian born philosopher and dialectical logician whose "energetist" work concerning "the principle of antagonism" influenced a number of French painters and critics, including his close friends Mathieu and Alvard.
• 6Emil Nolde, German expressionist printmaker and painter.
• 7Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, German expressionist painter and leader of the Die Brücke group.

Zarathustra is pleased that the struggle of the castes is over, that the time of a hierarchy of individuals might be coming after all. His hatred for the democratic system of leveling is just the beginning. In fact, he is rather pleased to be here. Now he can solve his problem.
— Nietzsche, Noon and Eternity (frag. post Werke, t. XII, p.417.)

1

The notion of No-Future corresponds to the political relationship between the class and the party, and to its consequences in the revolutionary period. No-Future is neither the negation of the whole future, nor the possibility of some political prediction arising from given conditions; it is both the realization of the whole future, existing at a fragmentary level in the present situation, and the search for the proper means of controlling the present.

No-Future is the political application of a unitary view of the entire revolutionary period of the twentieth century. Its theses cannot be separated from the objective study of the social facts revealed to us by the triple evolution of capitalist, socialist and developing countries. This evolution tends to establish a dialectic of current questions of equal importance for these countries; it refuses to mechanically link the series of particular problems in these countries, or to be fatally caught up in any view, no matter how dynamic, of peaceful co-existence. Peaceful co-existence, such as it is currently expressed by the Louis-Philippard theoreticians of the communist parties, is the abandonment of revolutionary positions, in Russia as much as in the Third World and highly industrialized nations.

No-Future is founded on the conviction that the most highly evolved productive forces of capitalist countries now permit the skipping of the transitional phase of socialist society. In these countries, socialism can only remain the order of the day on the condition that it initiates the total demystification of present political methods, and reveals the supersession of the relations of production by the accumulation of technical means, the constant recourse to depersonalization, etc. All the conditions are unified for the appropriation of the means of production and for their utilization to socialist ends.

No-Future is equally founded on a decisive appreciation of the anti-colonial revolutions. In these Third World countries, the development of productive forces from their origins enters into the struggle against the bureaucratic apparatus, that is, the heritage of colonization and the introduction of planning methods used in socialist countries. Third World countries are the fulcrum of 20th century revolution because their accession to independence is also the melting-pot for the life forces of both blocs. For the first time since primitive communities, what is born in the West and what is born the East — insofar as their expansion is unhindered — is susceptible to unification and amalgamation in these countries as a totally independent social form.

Finally, No Future is founded on the certainty that the state of things as they are cannot be considered as a state of peace or of war in any way. Neither peace nor war is possible from now on, but nor is revolution if we are limited to a purely evolutionist conception that automatically implies the withering of the State, etc. Above all, No-Future takes into account the existence of classless societies in Russia and China. The awareness of this fact implies the possibility of an accelerated revolutionary process eventually resulting in societies of socialized masses.

2

Socialism, wherever it appears, can no longer be considered as the simple antithesis of capitalism. Everything that delays the ascendance of the socialized masses is an alienation reborn in the heart of the socialist society (transitional or not).

The problem is giving the masses consciousness "to the greatest degree of consciousness possible," in order to ensure that the historical relations modified by the classless society are not a return to the old relationship existing between the class and the party, between the class and the union. The socialized masses act as autonomous forces. If, as Marx wished, the disappearance of politics and the economy is necessitated, the parties and the organs of class struggle must clearly disappear with them. The more a party or a trade union has been capable of seeing through its task, the easier it has been to eliminate it as such in the classless society. This continues to exist after the suppression of politics and the economy because the political consciousness of the masses then signifies a rupture — and not an adaptation — of the masses, liberated by the productive forces capable of surmounting all the relations of production from that point on. Responsibility and uprooting of the socialized masses are no longer a hindrance, but the first conditions that can at any moment give rise to the necessity for a revolution.

3

The political expression of the socialized masses, insofar as it aims for the disappearance of all politics, has as its prime objective the possibility, for the first time in history, of a situation where all humanity escapes from the historical law of uneven development. The revolution becomes its own theater.

It is important to know and to determine, in the present, how the conquest of interstellar space; human labor considered as the struggle against nature insofar as it is the dissolution of the technological milieu by the technology itself; the appearance of a cosmic consciousness in the classless society; the abolition of all functional signs in human relations; and the birth of new sentiments and of other unpredictable upheavals accelerate the processes that lead to the stage of this dialectical civilization of leisure and of work for all humanity together.

4

The creation of this history without dead time is linked to existential Marxist philosophy. The idea of the individual planning of existence rediscovers the chance that allows the formation of a philosophy of spatio-temporal presence where sensations and sentiments no longer depend on memory, but on the blossoming of all the virtualities of being by the multiplication and renewal of experience, no longer of isolated collectives or isolated people — experiences realizable as the imaginary itself, that is to say simultaneously collective and individual in all acts.

The daily upheaval of the time of life itself implies the cosmic and a-cosmic value of every situation. At the limit of this infinity before our eyes and the revolutionary accumulation of this history, the richness of life demands an always greater reproduction, no longer of habits or even of style, but of the everyday made impossible. The new antagonisms between terrestrial and cosmic values cannot be resolved by the simple communicability of obvious facts.

5

The conditions of freedom, having been realized by the planning of individual existence, become the values — existing or able to exist — of the state of reprieve among our aptitudes in the control and exercise of qualitative degrees of the construction of situations. The concepts of being, having and doing disappear with this freedom, beginning with the practical negation of all philosophy. Freedom is defined as a cosmogony of temporality and an a-cosmogony of constructed situations. Freedom, this fluid and unshakable structure of all energy, allows the transcendence of the old typology of "free men" or "the not-free" by the power that has every person transforming the world as each desires to see it transformed; accomplished against the primitive forms of this power.

6

The three orders of becoming are:

a) The order of constructing situations. This is when the power of freedom inscribes the lifestyle of all as a total work, that is to say the permanent realization of the lived totality against what were previously only dispersed means or fragmentary meanings (cosmic, political, artistic, etc.). This is the order of praxis as radical critique no longer advocated or indicated, but actually carried out.

b) The order of the planning of individual existence. This will be the possibility, given once and for all, of transcending every known emotion, including the contradictory sensation of "happiness-suffering." Human emotions will become different emotions, but no more superhuman than inhuman, due to the fact that from now on they will be linked to cosmic energy.

c) The tragic order of intelligence. This is that of two abstract worlds (one issuing from the struggle against nature, the other, in contrast, issuing from the domination of the cosmos by men). In this sense, the tragedy of intelligence is perhaps not its inability to avoid madness as a natural state, but of suddenly situating itself beyond madness, and not beside it as was previously the case.

These fragmentary programmatic notes are presented here as theoretical elements of the construction of situations in socialist society (transitional in itself); and as the first contribution to a working group which we envisage convening to define the total content of the revolution of everyday life.

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

For humanity, time is nothing but a succession of phenomena from a point of observation in space, while space is the order of the co-existence of phenomena in time or process.

Time is the change that is only conceivable in the form of a progressive movement in space, while space is the solid that is only conceivable in its participation in a movement. Neither space nor time possesses a reality or value outside of change or process, that is to say outside of the active combination of space-time. The action of space-time is the process, and this process is itself the change of time in space and the change of space in time.

We see, then, that the augmentation of quality, or resistance to change, is due to quantitative augmentation. They march in step. This development is the goal of socialist progress: the augmentation of quality by the augmentation of quantity. And it allows this double augmentation to be strikingly identical to the diminution of value, of space-time: reification.

The magnitude that determines value is space-time, the instant or the event. The space-time reserved for the existence of human space on the Earth demonstrates its value in events. No events, no history. The space time of a human life is its private property. This was Marx's great discovery in the perspective of human liberation, but at the same time it is the point of departure for the errors of the Marxists, because property only gains value in its realization, in its liberation, in its use, and what makes the space-time of a human life a reality is its variability. What gives the individual a social value is the variability of their behavior in relation to others. If this variability becomes private, excluded from social valorization — as is the case under authoritarian socialism — human space-time becomes unrealizable. Therefore, the private character of human qualities ("hobbies") has become an even greater valorization of human life than the private property of the means of production because uselessness, in socialist determinism, is nonexistent. Instead of abolishing the private character of property, socialism does nothing but augment it as much as possible, rending humans themselves useless and socially non-existent.

The goal of the development of artistic liberation is the liberation of human values by the transformation of human qualities into real values. Here begins the artistic revolution against socialist development, the artistic revolution that is tied to the communist project...

The value of art is therefore a counter-value in relation to practical values, and its measure in a sense inverse to the them. Art is the invitation to expend energy, with no precise goal other than what spectators themselves can bring to it. This is prodigality... Some still imagine that the value of art is in its duration, its quality. And they think that gold and precious stones are of artistic value, that artistic value is an inherent quality of the object in itself. By this logic, the work of art is nothing but the confirmation of humanity as the essential source of value...

The capitalist revolution was essentially a socialization of consumption. Capitalist industrialization brought humanity a socialization as profound as the socialization proposed by the socialists — that of the means of production. The socialist revolution is the fulfillment of the capitalist revolution. The one element removed from the capitalist system is saving, because consumption's richness has already been eliminated by the capitalists themselves. It is so rare to find a capitalist these days whose consumption exceeds the meanest demands. The difference between the lifestyle a great lord of the 17th century and that of a great capitalist of the Rockefeller era is ridiculous, and the gap is always widening.

The richness of consumption's variability was economized by capitalism, because the commodity is nothing but an object of socialized use. It is for this reason that sociologists avoid occupying themselves with the object of use.

The socialization of the object of use, which can be considered as a commodity, has three principle aspects:

a) On its own, the object of use of a common interest, desired by a great enough quantity of people, can serve as a commodity. The ideal commodity is the object desired by all. In order to open the way toward such a socialization of industrial production, capitalism must destroy the idea of individual and artisanal production, under the guise of "formalism";

b) In order to discuss the commodity, it is necessary to have a quantity of exactly the same object. Industry is only concerned with objects in series, manufactured in larger and larger numbers;

c) Capitalist production is characterized by a propaganda of popular consumption that reaches incredible power and volume. The demand for a socialist production is only the logical consequence of the demand for a socialized consumption.

Currency is the completely socialized commodity, showing everyone the measure of common value...

Socialization really constitutes a system built on absolute saving. Indeed, let us consider the object of use. We have indicated that the object of use becomes a commodity the moment as soon as it becomes useless, when the causal link between consumption and production is exhausted. On its own, an object of use is transformed in saving, stockpiling, becoming a commodity, but only in the case where a quantity of objects is stockpiled. This system of storage, which is the root of the commodity, is not eliminated by socialism. In fact, the opposite is true: the socialist system is founded on the stockpiling without exception of all production before its distribution, with the goal of perfect control of this distribution.

To date, no analysis has been made of accumulation — of stockpiling or saving — in its own form, that is the form of the container. Stockpiling occurs according to the relationship between container and its contents. We remarked initially that the substance, known as the contents, is none other than process; and in the form of content, it signifies a material in storage, a latent force. But we have always considered it from its own stable form. The form of a container is a form contrary to the form of its contents; its function is to prevent the contents from entering into process, except in controlled and limited conditions. The container-form is therefore a somewhat different thing to the form of the material itself, where there is never anything but the form of the contents; here one of term is found to be in absolute contradiction with the other. It is only in the domain of biology that the container becomes a basic function. All biological life has evolved, so to speak, by opposing the container-forms with the forms of the material. Technological development continues on the same path; all systems of measurement, of scientific control, are placed in the relationship of objective forms to container-forms.

Container-forms are established contradicting measured forms. The container-form normally conceals the form of its contents, and thus possesses a third form: that of appearance. These three forms are never clearly distinguished in discussions on form...

Money is the measure of time in social space... In a given space, that of society, money is the means of imposing speed itself. The invention of currency is the basis of 'scientific' socialism, and the destruction of currency will be the basis of the supersession of this mechanical socialism. Currency is the work of art transformed into numbers. The realization of communism will be the transformation of the work of art in the totality of everyday life...

Wherever it is manifest (in capitalism, in reformism, in so-called 'communist' power) bureaucracy appears as the realization of common counter-revolutionary socialization, in a certain manner, in the various rival sectors of the modern world. Bureaucracy is the container-form of society: standing in the way of process — standing in the way of revolution. In the name of the control of the economy, bureaucracy economizes without control (for its own ends, for the preservation of what exists). It has every power but the power to change things. And all change will always be made against it...

Real communism will be the leap into the domain of freedom and of value, of communication. Contrary to utilitarian value (normally known as material value), artistic value is the progressive value because, by a process of provocation, it is the valorization of humanity itself.

Since Marx, economic politics has shown its impotence and its cowardice. A hyperpolitics will need to strive for the direct realization of humanity.

This text is taken from a brochure by Jorn: Critique of Economic Politics, which will be issued in a series of "Reports presented to the SI" (Brussels, May 1960).

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

The very concept of the constructed situation is continually distorted by the existence of a daily psychosis that plunges human beings into a pathos of irremediable mediocrity. It is time to struggle against this mediocrity, to struggle against those self-righteous pacifists and so-called progressives who are content to wallow in the turgid morass of their own inadequate verbiage. It is time to get down to the permanent revolution of the spirit, to use paranoia and sensationalism to our own ends — in short, to become agents provocateurs.

The atrocious paradox of our civilization is that economic powers alone possess the most modern technological means, that they alone have them at their disposal, and that they use these means for the sole purpose of "making more money," of generating millions to profit from their leisure in an even more ridiculous, more bourgeois, more beastial manner. And with their own lack of desires, the masses find themselves subjugated to the dictatorship of the unions, which for the last fifty years have assumed the patriarchal role of the patron or the ironmaster.

In Israel, a country in the making, these developing forces have so far expressed themselves even more insufficiently, because the problems of "how to live" are imposed on individuals in such a crucifying way. Still bound to ancestral atavisms buried deep in their unconscious, they no longer think — can no longer think — about anything but their own immediate concerns, that is to say about how to increase their creature comforts in the most effective way possible. The population is supplied with human elements that are for the most part primitive, and this fusion is consciously carried out with the gift of American comfort, an obligatory and even forced comfort. These poor fools, blinded by rigid dogma (the worst that the Bible has to offer), taken in by the tarnished halo of socialism and liberalism, are further dazzled by being provided with washing machines, refrigerators, and rather hideous housing. In higher places, an American style unionism is being cemented, and the intellectuality of conscious people is held in suspicion. With such social barriers firmly in place, a clearly delimited caste system is beginning to appear.

But class conflicts don't even occur in this new supposedly socialist country, which is forged only by a new ruling class that circumstance and the abnegation of a few thousand have placed at the head of an embryonic nation whose various elements are well on their way to being completely homogenized, and above all depersonalized (when they're not being bribed).

It would have been possible to cling to a hope more tangible than spoken dreams or the desire for a better future, if an exceptional and revolutionary art had burst forth from these conditions and supplied a source for new creation. But deception lives on. An artist wanting to create again, wanting to smash their way out of the stultifying framework of Judaism, is nowhere to be seen.

However, an Israeli barbarism has started to take shape, and it is on this that we depend. It appears in the new generation: the sunburnt boys and inspirational girls. While life is the cities deteriorates, the countryside, that is to say the kibbutz and cooperative agricultural colonization, forges ahead in spite of it all. The new industries established since the proclamation of the State of Israel have given birth to a proletariat, but a proletariat that still lacks consciousness, an almost robotic proletariat. While these young proletarians are becoming increasingly automatized, watching their minds drain away day after day, the young peasants are turning their backs on their weary elders.

Israel's revolutionary consciousness can therefore come only from the earth, from the desert, from the colored sands of the Negev: from effort. Israel's revolutionary consciousness will also come from intelligence, from a few reasonable minds constantly on the move. The future of Israel is beginning to take shape. It starts with the impact of new forces that can be glimpsed in a few signs finding themselves echoed in the Israeli spirit.

Modernism alone is not enough: in a truly revolutionary society, the new will destroy itself.

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

Image above: General plan of the yellow zone

This area, which is situated on the edge of the city, gets its name from the color of a large part of its floor surface, notably on the eastern second level. This particularity adds to the rather joyful atmosphere, which predisposes the islet towards its adaptation as a zone for play. The different levels — three in the east, two in the west — are supported by a metal construction, disengaged from the ground. Titanium has been used for the construction bearing the floors and the buildings within; nylon for the walkways and to cover dividing- and partition-walls. The lightness of this construction explains not only the minimum use of supports, but also a great flexibility in the handling of the different parts, and the complete suppression of volumes. The metal structure may be considered as the basis for an arrangement of interchangeable, dismounted element-types and furniture, favoring the permanent variation of the environment. Thus the following description will restrict itself to the general framework of the arrangement. The structure consisting of superimposed levels means that the greater part of the surface must be illuminated and climatized artificially. Yet nowhere has it been sought to imitate natural conditions and forms of lighting. This becomes an integral part in the ambient games that are one of the attractions of the yellow zone. It should be noted, furthermore, that in many places one emerges suddenly into the open air.

One can arrive in this part of the city either by air, the terracing offering a series of landing strips; by car, at ground level; or lastly by underground train — according to the distances to be covered. Crossed in all directions by freeways, the ground level is devoid of buildings, with the exception of various pylons which support the construction, and a round building of six storeys (A), which supports the overhanging terrace. these supports, around which one has foreseen areas for the parking of the means of transport, contain the lifts which go up to the upper levels of the city or to the basement floors. The building (A) which houses the technical services, is separated from the rest of the islet and is only accessible from the terraces or the ground level. All the rest communicates internally and forms an expansive common space, except for only two buildings on the periphery of the city, containing apartments (B and C). Between these apartment buildings, whose windows look out onto the landscape, are to be found, at the north-east angle of the town and extending beyond the upper terraces, the great arrival hall (D) and a metal construction covered in sheet-aluminium of an extremely free form, whose two floors contain the passenger station and warehouses for the distribution of goods. While the hall is open to the air, the interior of the area itself is entirely covered. The eastern part is divided vertically into two covered floors, plus the part of the terracing for the aerodrome. By means of furniture acting as dividers, the floors are arranged into a great number of rooms — communicating horizontally as well as vertically, by means of stairs — whose varied ambiances are continually changed by situationist teams, in conjunction with the technical services. Intellectual games, above all, are practiced there.

The technological sector and the airport

The western part appears immediately more complicated. There are two labyrinth-houses, one large and one small (L and M), which take up and develop the ancient forces of architectural confusion: the water effects (G), the circus (H), the great ballroom (N), the white plaza (F) beneath which is suspended the green plaza, which enjoys a splendid view of the freeway traffic that passes below.

The two labyrinth-houses are formed by a great number of irregularly-shaped chambers, spiral staircases, distant corners, wastelands, cul-de-sacs. One goes through them adventurously. One can find oneself in a quiet room, clad in insulating material; the loud room with its vivid colors and ear-splitting sounds; the room of echoes (radiophonic speaker games); the room of images (cinematic games); the room for reflection (games of psychological resonance); the room for rest; the room for erotic games; the room of coincidences, etc. An extended stay in these houses has the tonic effect of a brainwashing and is frequently undertaken to erase the effects of habits.

The water games are found in the open air between these two houses, the terracing above having an opening which permits the sky to be seen. Jets of water and fountains are interspersed here with hoardings and constructions in bizarre shapes, including a heated grotto of glass where one can bathe in deepest winter while watching the stars.

By taking passage K, which instead of windows is equipped with large optical lenses that greatly magnify the view of the neighboring district, one arrives at the grand ballroom. Or instead one passes along the terraces around the water effects, which jut out over the white plaza, visible below, where demonstrations are held; and which also give access to the green plaza on the floor below. In descending below this plaza the public transport may be found which communicates with the other neighborhoods.

The yellow zone is the first itinerary in Promenades in New Babylon, a descriptive guide to the maquette-islets whose assembly constitutes a reduced model of the 'covered city.' In #3 of this bulletin Constant formulated the basic principles of this particular hypothetical notion of unitary urbanism. 1

Detail of sectors G and E

Translated by Paul Hammond. From: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/yellowzone.html

• 1Another City for Another Life

In No. 10 of Poésie Nouvelle (First Trimester, 1960), Isidore Isou, refuting the writings of one of his friends from a recent period, whom he soberly calls X in order not to give him unmerited publicity, declares:

One of the shabbiest lies of the author of Grammes is to speak of my general philosophical system when a) I have never published this system, and b) X is neither a prophet or cartomancer of the future.

If a number of my comrades who worked with me over the years, from Pomerand to Lemaître, have tried to divine the general system (and lacking the possibility they have at least the honesty to hold their tongue on this question), how could Z, who scarcely knows me, be able to know it?... The unique thing that Mr. Grammes could know of my intellectual order is that it accords to the creations of each domain an essential determined value, in relation to other values. But it is this which makes the successive X’s who, having known me, have no other supreme desire than to become creators. Thus the unique illumination that X has of my system ends at his conscious or unconscious effort to follow it, just when the ignorance of the whole of the system leads him to the real incapacity to create and the obligation to replace this creation with the tittle-tattle and lying pretensions about that which he knows nothing...It is only by accepting the creative hierarchy of the only movement of the contemporary avant-garde — given the general name ‘Lettrism’ — by candidly assimilating the innovating truth of the immediate past and present, by openly recognizing the forms of future evolution of the aesthetic disciplines that will truly be born for the history of culture and for the place of each author in this history. (Italics by A.J.)

Isou’s argument is constructed around a fundamental error according to which the knowledge of a system is only possible after you have become acquainted with all the consequences of the system; an idea which is pushed to the extreme by revealing the system through the testimony of the initiatory individual account, and the importance given to the particular usage that the master can make of his own system. In fact the system is a method. It is the method of the co-ordination of positions, of states. And, as the positions don’t change, the system, or the positional methods, are always revealed by analyzing a combination taken at random in the system.

Isou’s system is not a scientific system, as there are no longer any scientific systems. If Isou’s system had been a scientific system, it could not be ‘Isou’s system’, but only the application of the system by Isou in a given domain. Isou’s system necessitates Isou. It is a system of relations between subject and object. This system is an outlook. You don’t have to be a prophet or a cartomancer to work that out; you just have to be completely detached. I don’t know Isou, and I’m starting to be acquainted with his system. The order in which he arranges historic events is an extremely amusing and interesting thing, perfectly new in the European outlook: he measures all values according to Chinese perspective, just as values have been measured according to a central perspective since the renaissance.

It is today a well known fact that time is a dimension like any other, to be treated like those of space. Existentialism is opposed to the classic system by pretending that the instant is a unique value. Isou opposes this by establishing a little range of values between the immediate past and the present (which today is Isou). Isou is placed as a magnitude in his own perspective. Those who go in for this, with the obligatory slowness of followers of what has already been made by Isou, are smaller, and diminish from Lemaître to Pomerand, to finally arrive at the zero point, where we find the poor Mr X, who according to Isou’s system, is the nothing of everything, the nullity, the historic non-place (but this is the historic non-place of the historic space of Isou, which explains the importance Isou gives to the repeated description of this nothingness, this personification is anonymous). If the lines of perspective are prolonged beyond the zero point, history is expanded once again towards the pre-Isouian past, and the more the magnitudes are expanded in the past, the more they are accepted by Isou without criticism, and characterized according to their awkwardly scholastic reputations (Homer, Descartes etc.). This is the hierarchic order of Isou as regards the past; and as regards the future, where in any case he reckons a central creative place will come to be recognized for eternity, he will expect that an even greater system will replace it, and at the same time confirm it. “In order to better establish the possibilities of the preservation of a section of the avant-garde,” he goes along with the Breton’s famous formula about “the birth of a more emancipatory movement”. Nothing is more comfortable than to wait for successors, because the succession is not passed on by a direct line, but through contradiction.

Having thus clarified Isou’s system of valorization, an essential problem must now be posed: is it more of a religious system than an artistic one? It must be because he is unable to make a decision on this point that Isou has not yet published the final word in his system. From reading the development of his thought from the accessible material, it seems that there can be discerned a slippage by which the religious and cultural side more and more replace the artistic; hierarchic aspect becomes more important than the movement of Chinese perspective.

In order to be oriented, and from this fact to calibrate, in any particular dimension, it is always necessary to find a zero point, the point of departure or origin, whence proceeds all graduation. But the question is posed here: is Isou’s zero point fixed in history in the same way that the birth of Christ is fixed as the origin of our calendar. Isou thus becomes forever greater as he moves forward in time. Equally, is his Chinese perspective historically displaced through time? In this case, Isou will come to be diminished more and more in order to become the zero point of a new avant-garde, and only afterwards will he accede to the aggrandisement of the past. Thus the question is restated: could Isou’s system be employed as a method by others? This would increase the importance of the system, but must then diminish the importance of his personage. The impression is that it would benefit from two advantages, but this is impossible without the whole unhappy system being destroyed and renewed. This eventuality cannot be theoretically excluded. Isou was close to such a discovery in his recent reflections on prodigality, by which he found himself obliged to recognise the superiority of the situationist practices over the lettrist system. The unresolved problem on this religious question, and the double game which necessarily arose from it, has contributed to the very quick dissolution of the avant-garde gathered around Isou circa 1950. This is found, degraded to farce in the eternal discussion of Isou with Maurice Lemaître who for years constituted Isou’s ‘lettrist group’ all on his own (cf. the same issue of La Poésie Nouvelle).

The disaster of Isou’s system is to place the zero point as a divine point in the past, as much as placing himself as a sacred object. It is not by chance that the Chinese perspective is found in an ideology secretly held by Buddhism. In contrast, the classic system places the divine zero point at the center of the perspective of the future, and the sacred in the anti-world radiating towards infinity, beyond the extreme point of reality. The artistic bearing is a systematization of facts which themselves ignore the system. When this is unveiled, established, the artistic value is always pursued elsewhere (the innocent vision is inverted in principle). In the same way as the rich ‘lettrist’ researches (in the common sense of the word) of manuscripts from the end of the middle ages have been eliminated by printing (quantitative distribution of writing through the elimination of variations), so the lucky find, by the renaissance, of the central perspective has radically finished Christian art, of which the variables were eliminated by this organisation-type of Christian space. In effect, the central perspective, if it is transposed onto the dimension of time, exactly represents Christian metaphysics, the beyond being in the imaginary future, marked out by two successive points: death and Judgement Day. The utopians had places their perspective on the earth (in the historic future), and the artistic inspiration of modern times is essentially a futurist utopianism.

Isou’s Chinese perspective could therefore be compared to the Me-zero (divine-sacred identity) perspective, the outlook of radiating subjectivity of Vilhelm Bjerke-Petersen, so typical of Scandinavian thought. The advantages of Isou’s system can be seen on this terrain. In the end, a modern perspective could be invoked which considered the qualitative development of magnitude. This is the purely scientific outlook, characterised by its point of origin in the past, the zero point at the beginning of time. In this outlook that we actually find confirmed at the cosmic level with the theory of the expanding universe. Scientific socialism is linked to this outlook. But overall this question is so vast because there are many outlooks which have now been created.

Isou’s religious problem is complicated by a perplexity on the following theme: “I am god, seeing as how god is youth; seeing as how I am Isou, the point of origin”. He must choose between personal originality and that of the system which he has created and which automatically excludes him from the sphere of originality at the end of youth. The reservations which Isou has as regards his own system are easily explained. He is ageing, my friend!

The divinisation of the immediate past is the divinisation of the aged (the older generation), which is associated, through the dynamic use of Isou’s Chinese perspective, with his concept of holy youth. (“We start a career...”). Thus the aged Isou sees the new youth start to overthrow him in virtue of his own system, and he flees to a more assured place, protected by the books of Breton. The drama unfolds, it’s simply that Lettrism has superseded surrealism. In this way it will retire to claim its part in literary immortality. What gaiety! Holy youth! It returns all the time, and it is always the same. I exposed this gimmick in La Roue de la Fortune in 1948.

It is time to become aware of the drawbacks of all the systems of perspective derived from classical geometry. Many errors arise from a major illusion of modern savants: a distinction between ‘classical’ and ‘modern’ geometry was made in the belief that the autonomy of classical geometry could be saved, and that it could be taught as geometry and that which had superseded it were simultaneously true. In the geometry of Euclid, and this has been transmitted to the non-Euclidean systems, the point is defined as a spatial location with no spatial dimension. This omits the fact that the point, bereft of spatial dimensions, still represents the temporal dimension, thanks to its duration. The point thus introduces the dimension of time into spatial organisation, which is the basis of a new elementary geometry. (It is this new study of the point which enables the situation to be understood as a spatial-temporal work alien to the old properties of art). When the point is considered as a pure idea, geometry is infected with metaphysics and lends itself to the emptiest constructions of metaphysics. Nothing is left of it.

Human creation does not resemble this sort of French garden, such as Isou would want to embellish, the centre of which he believes he will come to definitively occupy, simply because, preaching untiringly in the emptiness, he foresees (in his own words, ‘the opening of a new amplic’) the completely symmetrical reproduction of the other side of Isou.

Translated by Fabian Tompsett and published as part of Open Creation and its Enemies by Unpopular Books in 1994, which is where the illustrations are from. Text taken from: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/originality.html

"The Beijing-Bao is the oldest daily newspaper in the world. It has appeared for over fifteen centuries, its first number having been printed in Beijing in the 4th century. The editors have often incurred the anger of the Chinese rulers for attacking the infallibility of religion and the state. The paper has nevertheless continued to appear every day, even though the editors have often paid for it with their lives. During those fifteen centuries, 1500 editors of the Beijing-Bao have been hung."

--Ujvidéki Magyar Szo (1957)

The situationist tendency is not aimed at preventing the construction of situations. This first restriction in our attitude has numerous consequences. We are striving to provoke the development of these consequences.

" 'Protection" is the key word in the Garment Center racket. The process is as follows: One day you receive a visit from a gentleman who kindly offers to 'protect' you. If you are really naïve, you ask, 'Protection against what?' " (Groueff & Lapierre, The Gangsters of New York.)

If, for example, the head honcho of existentialism assures us that it is hard for him to adopt any sort of vulgar materialism because culture is an integral part of our lives, we can agree substantially with the latter point but without being sure that we should be so proud of this fact. That's one consequence.

How can we comprehend the formation of our culture and of our philosophical and scientific information? Modern psychology has eliminated many of the doctrines that used to obscure this question. It looks for the motives: why do we accept or refuse an "idea" or an imperative? "One of the most important results of the process of socialization is the development of a system of normative equilibrium, which superimposes itself on the system of biological equilibrium. The latter system regulates the body's responses to various needs and necessities (nourishment, defense against cold or against physical attack, etc.), whereas the first one determines which actions can be considered 'practicable' or even 'thinkable' " (P.R. Hofstätter). For example, someone becomes aware of situationist activity. He "understands" it and "rationally" follows its arguments. Then, in spite of his momentary intellectual agreement, he relapses: the next day he no longer understands us. We propose a slight modification of the psychological description quoted above, in order to understand the play of forces that have prevented him from considering various things as "practicable" or even "thinkable" when we know they are possible. Let us examine this striking experimental reaction: "The trial of Dio and his accomplices begins. Then something extraordinarily scandalous takes place. The first witness, Gondolfo Miranti, refuses to talk. He denies all the statements he has made to the FBI. The judge loses all patience. Furious, he resorts to the ultimate argument: 'I order you to answer. If you do not, you will be sentenced to five years' imprisonment!' Without hesitation, Miranti accepts the five long years of prison. In the defendant's box Johnny Dio, well dressed and smooth shaven, smiles ironically." (Groueff & Lapierre, op cit.) It is difficult not to recognize an analogous pattern of behavior in someone who doesn't dare speak of problems as he knows they are. We have to ask: Is he a victim of intimidation? He is indeed. What is the mechanism common to these two kinds of fear?

Miranti had lived in gangland since his youth; this explains many things. "Gangland," in Chicago gangster slang, means the domain of crime, of rackets. I propose to study the basic functioning of "the Organization," in spite of the risks of getting involved: "As for the man who would try to set them free and lead them up to the light, do you not think that they would seize him and kill him if they could?" (Plato).1 Philosophy must not forget that it has always spoken its part in the most burlesque and melodramatic setting.

We should develop a little glossary of detourned words. I propose that "neighborhood" should often be read gangland. Similarly, social organization = protection. Society = racket. Culture = conditioning. Leisure activity = protected crime. Education = premeditation.

The systematic falsification of basic information (by the idealist conception of space, for example, of which the most glaring expression is conventional cartography) is one of the basic reinforcements of the big lie that the racketeering interests impose on the whole gangland of social space.

According to Hofstätter, "We are as yet incapable of examining the process of socialization in a truly 'scientific' manner." We, on the contrary, believe that we are capable of constructing a model for examining the production and reception of information. If we were allowed to monitor, by means of an exhaustive survey, the entire social life of some specific urban sector during a short period of time, we could obtain a precise cross-sectional representation of the daily bombardment of news and information that is dropped on present-day urban populations. The SI is naturally aware of all the modifications that its very monitoring would immediately produce in the occupied sector, profoundly perturbing the usual informational monopoly of gangland.

"Integral art, which has been talked about so much, can be realized only at the level of urbanism" (Debord) [Report on the Construction of Situations]. That is indeed where the limit is. At this level we can already remove certain decisive elements of conditioning. But if, beyond such salutary eliminations, we expect the largeness of scale in itself to generate favorable results, we will have committed the most serious error.

Neocapitalism has also discovered some advantages in large scale. Day and night it talks of nothing but city planning and national development. But its real concern is obviously the conditioning of commodity production, which it senses escaping it unless it resorts to this new scale. Academic urbanism has accordingly defined "slums" from the standpoint of postwar neocapitalism. Its techniques of urban renewal are based on sterile, antisituationist criteria.

We must make this critique of Mumford: If neighborhoods are not considered as pathological elements (ganglands), we will not be able to develop new techniques (therapies).

The constructors of situations must learn how to read the constructive and reconstitutable elements of situations. In so doing, they begin to understand the language spoken by situations. They learn how to speak and how to express themselves in this language; and eventually, by means of constructed and quasi-natural situations, how to say what has never yet been said.

Attila Kotányi (1960)

Revised translation by Ken Knabb of the complete text (the version in the Situationist International Anthology is abridged).

• 1Translator's note: Reference to the famous "parable of the cave" in Book VII of Plato's Republic, in which people are chained in a cave facing a wall in such a way that they can see the real world only through the shadows it casts on the wall, and who thus take those shadows for reality.

The existing framework cannot subdue the new human force that is increasing day by day alongside the irresistible development of technology and the dissatisfaction of its possible uses in our senseless social life.

Alienation and oppression in this society cannot be distributed amongst a range of variants, but only rejected en bloc with this very society. All real progress has clearly been suspended until the revolutionary solution of the present multiform crisis.

What are the organisational perspectives of life in a society which authentically "reorganises production on the basis of the free and equal association of the producers"? Work would more and more be reduced as an exterior necessity through the automation of production and the socialisation of vital goods, which would finally give complete liberty to the individual. Thus liberated from all economic responsibility, liberated from all the debts and responsibilities from the past and other people, humankind will exude a new surplus value, incalculable in money because it would be impossible to reduce it to the measure of waged work. The guarantee of the liberty of each and of all is in the value of the game, of life freely constructed. The exercise of this ludic recreation is the framework of the only guaranteed equality with non-exploitation of man by man. The liberation of the game, its creative autonomy, supersedes the ancient division between imposed work and passive leisure.

The church has already burnt the so-called witches to repress the primitive ludic tendencies conserved in popular festivities. Under the existing dominant society, which produces the miserable pseudo-games of non-participation, a true artistic activity is necessarily classed as criminality. It is semi-clandestine. It appears in the form of scandal.

So what really is the situation? It's the realisation of a better game, which more exactly is provoked by the human presence. The revolutionary gamesters of all countries can be united in the S.I. to commence the emergence from the prehistory of daily life.

Henceforth, we propose an autonomous organisation of the producers of the new culture, independent of the political and union organisations which currently exist, as we dispute their capacity to organise anything other than the management of that which already exists.

From the moment when this organisation leaves the initial experimental stage for its first public campaign, the most urgent objective we have ascribed to it is the seizure of U.N.E.S.C.O. United at a world level, the bureaucratisation of art and all culture is a new phenomenon which expresses the deep inter- relationship of the social systems co-existing in the world on the basis of eclectic conservation and the reproduction of the past. The riposte of the revolutionary artists to these new conditions must be a new type of action. As the very existence of this managerial concentration of culture, located in a single building, favours a seizure by way of putsch; and as the institution is completely destitute of any sensible usage outside our subversive perspective, we find our seizure of this apparatus justified before our contemporaries. And we will have it. We are resolved to take over U.N.E.S.C.O., even if only for a short time, as we are sure we would quickly carry out work which would prove most significant in the clarification of a long series of demands.

What would be the principle characteristics of the new culture and how would it compare with ancient art? Against the spectacle, the realised situationist culture introduces total participation.

Against preserved art, it is the organisation of the directly lived moment.

Against particularised art, it will be a global practice with a bearing, each moment, on all the usable elements. Naturally this would tend to collective production which would be without doubt anonymous (at least to the extent where the works are no longer stocked as commodities, this culture will not be dominated by the need to leave traces.) The minimum proposals of these experiences will be a revolution in behaviour and a dynamic unitary urbanism capable of extension to the entire planet, and of being further extensible to all habitable planets.

Against unilateral art, situationist culture will be an art of dialogue, an art of interaction. Today artists - with all culture visible - have become entirely separated from society, just as they are separated from each other by competition. But faced with this impasse of capitalism, art has remained essentially unilateral in response. This enclosed era of primitivism must be superseded by complete communication.

At a higher stage, everyone will become an artist, i.e., inseparably a producer-consumer of total culture creation, which will help the rapid dissolution of the linear criteria of novelty. Everyone will be a situationist so to speak, with a multidimensional inflation of tendencies, experiences, or radically different "schools" - not successively, but simultaneously.

We will inaugurate what will historically be the last of the crafts. The role of amateur-professional situationist - of anti- specialist - is again a specialisation up to the point of economic and mental abundance, when everyone becomes an "artist," in the sense that the artists have not attained the construction of their own life. However, the last craft of history is so close to the society without a permanent division of labour, that when it appeared amongst the S.I., its status as a craft was generally denied.

To those who don't understand us properly, we say with an irreducible scorn: "The situationists of which you believe yourselves perhaps to be the judges, will one day judge you. We await the turning point which is the inevitable liquidation of the world of privation, in all its forms. Such are out goals, and these will be the future goals of humanity."

Translated by Fabian Tompsett.