Translated by Ian Thompson, January 2015. Proofread and Edited by Anna O’Meara & Mehdi el H. From here: https://isinenglish.com/the-bitter-victory-of-surrealism/

"The success of Surrealism owes much to the fact that the most modern aspect of this society’s ideology has renounced a strict hierarchy of artificial values and openly makes use of the irrational, alongside the relics of Surrealism."
Report on the Construction of Situations, June 1957

Framed within a world that has not been fundamentally transformed, Surrealism is a success. This success has backfired on Surrealism, which expected nothing less than the overthrow of the dominant social order. Meanwhile, the intensifying delay in mass action devoted to this overthrow, along with the contradictions of advanced capitalism and a matching impotence in cultural creation, maintain the currency of Surrealism and promote a multiplicity of degraded repetitions.

Surrealism has an impassable nature in the conditions of life it has encountered (and which it has scandalously prolonged until now) because, as a whole, it is already an addendum to the art and poetry annihilated by Dadaism, with all the possibilities 1 [of art and poetry] [lying] beyond the Surrealist postscript to art history – in the issues of constructing an authentic life. All those who want to place themselves after Surrealism rediscover questions which predate it (Dadaist poetry or theatre – research into a collection of secondhand goods 2 ). Thus, for the most part, the pictorial novelties which have attracted attention since the end of the war are merely details, isolated and enlarged, taken — secretly — from the coherent mass of Surrealist contributions (Max Ernst, at an exhibition in Paris in early 1958, recalled what he had heard from Pollock in 1942).

The modern world has caught up with the clear lead that Surrealism once had on it. Demonstrations of innovation in the disciplines which are genuinely advancing (the scientific techniques) take on a Surrealist appearance: in 1955, a robot at the University of Manchester wrote a love letter that could pass for an example of automatic writing by a less-than-talented 3 Surrealist. However the reality controlling this progression is that, [as] the revolution has not come 4 , everything that [once] constituted a margin of freedom for Surrealism finds itself co-opted and utilised by the repressive world the Surrealists had fought.

The use of tape recorders to teach sleeping subjects sets about depleting life’s storehouse of dreams in the pursuit of pathetic and repugnant utilitarian goals. Nothing, however, constitutes such a clear co-opting of Surrealism’s subversive discoveries as the exploitation of automatic writing, and the collective games based on it, found in the technique of canvassing ideas called “brainstorming” in the United States. In “France-Observateur”, Gérard Lauzun writes:

“In a session lasting a set duration (ten minutes to an hour), a limited number of people (6 to 15) have complete freedom to express as many of their ideas as possible, no matter how outlandish, with no risk of censure. The quality of the ideas isn’t of much concern. It is absolutely forbidden to criticise participants’ ideas, or even to smile while they are speaking. Additionally everyone has the absolute right, the obligation even, to steal from and add to the previous ideas. (…) The army, the civil service, and the police have also found uses for the technique. The world of scientific research itself substitutes brainstorming sessions for conferences and ’round-tables’. (…) A writer/producer at the C.F.P.I. needs a title for a film. Eight people can put forward seventy in around fifteen minutes! Then, a tagline 5 : one hundred and four ideas in thirty four minutes – two are kept. (…) Lack of thinking, irrationality, absurdity, and sudden changes of subject are the rule. Quality makes way for quantity. The main goal of this technique is to eliminate the various barriers of social constraint, timidity, and fear which often prevent some people from speaking up at meetings or during administrative conferences – from advancing absurd suggestions which may contain some buried treasure! With these barriers lifted, we observe that people speak and, above all, that everyone has something to say. (…) Some American managers have been quick to see the advantages of such a technique in employee relations. Those who are able to express themselves demand less. ‘Organise brainstorming sessions for us!’ they tell the specialists: ‘to demonstrate to our employees that we care about their ideas, since we’re asking for them!’ The technique is becoming a vaccine against the revolutionary virus.”

Translators' note: As this new translation was being produced, I cross-referenced it to an existing translation made by Reuben Keehan, available on-line here. I would like to acknowledge the work done by Reuben Keehan, and the real assistance his translation provided to me. However all final decisions (for better or worse – which is for the reader to decide) in this translation are mine alone.

• 1“ouvertures” – literally openings
• 2“dans le style du recueil «Mont-de-Piété»” – literally “in the style of a pawnshop collection”
• 3“peu doué” – literally “not very gifted”
• 4“la révolution n’etant pas faite” – literally “the revolution has not been made”
• 5“slogan” – slogan, or advertising headline (‘tagline’ is specifically related to films)

There is a lot of talk these days about angry, raging youth. The reason people are so fond of talking about them is that, from the aimless riots of Swedish adolescents to the proclamations of England's would-be literary movement, the "Angry Young Men," there is the same utter innocuousness, the same reassuring flimsiness. Products of a period in which the dominant ideas and lifestyles are decomposing, a period that has seen tremendous breakthroughs in the domination of nature without any corresponding increase in the real possibilities of everyday life, reacting, often crudely, against the world they find themselves stuck in, these youth outbursts are somewhat reminiscent of the surrealist state of mind. But they lack surrealism's points of leverage in culture, and its revolutionary hope. Hence the tone underlying the spontaneous negativity of American, Scandinavian and Japanese youth is one of resignation. Saint-Germain-des-Prés had already, during the first years after World War II, served as a laboratory for this kind of behavior (misleadingly termed "existentialist" by the press); which is why the present intellectual representatives of that generation in France (Françoise Sagan, Robbe-Grillet, Vadim, the atrocious Buffet) are all such extreme caricatural images of resignation.

Although this intellectual generation exhibits more aggressiveness outside France, its consciousness still ranges from simple imbecility to premature self-satisfaction with a very inadequate revolt. The rotten egg smell exuded by the idea of God envelops the mystical cretins of America's "Beat Generation" and is not even entirely absent from the declarations of the Angry Young Men (e.g. Colin Wilson). These latter have just discovered, thirty years behind the times, a certain moral subversiveness that England had managed to completely hide from them all this time; and they think they're being daringly scandalous by declaring themselves antimonarchists. "Plays continue to be produced," writes Kenneth Tynan, "that are based on the ridiculous idea that people still fear and respect the Crown, the Empire, the Church, the University and Polite Society." This statement is indicative of how tepidly literary the Angry Young Men's perspective is. They have simply come to change their opinions about a few social conventions without even noticing the fundamental change of terrain of all cultural activity so evident in every avant-garde tendency of this century. The Angry Young Men are in fact particularly reactionary in attributing a privileged, redemptive value to the practice of literature, thereby defending a mystification that was denounced in Europe around 1920 and whose survival today is of greater counterrevolutionary significance than that of the British Crown.

In all this pseudorevolutionary sound and fury there is a common lack of understanding of the meaning and scope of surrealism (itself naturally distorted by its bourgeois artistic success). A continuation of surrealism would in fact be the most consistent attitude to take if nothing new arose to replace it. But because the young people who now rally to surrealism are aware of surrealism's profound demands while being incapable of overcoming the contradiction between those demands and the stagnation accompanying its apparent success, they take refuge in the reactionary aspects present within surrealism from its inception (magic, belief in a golden age elsewhere than in history to come). Some of them even take pride in still standing under surrealism's arc de triomphe, so long after the period of real struggle. There they will remain, says Gérard Legrand proudly (Surréalisme même #2), faithful to their tradition, "a small band of youthful souls resolved to keep alive the true flame of surrealism."

A movement more liberating than the surrealism of 1924 -- a movement Breton promised to rally to if it were to appear -- cannot easily be formed because its liberativeness now depends on its seizing the more advanced material means of the modern world. But the surrealists of 1958 have not only become incapable of rallying to such a movement, they are even determined to combat it. But this does not eliminate the necessity for a revolutionary movement in culture to appropriate, with greater effectiveness, the freedom of spirit and the concrete freedom of mores demanded by surrealism.

For us, surrealism has been only a beginning of a revolutionary experiment in culture, an experiment that almost immediately ground to a practical and theoretical halt. We have to go further. Why is becoming a surrealist no longer a meaningful option? Not because of the ruling class's constant encouragement of "avant-garde" movements to dissociate themselves from the scandalous aspects of surrealism. (This encouragement is not made in the name of promoting originality at all costs -- how could it be, when the ruling order has nothing really new to propose to us, nothing going beyond surrealism? On the contrary, the bourgeoisie stands ready to applaud any regressions we might lapse into.) If we are not surrealists, it is because surrealism has become a total bore.

Decrepit surrealism, raging and ill-informed youth, well-off adolescent rebels without perspectives (though certainly not without a cause) -- boredom is what they all have in common. The situationists will execute the judgment that contemporary leisure is pronouncing against itself.

SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL (1958)

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

Translated by Ian Thompson, February 2015. Proofread and Edited by Anna O’Meara & Mehdi el H. From: https://isinenglish.com/717-2/

The escape into art and literature, along with the overvaluing of these activities (in accord 1 with the old bourgeois perspective) seem to be widespread notions in the Workers’ States of Europe. There, disillusioned intellectuals, reacting to the police détournements 2 of an undertaking to make real change in the world, have come to demonstrate a naïve indulgence for the by-products and repetitions of a decomposing Western culture. In a concurrent delusion they have rediscovered the subject of Parliamentary Democracy. The young Polish writer Marek Hlasko, in an interview in “L’Express” (17 April 1958), justified his intention to return to Poland (where, according to his own confidently expressed opinions, life is unbearable – with no possibility of improvement) by using this stunning rationale: “Poland is an extraordinary country for a writer, and it is worth enduring all the consequences in order to live in this country, and to observe it.”

We have no regrets about the decline of the Zhdanov Doctrine despite the senseless interest one comes across in Czechoslovakia or Poland in the more wretched aspects of the end of Western culture: expressions which are no longer at the extreme of formal decomposition, but which have reached a total neutrality (e.g. Sagan-Drouet, or the artistic motivations of the journal “Phases”). We understand the need to oppose the still powerful doctrine of Social Realism by demanding total freedom of information and creation. But this freedom should in no instance become confused with an allegiance to the “modern” culture now found in Western Europe. This culture is historically the opposite of creation: a series of forged repetitions. To call for freedom of creation, is to recognise the necessity for the better construction of environments. Real freedom will be the same both here and in the Workers’ States, as will its foes.

Translator's Note: As this new translation was being produced, I cross-referenced it to an existing translation made by Reuben Keehan, available on-line here. I would like to acknowledge the work done by Reuben Keehan, and the real assistance his translation provided. However all final decisions (for better or worse – which is for the reader to decide) in this translation are mine alone.

• 1“définies selon” – literally “defined in accordance with”
• 2“détournement” – literally “diversion/misappropriation”, I have retained the original French here to denote it’s very specific use by the SI (as specified later in this issue in “Definitions”)

Translated by Ian Thompson, March 2015. Proofread and Edited by Anna O’Meara & Mehdi el H. From: https://isinenglish.com/1-4-the-struggle-for-control-of-the-new-techniques-of-conditioning/

“It is now possible for us to unfailingly trigger and direct the responses of men in predetermined ways”, writes Serge Chakhotin concerning techniques of public influence1 used by both revolutionaries and fascists between the two world wars (“The Rape of the Masses : the Psychology of Totalitarian Political Propaganda”2
, Gallimard). Science has continued to progress ever since: there have been advances in the experimental study of the mechanisms of behaviour; new uses have been found for existing technologies; and new technologies [for influencing behaviour] have been invented. For many years, there have been trials of subliminal advertising (by editing unrelated images, 1/24th of a second in duration, into films, – [that are] perceptible to the retina but that remain beneath conscious recognition) and of inaudible advertising (using infrasound). In 1957, Canada’s National Defence Research Service carried out an experimental study into boredom, in which subjects were isolated in a hermetically-sealed3 environment (a constantly-lit cell with bare walls, furnished with only a comfortable couch, and absolutely devoid of smells, noises, or variations in temperature). Researchers observed extensive disturbances in behaviour; in the absence of sensory stimuli the brain failed to maintain the standard4 level of arousal needed for its normal functioning. They could therefore conclude that dull ambiences have a harmful influence on human behaviour, and hence explain the unpredictable accidents that occur during monotonous work – which will certainly5 increase with the extension of automation.

The testimony of a certain Lajos Ruff, published in the French press6 at the start of 1958, takes take this a step further7 . His account (dubious in many respects, but not lacking in detail8 ) describes the “brainwashing” he allegedly endured [at the hands of]9 the Hungarian police in 1956. Ruff claims he had spent six weeks locked in a room where the combined use of well-known techniques10 had aimed at — and eventually succeeded in — making him lose all faith in his own perception of the outside world and in his own personality. These techniques were: the resolutely alien decor of this closed room (transparent furniture, a curved bed); the lighting, with a bright light11 from the outside shining through at night (he had deliberately been warned about the light’s psychological effects, but had no ability to shelter [from it]); psychoanalytic methods used by a doctor in everyday conversation; various drugs; simple deceptions which enhanced the effects of these drugs (even though he had every reason to believe that he had been unable to leave his cell for weeks, he would wake up [dressed in] damp clothes and muddy shoes); the screening of absurd or erotic films, combined with the occasional performance of other scenes in the room itself; and lastly, visitors who spoke to him as if he were the hero of an adventure series (set in the Hungarian Resistance) which he was forced to watch (from the details in these films and in his real-life encounters, he ended up feeling the pride of having taken part in the action).

Here we must recognise the repressive use of a constructed ambience that has reached a fair level of complexity. To date, all the findings of impartial scientific research have been ignored by free artists, and put to immediate use by the police. In the United States subliminal advertising has raised some concern, but the public has been reassured by the announcement that the first two slogans to be broadcast would be innocuous 12 . These persuasive messages are“Ils influenceront dans ces deux directions” – literally “They will influence in these two ways”: “Drive slower” and “GO TO CHURCH.”

The entire humanist, artistic and legal notion of the sacrosanct, unalterable personality is doomed. We have no displeasure in seeing it go. But it should be understood that we will [actively] join the race between free artists and the police to test and to improve the use of the new techniques of conditioning. The police already have a considerable head start in this race. Its outcome [will result in either]13 the outbreak of passionate and liberating environments, or the scientifically controllable, impervious reinforcement of the old world’s environment of horror and oppression. While we speak of free artists, no artistic freedom is possible until we seize the means accumulated by the XXth century – which we see as the real means of artistic production. Those deprived of [such means] are doomed not to be artists for these times. If the control of these new means is not entirely revolutionary, we could be dragged towards the police[-state] ideal14 of a beehive-like society. The domination of nature can be either revolutionary or become the absolute weapon of the forces of the past. The Situationists place themselves at the service of the need for forgetting. The only force that the Situationists can expect anything of is the proletariat (theoretically without a past, compelled to reinvent everything permanently, which in Marx’s words “is revolutionary or nothing”). Will the proletariat be of our times or not? The question is important for our purpose: the proletariat must realise art.

Translator's note: As this new translation was being produced, I cross-referenced it to an existing translation made by Reuben Keehan, available on-line here. I would like to acknowledge the work done by Reuben Keehan, and the real assistance his translation provided. However all final decisions (for better or worse – which is for the reader to decide) in this translation are mine alone.

• 1“méthods d’influence sur des collectivités” – techniques of influence on communities”
• 2Title of the English version of Chakhotin’s book – translated by E. W. Dickes (Alliance Book Corp, 1940)
• 3“un environnement aménagé de telle sorte que rien ne pouvrait s’y passer” – literally “an environment adjusted in such a way that nothing can get through it”
• 4“moyenne” – can also be translated as “average” or “normal”
• 5“destinés à” – literally “destined for”
• 6“et en libraire” – redundant phrase not included
• 7“On va plus loin” – literally “We go further”
• 8“ne contenant aucune anticipation de détail” – literally “not holding back any advance of detail”
• 9“que lui aurait fait subir la” – literally “which he would have [been] made to endure [by] the”
• 10“moyens” – literally “means” or “resources”
• 11“rayon lumineux” – literally “luminous beam”
• 12“seraient sans danger pour quiconque” – literally “would be harmless for anyone”
• 13“De son issue dépend pourtant” – literally “From its outcome yet depends”
• 14alternatively “policé” can be the past participle of the archaic verb “policer” (literally “to civilise”) – so there is an alternate rendered of “civilised ideal”

FOR 1 AND AGAINST CINEMA

Translated by Ian Thompson, April 2015. Proofread and Edited by Anna O’Meara & Mehdi el H. From https://isinenglish.com/748-2/

Cinema is the principal art of our society, insofar as its development is sought in the continual integration2 of new mechanical technologies. Hence, [cinema] is the best representation of an era of anarchically juxtaposed inventions (not coherently linked, but simply added together3 ) not only in its anecdotal or formal expression, but also in its material infrastructure. Following the big-screen, the introduction of stereo sound, and attempts [to create] 3D images, the United States showcased a process known as “Circarama”4 at the Brussels World Fair. As reported in “Le Monde” on April 17, through this technique5

“we find ourselves in the centre of the spectacle and we live it – just as if we are an integrated part of it. When cameras mounted inside a car capture images of San Francisco’s Chinatown rushing past6 , we experience the [same] reactions and feelings [as] the car’s passengers.”

Elsewhere an aromatic cinema is being tested through new applications of sprays; it is expected to give undeniably realistic results.

Cinema thus presents itself as a passive substitute for the unitary artistic activity that is now possible. It brings previously unheard of power to the worn-down, reactionary force of the spectacle without participation. One is not afraid to say that we live in the world we recognise by finding ourselves7 without freedom in the centre of a miserable spectacle, “just as if we are an integrated part of it”. But that is not life, and spectators [have] not yet [come into] the world8 . [Indeed] those who wish to build this world must fight cinema’s tendency to represent the anti-construction of situations (the construction of the ambience of the slave, the legacy of cathedrals), while at the same time recognising the inherent value of new technological applications (stereophonics, aromatics).

The lag in the appearance of symptoms of modern art in cinema (e.g. some [self]-destructive9 works, accepted for 20 to 30 years in literature and the plastic arts, are still rejected even in the cinema clubs 10 ) arises not only from its chains of simple economics and masked idealisms (moral censorship), but [also] from the positive importance of cinematic art in modern society. Cinema’s importance is owed to the superior means of influence it applies, which inevitably leads to the increasing control [of cinema] by the dominant class. It is therefore necessary to struggle to seize a truly experimental sector in the cinema.

We can foresee two distinct uses for cinema: firstly, its use as a form of propaganda in the pre-situationist transition period; next, its direct use as a constituent element in a realised situation.

Cinema is therefore comparable to architecture in its current importance in everyone’s life, in the restrictions that hamper“ferment” – literally “close (off)” its renewal, and by the great potential impact such freedom of renewal is bound to have. It is necessary to take advantage of the progressive aspects of mass-produced cinema, and as in the discovery of an architecture based on the psychological employment of ambience, we can remove the pearl hidden in the manure of absolute functionalism.

Translator's Note: As this new translation was being produced, I cross-referenced it to an existing translation made by Reuben Keehan, available on-line here. I would like to acknowledge the work done by Reuben Keehan, and the real assistance his translation provided. However all final decisions (for better or worse – which is for the reader to decide) in this translation are mine alone.

• 1“Avec” – literally “with”
• 2“dans un mouvement continu d’integration” – literally “in a continuous motion/action of integration”
• 3“non articulées, simplement additionnées” – literally “not connected, merely added”
• 4“Circarama” was developed by Disney Corporation
• 5“au moyen duquel” – literally “by means of which”
• 6“prises de vues fonce dans le quartier chinois de San-Francisco” – “have taken pictures hurrying in the Chinese neighborhood of San Francisco”
• 7“du fait que l’on se trouve” – literally “in fact that in it we find ourselves”
• 8“ne sont pas encore au monde” – literally “are not yet in/with the world
• 9“oeuvres formellement destructrices” – literally “absolutely destructive works”
• 10“sont encore rejectées même dans les ciné-clubs” – literally “are still rejected, even in cinema clubs”. Please note that this entire sentence has been totally restructured to flow better in English.

Translated by Ian Thompson, April 2015. Proofread and Edited by Anna O’Meara & Mehdi el H.
From: https://isinenglish.com/1-6-contribution-to-a-situationist-definition-of-play/

One can only escape the linguistic and practical confusion that surrounds the notion of play by considering it in action. Two centuries of negation by the constant idealisation of production have led to the primitive social functions of play now appearing as nothing more than bastardised relics, as inferior forms derived from the needs of the current organisation of production. At the same time, the progressive tendencies of play have revealed themselves, linked to the very development of these productive forces.

The next phase of play’s advance1 seems to require2 the disappearance of any element of competition. The question of winning or losing, which has to date been nearly inseparable from ludic activity, appears to be tied to every other expression of competition between people in the appropriation of goods. The sense of importance in winning, which concerns concrete (or more frequently illusory) satisfactions, is the wretched product of a wretched society. The feeling [of winning] is, of course, exploited by every conservative force to conceal the monotony and the brutality of the conditions of life they impose. Simply consider the [social] demands3 détourned by competitive sports, which was most clearly established in its modern form4 in Great Britain, alongside5 the rise of factories. Not only do the crowds identify with professional players or clubs (which assume the same mythic role as the movie stars who live, and the statesmen who make decisions, in their place), but the endless sequence of match results also keeps hold over the passions of the spectators6 . Direct participation in a game, even in those requiring a certain degree of intellectual exertion, becomes uninteresting as soon as the established rules of play involve the acceptance of competition for its own sake. Nothing sows the contemporary contempt for the idea of play as much as the presumptuous observation which opens Tartakower’s “A Breviary of Chess” 7 : “Chess is universally recognised as the king of games.”

The element of competition must vanish in favour of a more authentically collective concept of play: the communal creation of selected ludic ambiences. The central distinction made between play and everyday life, which keeps play as an isolated and temporary anomaly, must be surpassed. Johan Huizinga writes, “Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life, [play] brings a temporary, a limited perfection.” [8] Everyday life, which was previously determined by the question of survival, can now be rationally controlled (this possibility is at the heart of every conflict of our time). Play, radically breaking with a delimited ludic time and space, must invade the whole of life. Perfection cannot be its endpoint, insofar as this perfection signifies a static construction opposed to life. However one can propose to push the beautiful chaos of life to its perfection. Eugénio d’Ors considered the Baroque to delimit once and for all “the vacancy of history”, and the organised afterlife of the Baroque will hold a major place in the coming reign of leisure

In this historical perspective, play — the constant experimentation with ludic innovations — only comes into being alongside ethics and questions of life’s meaning. The only success which we can appreciate in play is the immediate success of its ambience, and the constant increase of its powers. In its present co-existence with the residues of the phase of decline, play cannot completely free itself from a competitive aspect, it must at least aim to provoke conditions favourable to living directly. In this sense it is still both a struggle and a representation: a struggle for a life measured by desire, and a concrete representation of such a life.

Play often feels imaginary, owing to its fringe existence in comparison to the oppressive reality of work, but the Situationists’ work is precisely the preparation of the ludic possibilities to come. One can thus be tempted to neglect the Situationist International inasmuch as one will easily identify in it some aspects of a great game. “Nevertheless,” says Huizinga, “as we have already pointed out, the consciousness of play being ‘only pretend’ does not in any way prevent it from proceeding with the utmost seriousness…”8

Translator's Note: As this new translation was being produced, I cross-referenced it to an existing translation made by Reuben Keehan, available on-line here. I would like to acknowledge the work done by Reuben Keehan, and the real assistance his translation provided. However all final decisions (for better or worse – which is for the reader to decide) in this translation are mine alone.

• 1“affirmation” – literally “assertion”
• 2“semble devoir” – literally “seems to be bound to”
• 3“revendications” are demands/claims made on behalf of a group (eg strikers, protestors)
• 4“qui s”impose sous sa forme moderne précisément” – literally “which established itself in it’s modern form accurately”
• 5“avec” – “with”, “because of”, or “using”
• 6“ne laisse pas de passionner les observateurs” – literally “does not let [up on] entralling/exciting the observers”
• 7English translation of Tartakower’s book (George Rutledge & Sons, 1937)
• 8both Huizinga quotes are taken from the English edition of “Homo Ludens” (Roy Publishers, 1950). “Homo Luden’s” was written in German, however the English translation was partially based on Huzinga’s own translation into English. Note that the grammatically awkward phrase “only a pretend” has been altered in the last quote for flow.

"The construction of situations begins beyond the ruins of the modern spectacle. It is easy to see how much the very principle of the spectacle -- nonintervention -- is linked to the alienation of the old world. Conversely, the most pertinent revolutionary experiments in culture have sought to break the spectators' psychological identification with the hero so as to draw them into activity. . . . The situation is thus designed to be lived by its constructors. The role played by a passive or merely bit-part playing 'public' must constantly diminish, while that played by those who cannot be called actors, but rather, in a new sense of the term, 'livers,' must steadily increase."

--Report on the Construction of Situations

Our conception of a "constructed situation" is not limited to an integrated use of artistic means to create an ambiance, however great the force or spatiotemporal extent of that ambiance might be. A situation is also an integrated ensemble of behavior in time. It is composed of actions contained in a transitory decor. These actions are the product of the decor and of themselves, and they in their turn produce other decors and other actions. How can these forces be oriented? We are not going to limit ourselves to merely empirical experimentation with environments in quest of mechanistically provoked surprises. The really experimental direction of situationist activity consists in setting up, on the basis of more or less clearly recognized desires, a temporary field of activity favorable to these desires. This alone can lead to the further clarification of these simple basic desires, and to the confused emergence of new desires whose material roots will be precisely the new reality engendered by situationist constructions.

We must thus envisage a sort of situationist-oriented psychoanalysis in which, in contrast to the goals pursued by the various currents stemming from Freudianism, each of the participants in this adventure would discover desires for specific ambiances in order to fulfill them. Each person must seek what he loves, what attracts him. (And here again, in contrast to certain endeavors of modern writing -- Leiris, for example -- what is important to us is neither our individual psychological structures nor the explanation of their formation, but their possible application in the construction of situations.) Through this method one can tabulate elements out of which situations can be constructed, along with projects to dynamize these elements.

This kind of research is meaningful only for individuals working practically toward a construction of situations. Such people are presituationists (either spontaneously or in a conscious and organized manner) inasmuch as they have sensed the objective need for this sort of construction through having recognized the present cultural emptiness and having participated in recent expressions of experimental awareness. They are close to each other because they share the same specialization and have taken part in the same historical avant-garde of that specialization. It is thus likely that they will share a number of situationist themes and desires, which will increasingly diversify once they are brought into a phase of real activity.

A constructed situation must be collectively prepared and developed. It would seem, however, that, at least during the initial period of rough experiments, a situation requires one individual to play a sort of "director" role. If we imagine a particular situation project in which, for example, a research team has arranged an emotionally moving gathering of a few people for an evening, we would no doubt have to distinguish: a director or producer responsible for coordinating the basic elements necessary for the construction of the decor and for working out certain interventions in the events (alternatively, several people could work out their own interventions while being more or less unaware of each other's plans); the direct agents living the situation, who have taken part in creating the collective project and worked on the practical composition of the ambiance; and finally, a few passive spectators who have not participated in the constructive work, who should be forced into action.

This relation between the director and the "livers" of the situation must naturally never become a permanent specialization. It's only a matter of a temporary subordination of a team of situationists to the person responsible for a particular project. These perspectives, or the provisional terminology describing them, should not be taken to mean that we are talking about some continuation of theater. Pirandello and Brecht have already revealed the destruction of the theatrical spectacle and pointed out a few of the requirements for going beyond it. It could be said that the construction of situations will replace theater in the same sense that the real construction of life has increasingly tended to replace religion. The principal domain we are going to replace and fulfill is obviously poetry, which burned itself out by taking its position at the vanguard of our time and has now completely disappeared.

Real individual fulfillment, which is also involved in the artistic experience that the situationists are discovering, entails the collective takeover of the world. Until this happens there will be no real individuals, but only specters haunting the things anarchically presented to them by others. In chance situations we meet separated beings moving at random. Their divergent emotions neutralize each other and maintain their solid environment of boredom. We are going to undermine these conditions by raising at a few points the incendiary beacon heralding a greater game.

In our time functionalism (an inevitable expression of technological advance) is attempting to entirely eliminate play. The partisans of "industrial design" complain that their projects are spoiled by people's playful tendencies. At the same time, industrial commerce crudely exploits these tendencies by diverting them to a demand for constant superficial renovation of utilitarian products. We obviously have no interest in encouraging the continuous artistic renovation of refrigerator designs. But a moralizing functionalism is incapable of getting to the heart of the problem. The only progressive way out is to liberate the tendency toward play elsewhere, and on a larger scale. Short of this, all the naïve indignation of the theorists of industrial design will not change the basic fact that the private automobile, for example, is primarily an idiotic toy and only secondarily a means of transportation. As opposed to all the regressive forms of play -- which are regressions to its infantile stage and are invariably linked to reactionary politics -- it is necessary to promote the experimental forms of a game of revolution.

SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL (1958)

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

constructed situation

A moment of life, concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of unitary environment and the free play of events.

situationist

Relating to the theory or practical activity of constructing situations. One who engages in the construction of situations. A member of the Situationist International.

situationism

A word totally devoid of meaning, improperly derived from the preceding term. There is no situationism, which would mean a theory of interpretation of existing facts. The notion of situationism was obviously conceived by anti-situationists.

psychogeography

The study of the precise effects of geographical setting, consciously managed or not, acting directly on the mood and behaviour of the individual.

psychogeographical

Relating to psychogeography. That which manifests the direct effect of geographical setting on mood.

psychogeographer

One who studies and reports on psychogeographical realities.

dérive

An experimental mode of behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique for hastily passing through varied environments. Also used, more particularly, to designate the duration of a prolonged exercise of such an experiment.

unitary urbanism

The theory of the combined use of art and technology leading to the integrated construction of an environment dynamically linked to behavioural experiments.

détournement

Used as an abbreviation for the formula: détournement of prefabricated aesthetic elements. The integration of past or present artistic production into a superior environmental construction. In this sense, there cannot be situationist painting, or music, but a situationist use of these media. In a more primitive sense, détournement from within old cultural spheres is a form of propaganda, which lays witness to the depletion and waning importance of these spheres.

culture

The reflection and prefiguration at any given historical moment, of the possible organization of daily life; the complex of mores, aesthetic, and feelings by which a collective reacts to a life which is objectively given to it by its economy. (We define this term only from the perspective of the creation of values, and not of their teaching.)

decomposition

The process by which traditional cultural forms have destroyed themselves, under the effects of the appearance of superior means of dominating nature, permitting and requiring superior cultural constructions. We distinguish between an active phase of decomposition, effective demolition of older superstructures -- which ends around 1930 -- and a phase of repetition, which has dominated since then. The delay in passing from decomposition to new constructions is tied to the delay in the revolutionary liquidation of capitalism.

(June 1958)

Translated 1995 by a.h.s. boy

Translated by Ian Thompson, January 2016. Proofread and Edited by Anna O’Meara & Mehdi el H. From: https://isinenglish.com/1-9-formulary-for-a-new-urbanism/

SIR, I AM FROM ANOTHER COUNTRY

We are bored in the city, there is no more Temple of the Sun. Between the legs of passing women the Dadaists had hoped to find a monkey wrench, and the Surrealists, a crystal cup. That’s gone [1]. We know how to read faces [for] every promise — the latest stage of morphology. The poetry of billboards lasted twenty years. We are bored in the city, we have to push ourselves to the limit [2] to discover still more mysteries on the street signage [3], the latest state of humour and poetry:

Patriarch’s Public Baths
Meat-cutting Machines
Notre-Dame Zoo
Sports Pharmacy
Martyrs’ Convenience Store
Translucent Concrete
Golden-Hand Sawmill
Centre for Functional Recuperation
Saint-Anne Ambulance
Café Fifth Avenue
Volunteers Street Extension [4]
Guesthouse in the Garden
Hotel of Foreigners
Wild Street

And the swimming pool on the Street of Little Girls [5]. And the police station on Rendezvous Street [6]. The medico-surgical clinic and the free employment agency on the Quay of Goldsmiths [7]. The artificial flowers on Sun Street [8]. The Castle Cellars Hotel, the Ocean Bar and the Back & Forth Café. The Hotel of the Epoch.

And the strange statue of Dr. Philippe Pinel, benefactor of the insane, in the last evenings of summer. To explore Paris.

And you, forgotten, your memories ravaged by all the dismays of the world [9], run aground in the Red Cellars of Pali-Kao, without music and without geography, no longer on your way to the hacienda where the roots think of the child and where the wine ends in fables from an almanac. That’s all over. You will not see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist.

The hacienda must be built.

All cities are geological, and one can’t take three steps without running into ghosts fully-charged with the glamour [10] of their legends. We move about in a closed landscape whose landmarks incessantly pull us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to catch a glimpse of the original notions of space, but this remains a partial view [11]. [A full view] must be sought [12] in the magical places of folktales and surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, small forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors.

These dated symbols retain a small catalysing power, but it is almost impossible to use them in a symbolic urbanism without rejuvenating them; charging them with a new meaning. Our state of mind, haunted by the old archetypes [13], has lagged behind sophisticated machines. The various attempts to incorporate modern science into new myths remain inadequate. Meanwhile the abstract has infested all arts, contemporary architecture in particular. Pure plasticity, story-less and lifeless, soothes and cools the eye. Other partial beauties can be found elsewhere, while the land of new syntheses recedes further and further into the distance. Each of us is torn between the emotionally-charged past and the already dead future [14].

We will not prolong the mechanical cultures and cold architecture that ultimately lead to boring leisure.

We intend to create new, changing [15] settings. (…)

Darkness retreats in the face of lighting, and the seasons in the face of air conditioning: night-time and summer lose their allure, and dawn vanishes. The city-dwellers [16] think that they pull away from cosmic reality, and no longer dream of it. The reason is obvious: dreams spring from reality and fulfil themselves in it.

The latest technological developments [17] enable continuous connection between the individual and cosmic reality, while eliminating its inconveniences. Glass ceilings reveal the stars and the rain. The mobile house turns towards the sun. Its sliding walls enable plants to invade life. Climbing on tracks, it can move towards the sea in the morning, returning to the forest in the evening.

Architecture is the simplest means of connecting time and space, of regulating reality; the stuff of dreams. It concerns not only plastic connections and regulation (expressing an ephemeral beauty), but an affective [18] regulation, part of the perpetual evolution [19] of human desires and progress in fulfilling them.

Tomorrow’s architecture will therefore be a means of altering contemporary notions of time and space. It will be a means of knowing and a means of acting.

The architectural complex will be modifiable. Its appearance will partly or totally change in accordance with the desire of its inhabitants. (…)

Communities of the past had offered the masses an absolute truth and unquestionable mythical paradigms. The entry of the concept of relativity into the modern mind makes it possible to surmise the EXPERIMENTAL aspect of the next civilisation (although I’m still not satisfied with that word). Let’s say more flexible, more “playful” [20]. On the basis of this mobile civilisation, architecture will, at least initially, be a means of experimenting with the thousands of ways of changing life, in preparation for a synthesis that can only be epic.

A mental illness has overrun the planet: banalisation. Everyone is mesmerised by [material] production and comfort — [21] sewage systems, elevators, bathrooms, washing machines.

This state of affairs, born of a struggle [22] against poverty, has overshot its goal — the liberation of humanity from material cares — to become a haunting symbol of today. Between love and a garbage disposal unit, the youth of every country have made their choice in favour of the garbage disposal unit. A complete U-turn of the psyche has become vital, by bringing to light forgotten desires, and by the creation of entirely new desires. [Then by] intensive propaganda in favour of these desires.

We have already highlighted the need for the construction of situations to be [23] one of the basic desires on which the next civilisation will be founded. This need for total creation has always been tightly bound together [24] with the need to play with architecture, time and space. (. . .)

Chirico will be remembered [25] as one of the most remarkable architectural pioneers. He tackled the the issues of absences and presences across time and space.

We know that an object that is not consciously noticed at the time of a first visit can, by its absence during subsequent visits, provoke an undefinable sensation: through a recovery in time, the absence of the object makes itself a noticeable presence. Better [put]: although remaining generally undefinable, the character of the sensation can vary from serene joy to horror, according to the object’s nature and the importance assigned to it by the visitor. (It’s of little concern to us that in this specific case memory is the vehicle of this unease [26]; I have only chosen this example for its utility).

In Chirico’s paintings [of the] Arcades period an empty space creates a well-filled time. It is easy to imagine that the future will have such architects in store for us, and what their influence will be on the masses. We can only despise a century [like our own] [27] that relegates such blueprints [28] to so-called museums.

This new vision of time and space, which will be the theoretical basis of future constructions, is not [yet] fully developed. It never will be until experimentation on behaviours takes place in cities reserved for this purpose, where — in addition to the facilities necessary for basic comfort and security — buildings filled with great evocative and influential power would be systematically assembled; symbolic structures representing desires, forces and events – past, present and future. A rational extension of old religious systems, of old tales, and particularly of psychoanalysis to the benefit of architecture becomes more urgent every day, as the reasons to be empassioned vanish.

Everyone will live in their own “cathedral”, as it were. It will contain rooms which produce dreams more effectively than drugs, and houses where one cannot help but love. Others will be irresistibly alluring to travellers. . . .

This proposal can be compared to the Chinese and Japanese gardens in Trompe-l’oeil [29] — with the difference that those gardens are not designed to be lived in all the time — or to the absurd labyrinth in the Jardin des Plantes [30], at the entry to which is written (the height of stupidity, Ariadne rendered jobless [31]): Games are forbidden in the labyrinth.

This city could be conceived in the form of an arbitrary assembly of castles, grottos, lakes, etc… This would be the baroque stage of urbanism viewed as a means of understanding; but this theoretical phase is already outdated. We know that a modern building could be constructed which would have no resemblance to a medieval castle, but which could preserve and increase the poetic power of Castle (through the maintenance of a strict minimum of lines, the rearrangement of a number of others, the location of windows [32], its topographical location, etc.).

The districts of this city could correspond to the myriad feelings [33] that are encountered by chance in day-to-day life.

Bizarre Quarter — Happy Quarter (specially reserved for housing) — Noble and Tragic Quarter (for well-behaved children) — Historical Quarter (museums, schools) — Useful Quarter (hospital, hardware stores) — Sinister Quarter, etc… And an Astrolarium which would group plant varieties according to the connection that they demonstrate to the stellar rhythm, a planetary garden similar to that which the astronomer Thomas intends to establish at Laaer Berg in Vienna. Vital to give the inhabitants a consciousness of the cosmic. Perhaps also a Quarter of Death, not to die in but for living in peace — I’m thinking here of Mexico and of a principle of cruelty in innocence that appeals more to me every day.

The Sinister Quarter, for example, would beneficially replace those god-forsaken places [34], the mouths of hell, many peoples had possessed in their capitals long ago: that had symbolised the evil powers of life. The Sinister Quarter would have no need to contain real dangers, like traps, dungeons or mines. It would be difficult to approach, hideously decorated ([with] piercing whistles, alarm bells, regular sirens at sporadic intervals, hideous sculptures, powered moving machines, called Auto-Mobiles), and as poorly lit at night as it was blindingly [35] lit during the day through an excessive use of reflection. At the centre, the “Square of the Appalling Mobile.” [Since the] saturation of the market with a product causes its value to fall: through exploring the sinister quarter, adults and children would learn to no longer be afraid of the frightening events of life, but to be amused by them.

The main activity of the inhabitants will be the CONTINUOUS DÉRIVE. The changing of the scenery from one hour to the next will result in complete disorientation. (. . .)

Later, with the inevitable decrease in the effect of actions [36], this dérive will partly abandon the realm of experience for that of representation. (. . .)

Economic objections can easily be dismissed. We know that the more a place is set apart for free play, the more it influences behaviour and the stronger its attraction grows. The proof is in the great status [given to] Monaco and Las Vegas, [along with] Reno (that caricature of free love). Yet these are nothing but simple gambling venues [37]. The first experimental city would easily survive from permitted and controlled tourism. Upcoming avant-garde activities and creations would focus there. In a few years it would become the intellectual capital of the world, and would be universally acknowledged as such.

Gilles Ivain.

Translator's Note: In October 1953 the Lettrist International adopted this report on urbanism by Gilles Ivain, which constituted a key component in the new direction then being taken by the experimental avant-garde. This current text was created from two successive drafts containing minor differences in wording, preserved in the LI archive, which became documents 103 and 108 of the Situationist Archives.

As this new translation was being produced, I cross-referenced it to an existing translation made by Ken Knabb available on-line here. I would like to acknowledge the work done by Ken Knabb, and the real assistance his translation provided to me. However all final decisions (for better or worse – which is for the reader to decide) in this translation are mine alone.

[1] “perdu” – can also be “lost”
[2] “il faut se fatiguer salement” – literally “must exhaust yourself badly/messily”
[3] “les pancartes de la voie publique” – literally “signs of the highway”
[4] “rue des Volontaires” – a street in the 15th arrondissement of Paris
[5] “rue des Fillettes” – a street in the 18th arrondissement of Paris
[6] “rue du Rendez-Vous” – a street in the 12th arrondissement of Paris
[7] There is a pun here that cannot be translated. “Quai des Orfèvres” is the address of the Parisian police headquarters (on the Île de la Cité), and in the phrase for job centre (”bureau de placement gratuit”) the word “placement” is a French slang term for being arrested.
[8] “rue du Soleil” – a street in the 20th arrondissement of Paris
[9] “mappemonde” – literally “globe”
[10] “armés de tout le prestige” – literally “armed/charged with all the glamour”
[11] “cette vision demeure fragmentaire” – literally “this view remains [a] fraction”
[12] “Il faut la chercher” – literally “It is necessary to search for it”. But what is the “la”/”it”? It is the view (”vision”) – however the context makes it clear that this is not the partial view described in [11], hence I have used the clarifying phrase “a full view”.
[13] “images-clefs” – literally “key-images”
[14] “mort dès à present” – literally “dead as from now”
[15] “mouvants” – literally “moving” or “shifting”, but in this context “changing” seems most appropriate
[16] “L’homme des villes” – literally “The man of the cities”
[17] “Le dernier état de la technique” – literally “the latest state/condition of technology”
[18] “influentielle” – in this context this emphasises the influence on the desires/emotions, so the word “affective” has been used
[18] “la courbe éternelle” – literally “the eternal curve/bend”
[19] “amusé” – literally “amused” or “entertained”
[20] “tout-à-le” not included
[21] “comme un” – literally “as one”, but English grammar requires a different construct
[22] “protestation” – literally “protest”, but in English this doesn’t get across the inherent conflict
[23] “étroitement mêlé au” – literally “closely combined/blended with”
[24] “peu nous importe” – literally “it doesn’t matter to us”
[25] “restera” – literally “will remain”
[26] “étate d’âme” – literally “qualms/hestitation”
[27] “Nous ne pouvons aujourd’hui que méprise” – literally “We can today only despise”
[28] “maquettes” – literally “models/first drafts”
[29] “Trompe-l’œil – “French for ‘deceive the eye’, is an art technique that uses realistic imagery to create the optical illusion that the depicted objects exist in three dimensions.” (From Wikipedia)
[30] the “Jardin des Plantes” is the Paris botanical gardens on the city’s right bank
[31] “en chômage” – literally “in unemployment”. In Greek Mythology Ariadne is known as the “Mistress of the Labyrinth”.
[32] “ouvertures” – literally “openings” or “windows”
[33] word omitted: “catalogués” – “labelled” or “classed”
[34] “trous” – literally “holes”, slang term for dump, grave, prison
[35] “violemment” – literally “violently”
[36] “lors de l’inévitable usure des gestes” – literally “during the inevitable erosion of gestures/actions
[37] “Pourtant il ne s’agit que de simples jeux d’argent” – literally “Yet it is only a matter of simple gambling”

1

The traditional goal of aesthetics is to produce, by means of art, impressions of certain past elements of life in circumstances where those elements are lacking or absent, in such a way that those elements escape the disorder of appearances subject to the ravages of time. The degree of aesthetic success is thus measured by a beauty that is inseparable from duration, and that even goes so far as pretensions of eternity. The goal of the situationists is immediate participation in a passionate abundance of life by means of deliberately arranged variations of ephemeral moments. The success of these moments can reside in nothing other than their fleeting effect. The situationists consider cultural activity in its totality as an experimental method for constructing everyday life, a method that can and should be continually developed with the extension of leisure and the withering away of the division of labor (beginning with the division of artistic labor).

2

Art can cease being a report about sensations and become a direct organization of more advanced sensations. The point is to produce ourselves rather than things that enslave us.

3

Mascolo is right in saying (in Le Communisme) that the reduction of the work day by the dictatorship of the proletariat is “the most certain sign of the latter’s revolutionary authenticity.” Indeed, “if man is a commodity, if he is treated as a thing, if human relations are relations of thing to thing, this is because it is possible to buy his time.” But Mascolo is too quick to conclude that “the time of a man freely employed” is always well spent, and that “the purchase of time is the sole evil.” There can be no freely spent 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.

4

An international association of situationists can be seen as a coalition of workers in an advanced sector of culture, or more precisely as a coalition of all those who demand the right to work on a project that is obstructed by present social conditions; hence as an attempt at organizing professional revolutionaries in culture.

5

We are excluded from real control over the vast material powers of our time. The communist revolution has not yet occurred and we are still living within the confines of decomposing old cultural superstructures. Henri Lefebvre rightly sees that this contradiction is at the heart of a specifically modern discordance between the progressive individual and the world, and he terms the cultural tendency based on this discordance “revolutionary-romantic.” The inadequacy of Lefebvre’s conception lies in the fact that he makes the mere expression of this discordance a sufficient criterion for revolutionary action within culture. Lefebvre abandons in advance any experimentation involving profound cultural change, contenting himself with mere awareness of possibilities that are as yet impossible (because they are still too remote), an awareness that can be expressed in any sort of form within the framework of cultural decomposition.

6

Those who want to supersede the old established order in all its aspects cannot cling to the disorder of the present, even in the sphere of culture. In culture as in other areas, it is necessary to struggle without waiting any longer for some concrete appearance of the moving order of the future. The possibility of this ever-changing new order, which is already present among us, devalues all expressions within existing cultural forms. If we are ever to arrive at authentic direct communication (in our working hypothesis of higher cultural means: the construction of situations), we must bring about the destruction of all the forms of pseudocommunication. The victory will go to those who are capable of creating disorder without loving it.

7

In the world of cultural decomposition we can test our strength but never use it. The practical task of overcoming our discordance with this world, that is, of surmounting its decomposition by some more advanced constructions, is not romantic. We will be “revolutionary romantics,” in Lefebvre’s sense, precisely to the degree that we fail.

GUY DEBORD
1958

From: http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/1.cultural-revolution.htm

It's rather astonishing that practically no one, until now, dared pursue the logic of automation to its ultimate implications. As a result, we have no real perspectives on it. It seems more like the engineers, scientists, and sociologists are trying to fraudulently sneak automation into society.

Automation, however, is now at the center of the problem of socialist control of production and of the preeminence of leisure over work time. The question of automation is the most heavily charged with positive and negative possibilities.

The goal of socialism is abundance -- the greatest amount of goods to the greatest number of people, which, statistically, implies the reduction of unforseen events to the level of improbable. An increase in the number of goods reduces the value of each. This devalorisation of all human goods to the level of "perfect neutrality," so to speak, will be the unavoidable consequence of a purely scientific socialist development. It is unfortunate that most intellectuals never get past this idea of mechanical reproduction, and are preparing man for this bleak, symmetric future. Likewise artists, specialized in the study of the unique, are turning in greater numbers, with hostility, against socialism. On the flip side, the socialist politicians are suspicious of any manifestation of artistic power or originality.

Attached to their conformist positions, one after another displays a certain bead mood with regard to automation, which risks jeopardizing their cultural and economic conceptions. There is, in every "avant-garde" tendency, a self-defeating attitude towards automation or, at best, an under-estimation of the positive aspects of the future, the proximity of which is revealed by the early stages of automation. At the same time, the reactionary forces flaunt an idiotic optimism.

An anecdote is pertinent here. Last year, in the journal Quatrième Internationale, the militant marxist Livio Maitan reported that an Italian priest had already proposed the idea of a second weekly Mass, necessitated by the increase in free time. Maitan responded: "The error consists in believing that man in the new society will be the same as in the present society, though in reality he will have needs so different from ours that it's almost too difficult to imagine." But Maitan's error is to leave to a vague future the new needs which are "almost too difficult to imagine." The dialectical role of the spirit is to incline the possible towards desirable forms. Maitan forgets that "the elements of a new society are formed within the old society," always, as the Communist Manifesto states. The elements of a new life should already be in formation among us -- in the realm of culture --, and it's up to us to help ourselves in order to raise the level of the debate.

Socialism, which tends towards the most complete liberation of the energies and potential in each individual, will be obligated to see in automation an anti-progressive tendency, rendered progressive only by its relation to new provocations capable of exteriorizing the latent energies of man. If, as the scientists and technicians claim, automation is a new means of liberating man, it ought to imply the transcendence of precedent human activity. This requires man's active imagination to transcend the very realization of automation. Where can we find such perspectives, which render man master and not slave of automation?

Louis Salleron explains in his study on "Automation" that it, "as nearly always happens with matters of progress, adds more than it replaces or suppresses." What does automation, in itself, add to the possibility of action? We have learned that it completely suppresses it within its domain.

The crisis of industrialization is a crisis of consumption and production. The crisis of production is more important than the crisis of consumption, the latter being conditioned by the former. Transposed on the individual level, this is equivalent to the thesis that it is better to give than to receive, to be capable of adding rather than suppressing. Automation is thus possessed of two opposing perspectives: it deprives the individual of any possibility of adding something personal to automated production, which is a fixation of progress, while at the same time sparing human energies now massively liberated from reproductive and uncreative activities. The value of automation thus depends on projects which transcend it, and which release new human energies at a superior level.

Experimental activity in culture [is] today in this incomparable field. And the self-defeating attitude here, the resignation before the possibilities of the epoch, is symptomatic of the old avant-garde who remain content, as Edgar Morin wrote, "to chew on the bones of the past." A surrealist named Benayoun says in No. 2 of Surréalisme Même, the latest expression of the movement: "The problem of leisure is already tormenting sociologists... We no longer put faith in scientists, but in clowns, lounge singers, ballerinas, plastic people. One day of work for six of rest: the balance between the serious and the frivolous, between slacking and laboring, is at great risk of being upset. The 'worker,' in his unemployment, will be lobotomized by a convulsive, invasive television short on ideas and scarce on talent." This surrealist doesn't see that a week of six days of rest will not lead to an "upset of the balance" between the frivolous and the serious, but a change in nature of the serious as well as of the frivolous. He hopes only for mistaken identities, a ridiculous return to the given world, which he perceives, like an aging surrealist, as a sort of intangible vaudeville. Why will this future be the solidification of present-day vulgarities? And why will it be "short on ideas?" Does this mean it will be short on 1924 surrealist ideas updated for 1936? Probably. On does it mean that imitation surrealists are short on ideas? We know it well.

New leisures seem like a chasm that current society knows no better way to bridge than to proliferate jury-rigged pseudogames. But they are, at the same time, the base on which the greatest cultural construction ever imagined could be erected. This goal is obviously outside the circle of interest of the partisans of automation. If we want to have a discussion with engineers, we must enter their field of interest. Maldonado, who currently directs the Hochschule f?r Gestaltung at Ulm, explains that the development of automation has been compromised because there is little enthusiasm amongst the youth to follow the polytechnic path, except for specialists in automation itself, gutted of a general cultural perspective. But Maldonado, who, of all people, should display such a general perspective, is completely unaware of it: "automation will only be able to develop rapidly once it establishes as its goal a perspective contrary to its own establishment, and once we can realize such a perspective in the course of its development."

Maldonado proposes the opposite: first establish automation, then its uses. We could argue with this method if the goal were not precisely automation, because automation is not an action in a domain, which would provoke an anti-action. It is the neutralization of a domain, which would come to neutralize the outside as well if the opposing actions were not undertaken at the same time.

Pierre Drouin, speaking in the January 5, 1957 Le Monde on the growth of hobbies as the realization of virtualities which workers can no longer find use for in their professional activity, concludes that in every man "there is a creator sleeping." This old cliché burns with truth today, if we link it back to the real material possibilities of our time. The sleeping creator must awaken, and his state of waking could well be called situationist.

The notion of standardization is an attempt to reduce and simplify the greatest number of human needs to the greatest degree of equality. It is up to us as to whether standardization opens more interesting realms of experience than it closes. Depending on the result, we could end up with a total degradation of human life, or the possibility of perpetually discovering new desires. But these desires will not come about on their own, in the oppressive frame of our world. Communal action must be taken to detect, manifest, and realize them.

Asger Jorn (June 1958)

Translated 1995 by a.h.s. boy

"Intellectual" or "artistic" collaboration in a group devoted to the type of experimentation we are engaged in involves our everyday life. It is always accompanied with a certain friendship.

Consequently, when we think of those who have participated in this joint activity and then been excluded from it, we are obliged to admit that they were once our friends. Sometimes the memory is pleasant. In other cases it's ridiculous and embarrassing.

On the whole, later developments have confirmed the correctness of our reproaches and the irredeemability of the people who have not been able to remain with us. A few of them have even ended up joining the Church or the colonial troops. Most of the others have retired to one or another little niche in the intelligentsia. [...]

The recent formation of the Situationist International has given a new relevance to the questions of accord and breaks. A period of discussions and negotiations on a footing of equality between several groups, beginning with the Alba Congress, has been concluded with the formation at Cosio d'Arroscia a disciplined organization. The result of these new objective conditions has been to force certain opportunist elements into open opposition, leading to their immediate elimination (the purging of the Italian section). Certain wait-and-see attitudes have also ceased to be tolerable, and those of our allies who have not seen fit to join us immediately have thereby unmasked themselves as adversaries. It is on the basis of the program since developed by the majority of the SI that all the new elements have joined us, and we would risk cutting ourselves off from these elements, and especially from those we will meet in the future, if we consented to pursue the slightest dialogue with those who, since Alba, have demonstrated that their creative days are over.

We have become stronger and therefore more seductive. We don't want innocuous relationships and we don't want relationships that could serve our enemies. [...]

It should be clearly understood that all the situationists will maintain the enmities inherited from the former groupings that have constituted the SI, and that there is no possible return for those whom we have ever been forced to despise. But we don't have an idealist, abstract, absolutist conception of breaks. It is necessary to recognize when an encounter in a concrete collective task becomes impossible, but also to see if such an encounter, in changed circumstances, does not once again become possible and desirable between persons who have been able to retain a certain respect for each other. [...]

As I said at the beginning, a collective project like we have undertaken and are pursuing cannot avoid being accompanied by friendship. But it is also true that it cannot be identified with friendship and that it should not be subject to the same weaknesses. Nor to the same modes of continuity or looseness.

MICHÈLE BERNSTEIN (1958)

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

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

ON 1 JANUARY 1958 the first manifesto of the German section of the SI was published in Munich under the title "Nervenruh! Keine Experimente!" [Stay Calm! No Experiments!]. Violently denouncing the poverty of cultural pseudo-novelties, this tract did not shy from pointing out the issue at hand: "Damen und Herren, lassen Sie sicht nicht provozieren: das ist das letzte Gefechte! . . . Wann kommt der neue Einheitsstuhl? Ein Gespenst geistertdurch die Welt: die situationistische Internationale." [Ladies and Gentlemen, don't let yourselves be provoked: this is the last struggle! . . . When will the new Einheitsstuhl1 come out? A specter is haunting the world: the Situationist International.]

Shortly afterwards the French section published the tract "The New Cultural Theater of Operations" and the appeal "To the Producers of Modern Art" (If you are tired of copying the demolitions; if you think that the fragmentary repetitions expected of you are outdated before they even come about, contact us to organize the new powers for a superior transformation of the surrounding environment.)2

Potlatch, information bulletin of the Lettrist International until its 28th issue, has come under the control of our united organization, its publication occasionally continued by our French section. Due for publication by the SI in Paris, Asger Jorn's book Pour la Forme, collecting many texts published in different languages between 1953 and 1957, presents his essential theoretical contributions to the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, which is equally integrated into the new International.

In Belgium our comrades have published, in a book devoted to the history of the avant-garde gallery "Taptoe" — which closed with a psychogeographical exhibition in February 1957 — an interview with Jorn on the meaning of the changes in experimental art before and after the Cobra movement (1949-1951), and a second edition of Report on the Construction of Situations. A translation of this report by our Italian section was published in Turin in May (Editions Notizie).

The Belgian section of the SI is also occupied with the extension of its propaganda in Holland, with Walter Korun's study on the origins of the Situationist International and its current program, written in Dutch for number 11 of the journal Gard-Sivik.

• 1An all purpose chair produced by the original Bauhaus.
• 2This text was printed on a single strip of paper, 2cms high and 90 cms long.

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

The second conference of the Situationist International met in Paris on the 25 and 26 January, six months after the founding conference of Cosio d'Arroscia in July 1957, concerned particularly with the development of our action in Northern Europe and Germany, editorial activity, the organization of a dérive by several groups in radio contact, and preliminary positions on the application of certain ambient constructions.

The conference proceeded with the purging of the Italian section, in which a faction had developed, first maintaining idealist and reactionary theses which were refuted and condemned by the majority, and then abstaining from all self-criticism. The conference thereby decided on the exclusion of Walter Olmo, Piero Simondo and Edna Verrone.

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

The British Situationist Ralph Rumney, who had conducted a number of psychogeographical forays into Venice the Spring of 1957, subsequently set out with the goal of a more systematic exploration of the area, hoping to be able to present an exhaustive account by around June 1958 (cf. an announcement in Potlatch #29). At first the expedition went favorably. Having completed the initial elements of a plan of Venice whose notational technique clearly surpassed all psychogeographical cartography before it, Rumney imparted to his comrades his discoveries, his early conclusions and his hopes. By the month of January 1958, however, the news was taking a turn for the worst. Rumney, struggling against innumerable difficulties, slowed down more and more by the territory he had attempted to cross, abandoned one line of research after the other, and in the end, as he communicated to us in his moving message of 20 March, came to a complete standstill.

Diagram of all the courses taken in one year by a student living in the 16th Arrondissement.
Published by Chombart de Lauwe in "Paris et l'agglomération parisienne" (PUF).

The explorers of old were aware of the high proportion of losses entailed in the quest for objective knowledge of geography. One must expect to see victims among the new searchers, the explorers of social space and its modes of use. The pitfalls are of a wholly different type, the stakes of a different nature: it is a matter of discovering a passionate use for life. It is natural for one to encounter all the defenses the world of boredom can muster. And thus, Rumney has disappeared, and his father has not yet organized a search party. The Venetian jungle is strong; it closed in on the young man, full of life and promise, now lost, dissolved in a multitude of memories.

On April 12, two days before the gathering in Brussels of an international assembly of art critics, the situationists widely distributed an address to that assembly signed -- in the name of the Algerian, Belgian, French, German, Italian and Scandinavian sections of the SI -- by Khatib, Korun, Debord, Platschek, Pinot-Gallizio and Jorn:

To you, this gathering is just one more boring event. The Situationist International, however, considers that while this assemblage of so many art critics as an attraction of the Brussels Fair is laughable, it is also significant. Inasmuch as modern cultural thought has proved itself completely stagnant for over twenty-five years, and inasmuch as a whole era that has understood nothing and changed nothing is now becoming aware of its failure, its spokesmen are striving to transform their activities into institutions. They thus solicit official recognition from the completely outmoded but still materially dominant society, for which most of them have been loyal watchdogs. The main shortcoming of modern art criticism is that it has never looked at the culture as a whole nor at the conditions of an experimental movement that is perpetually superseding it. At this point in time the increased domination of nature permits and necessitates the use of superior powers in the construction of life. These are today's problems; and those intellectuals who hold back, through fear of a general subversion of a certain form of existence and of the ideas which that form has produced, can no longer do anything but struggle irrationally against each other as defenders of one or another detail of the old world -- of a world whose day is done and whose meaning they have not even known. And so we see art critics assembling to exchange the crumbs of their ignorance and their doubts. We know of a few people here who are presently making some effort to understand and support new ventures; but by coming here they have accepted being mixed up with an immense majority of mediocrities, and we warn them that they cannot hope to retain the slightest interest on our part unless they break with this milieu. Vanish, art critics, partial, incoherent and divided imbeciles! In vain do you stage the spectacle of a fake encounter. You have nothing in common but a role to cling to; you are only in this market to parade one of the aspects of Western commerce: your confused and empty babble about a decomposed culture. History has depreciated you. Even your audacities belong to a past now forever closed. Disperse, fragments of art critics, critics of fragments of art. The Situationist International is now organizing the integral artistic activity of the future. You have nothing more to say. The Situationist International will leave no place for you. We will starve you out.

Our Belgian section carried out the necessary direct attack. Beginning April 13, on the eve of the opening of the proceedings, when the art critics from two hemispheres, led by the American Sweeney, were being welcomed to Brussels, the text of the situationist proclamation was brought to their attention in several ways. Copies were mailed to a large number of critics or given to them personally. Others were telephoned and read all or part of the text. A group forced its way into the Press Club where the critics were being received and threw the leaflets among the audience. Others were tossed onto the sidewalks from upstairs windows or from a car. (After the Press Club incident, art critics were seen coming out in the street to pick up the leaflets so as to remove them from the curiosity of passersby.) In short, all steps were taken to leave the critics no chance of being unaware of the text. These art critics did not shrink from calling the police, and used their World Exposition influence in order to block the reprinting in the press of a text harmful to the prestige of their convention and their specialization. Our comrade Korun is now being threatened with prosecution for his role in the intervention.

SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL (1958)

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

It is not Catilina on our doorstep, but death.
— P.J. Proudhon to Herzan, 1849

While the current issue of this journal was at the printers (13 May to 2 June), serious events were underway in France. These latest developments could have a dramatic impact on the conditions of avant-garde culture, as well as many other aspects of European life.

If it is true that history tends to replay tragedy as farce, then the Spanish War of Independence has seen its repetition in the comedy of the end of the Fourth Republic. The political heart of the Fourth Republic was its unreality, and its bloodless death was itself unreal. The Fourth Republic was inseparable from the perpetual war in the colonies: while the people of France were interested in ending the war, the colonialist sectors were interested in winning it. Parliament seemed incapable of doing either, but for years it made repeated concessions and resignations to the colonialists and the army in their service, ever willing to hand them the reigns of power.

When the colonial Algerian army revolted, just as everyone had expected it to, it would not have taken much for the republican government to maintain order, and resistance remained necessary and could easily have been executed right up to the last day. But initially, it had to rely on the support of the people through a parliamentary majority of the left. In the end, after the conquest of Corsica and the threat of airborne troops invading Paris, it could have depended upon the effective force of a mobilized population (with a government organized general strike like that which annihilated the initial success of the Kapp putsch1 by armed militias). This revolutionary process, which involved calling on conscripted men to rise up against their rebellious leaders and above all to recognize Algerian independence, looked even more dangerous than fascism.

Throughout this crisis the Communist Party was the greatest defender of the parliamentary regime and nothing more. But the regime reached this point of dissolution precisely because of its refusal to take into account the voice of the communist majority in the Left. Until the very end, it remained the victim of the unique process of intimidation with which the Right minority had continuously imposed its politics: the myth of a Communist Party working to seize power. The Party, which had not done the slightest amount of work, had thus disappointed and disarmed the masses without ever achieving a single thing in Parliament; all the while making every effort to have its advances noticed by the leaders of the bourgeoisie themselves. These latter can be assured that the communists will never register their first parliamentary success: the regime collapsed before they could have the chance. On 28 May it seemed as if it would be possible to drive the nation — and not the Parliament — into the anti-fascist struggle. But after the CGT's2 failure on the evening of 29 May to call for the unlimited general strike that would have been the principle weapon of this struggle, the demonstrations of 1 June could be nothing but pure formalities.

The indifference of the masses was due to the fact that for such a long time, they had only been offered a false parliamentary alternative between the moderate Right and the moderation of a Popular Front made all the more utopian by its absolute rejection by non-communists. Non-politicized elements had been anaesthetized by the popular press and radio. A government controlling such means of communication, exploiting them to their fullest, should have had time to inform the country, but the capitalist mode of information followed its natural inclination and successfully concealed the death throes of the regime from the majority of the population. The politicized elements had, since 1945, made a habit out of defeat, and they were justifiably skeptical of such a "defense of the Republic." However, the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators who marched together in Paris on 28 May showed that the people deserved better, and that at the last moment they would rise up.

As yet, this lamentable affair has had nothing modern about it. Fascism has neither a mass party in France, nor a program. Only the force of a narrow-minded, racist colonialism and an army that can see no other victory in its reach, has, as a first step, imposed de Gaulle on France: a man who represents a boyscout's idea of the national grandeur of 17th century France, and who guarantees the transition to a Poujadist,3 militarist moral order. For such a heavily industrialized country, there has been next to no decisive action on the part of the working class. Things have sunk to the level where neither the bourgeoisie nor the proletariat has a political presence, and everything is decided by pronunciamentos.

So what happens now? The workers' organizations are intact; public opinion has been alerted; and the Algerian army is still fighting. To maintain its Algerian rule, the colonists, who controlled the government in Paris long before their official appointment, must now rule unopposed in France. Their goal remains the intensification to their profit of the war effort across the whole of France, and at present this necessitates the liquidation of democracy in this country and the triumph of fascist authority. If they are still capable of reversing this current, the democratic forces in France must now take their attitude to its logical end: the liquidation of colonial power in Algeria and in France, that is to say the establishment of an Algerian Republic of the FLN.4 A violent clash is therefore inevitable before too long. The despicable illusions on the role of the President-General, the obstacles facing united action, and another hesitation just as the struggle is beginning might serve to further weaken the people, or even to sell them out, but nothing will hold off the dénouement.

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

• 1Kapp Putsch: Reactionary coup led by Wolfgang Kapp (1958-1922) in which the Freikorps seized control of Berlin on 13 March 1920. It was defeated by a four day general strike organized by the ruling Social Democrats after an unsuccessful appeal to the army.
• 2CGT: Confédération Générale du Travail, the General Confederation of Labor, France's largest trade union, closely allied with the French Communist Party.
• 3Poujadism: Right-wing protest movement led by French politician Pierre Poujade (b.1920), enjoying massive popularity in the 1950's.
• 4FLN: Front de Libération Nationale, National Liberation Front, the Algerian revolutionary group that led the War of Independence against France from 1956 until 1962.

In a text entitled 'Poetry Above All,' Benjamin Péret opens the first number of the surrealist bulletin Bief with an attack on the situationists, to whom he attributes the idiotic project of placing poetry and art under the 'guidance' of science.

Motivated by the grotesque intention to propagandize against the situationists, Péret's confused declarations cruelly reveal a mode of thinking from another century: an incapacity to comprehend the problems of the present, an incapacity that renders even more laughable his pretense to combat those who pose them.

'Nuclear fission and its consequences,' he says, 'won't provide a new way of feeling, any more than they will generate an original poetry.' True. But who is it that wants to 'feel' passively? And who is it that expects 'an original poetry,' with or without a nuclear pretext? We smile at this rhetoric of the pre-eminence of scientism over poetic sensibility, and conversely, these polemics that remind us Sully-Prudhomme.1 We don't want to renew expression in itself, and certainly not the expression of science: we want to bring passion to everyday life. To this end, poetry can no longer be of any use. We're not about to patch up poetic language and artistic expression for them to end up being loved unconditionally by a generation of dadaist has-beens. As the song goes: your youth is dead and so are your loves.

What, then, is our goal? The creation of situations. Although there can be no doubt that people have attempted direct interventions into their surroundings at various times in their lives, such constructions did not possess the unified means for their qualitative and quantitative extension, remaining isolated and fragmentary.

The failure to realize these desires was for a long time palliated by the distractions of religion and, at a later stage, the spectacle of art. However, going hand in hand with the material development of the world — which must be understood in its broadest sense — the disappearance of these distractions is now easy to verify. The construction of situations is not directly dependent on atomic energy; nor even on automation or social revolution, since experiments can be carried out in the absence of certain conditions, conditions that will no doubt come to fruition in the near future. But while a number of sectors lag behind the total advance of our time, depriving us of means we would like to have at our disposal and leaving the present somewhat dull, a proper perspective of this order has been able to appear for the first time in history, and lesser pleasures thus seem unworthy of our attention.

Péret is the prisoner of a false richness of memory, of the vain task of preserving the emotions associated with the collector's items of others.

Péret and his friends are the conservators of an art world whose time is up. They are on the side of those who sell it condensed in Malraux's imaginary museums.2 They are on the side of those who want to prolong its "nobility" while decorating their refrigerators with modern paintings. But this nobility died with the anciens régime of culture, leaving them on the side of nothing but nostalgia. Dreams, which they praised so much, are only good for those who would rather to sleep forever.

We are the partisans of forgetting: forgetting the past, living in the present. Our contemporaries cannot be found among those satisfied with too little. In April 1958, the SI's Belgian section hurled at the International Assembly of Art Critics a slogan that summed up our little step forward perfectly: "the classless society has found its artists."

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

• 1René-François-Armand (Sully) Prudhomme (1839-1907), French poet and leader of the traditionalist Parnassian movement, who studied science before turning to poetry.
• 2A reference to Le Musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale by André Malraux (1901-1976), the French novelist and art historian who served as de Gaulle's minister for culture from 1958 to 1968.

In 1958, something of a conspiracy launched a new avant-garde movement that had the peculiar trait of having been defunct for seven years. Though never presented in clear terms, allusions are made to the continuing existence of none other than Cobra. In some cases an origin is fixed, implying its permanence.

Thus, on 18 September, France-Observateur wrote on the painter Corneille: "At this time (1950), he participated in the founding of the artistic group Reflex, which was slowly integrated into the avant-garde movement Cobra." In other cases, given the fact that Cobra is hardly ever mentioned, the illusion is created that its constitution is more recent, as in Le Monde of 31 October: "With his combination of abstract lyricism and African aesthetic influences, Holland's Rooskens is part of the avant-garde movements Reflex and Cobra..."

What is the reality? Between 1948 and 1951, there was an Experimental Artists International more often known as the Cobra movement, after the name of its journal (its title, short for Copenhagen - Brussels - Amsterdam, expressed its almost exclusively Northern European composition). The journal Reflex, which was the organ of the Dutch Experimental Group before international contact and the publication of Cobra, ran to only two numbers in 1948. The groups that made up the Cobra movement were united in the proclamation of experimental cultural research. But this positive aspect was paralyzed by an ideological confusion maintained by the strong participation of neo-surrealists. The only effective experiment that Cobra could carry out was that of a new style of painting. In 1951, the Experimental Artists International put an end to its own existence. The representatives of its advanced tendency pursued their research in different forms. On the other hand, a number of artists abandoned their preoccupation with experimental activity, putting their talent to use in making this particular pictorial style, which was the sole tangible result of the Cobra endeavor, and highly fashionable (for example [Karel] Appel in the UNESCO building).

It is the commercial success of old members of the Cobra movement that has recently led to other more mediocre artists, who were of very little importance to Cobra and its afterlife, to plot to various ends the mystification of an uninterrupted, eternally young Cobra movement, classically experimental in the style of 1948, where their wretched commodities can be marketed under the same prestigious label as those of Corneille and Appel. Cobra's old editor-in-chief [Christian] Dotremont is responsible for this charade, by trying to please everyone. Indeed, the artists linked to this scheme, whether or not they participated in the brief experiment of 1948-1951, attach a supposed "theoretical" value to their works by declaring themselves an organized movement. And the individuals who control the judgment and sale of the decomposed repetitions of modern art have a vested interest in making people believe the objects in question are expressions of a truly innovative movement. They therefore struggle against real changes, whose foreseeable extent must entail their practical disappearance from the posts they hold, and the ideological failure of their entire life (the taste, the practical consideration, and the dominant cultural elite of ebbing movements, whose strongest example remains that of the surrealists, but is discretely beginning to manifest itself even in regard to some lettrist recordings, in spite of the near complete opposition that they met at the time of lettrism and the difficulty of exploiting that movement).

It is most likely, however, that no matter how favorable conditions may be, the reactionary effort now being deployed under the Cobra flag will not last. At the beginning of 1958, Neo-Cobra was assured of a show at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, once upon a time the site of a scandalous exhibition by the movement, and whose extremely overrated reputation in Paris should be attributed to a few hack journalist friends of the warmed up Cobra as much as the old cultural world of museums. Neo-Cobra intended to organize a highly eclectic major exhibition designed to travel to other capitals, and above all to make an impression on the American market. The situationists, who found themselves implicated in this little affair because two of them had played important roles in Cobra1 , made it known that they would only accept this exhibition in a rigorously historical form, whose appraisal would be undertaken by a delegate chosen by them, and that they would be limited to opposing as unimportant any sort of attempt to present Cobra as contemporary research. In the face of our opposition the Stedelijk Museum withdrew its agreement. It goes without saying that this is behind the present campaign to resurrect Cobra. And it is doubtful that this campaign can expect any worthwhile success if its promoters cannot find considerable enough support to allow the them to show the assembled bits and pieces of their pseudo-movement.

The despicable character of this attempt at a new beginning is familiar to anyone who knows the program adopted by Cobra ten years ago, as is demonstrated by the Manifesto of the Dutch Experimental Group2 , written by Constant and published in Reflex #1:

The historical influence of the upper classes has pushed art into more and more of a position of dependence, accessible only to exceptionally gifted spirits, capable only of pulling off a little formalist freedom.

An individualist culture is therefore constituted and is condemned alongside the society that produced it, its conventions no longer offering any possibility of imagination or desire, even preventing vital human expression.

At this stage, a popular art cannot correspond to the conceptions of the people, as the people do not participate in artistic creation but in historically imposed formalisms. What characterizes popular art is a vital, direct and collective expression...

A new freedom will come that allows humans to satisfy their creative desires. With this development the professional artist will lose his privileged position: this explains the current resistance in the arts.

In the transitional period creative art found itself in permanent conflict with existing culture, while at the same time announcing a new culture. With this double aspect, whose psychological effect would have a growing importance, art played a revolutionary role in society. The bourgeois spirit still dominates all of life, even to the point of bringing a prefabricated popular art to the masses.

The cultural void has never been more obvious than in the post-war era...

Any prolonging of this culture appears impossible, and therefore the task of artists cannot be constructive in the framework of such a culture. It is necessary first of all to rid ourselves of old cultural shreds which instead of permitting us an artistic expression prevent us from finding one. The problematic phase in the history of modern art is over, and it is about to be succeeded by an experimental phase. This is to say that the experience of a period of unlimited freedom must allow us to find the laws of a new creativity.

Naturally, those who marched in line with such a program can today be found among the ranks of the Situationist International.

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

• 1Libcom note: Asger Jorn and Jørgen Nash were members of Cobra who joined the Situationist International
• 2Libcom note: available here: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/presitu/manifesto.html

Any creative effort that is not henceforth carried out in view of a new cultural theater of operations, of a direct creation of life's surroundings, is in one way or another a hoax. Within the context of the exhaustion of traditional aesthetic categories, some reach the point of making themselves known simply by signing a blank, which is the perfect result of the Dadaist "readymade." A few years ago, the American composer John Cage obliged his audience to listen to a moment of silence. During the lettriste experiment of 1952, a twenty-four-minute dark sequence, with no soundtrack, was introduced into the film Hurlements en faveur de Sade. Yves Klein's recent monochrome paintings, inspired by Tinguely's machines, take the form of rapidly revolving blue disks, causing the critic for Le Monde (November 21, 1958) to remark:

You might think that all this effort and so many detours do not lead very far. Even the protagonists do not take themselves very seriously. But their enterprise falls symptomatically within the present disarray. "They've run out of ideas" is heard on all sides. Is art, and especially painting, once and for all "at the end of its rope"? This has been said of all periods, but it may after all have devolved on ours to coincide with the final impasse. This time the old surface of the canvas, where Impressionism and Expressionism, Fauvism and Cubism, pointillism and Abstract Expressionism, geometric and lyrical abstraction have all been superimposed, is beginning to show its threads.

Actually, the artists' seriousness does not pose any sort of problem. The real question opposes any isolated artistic means with the unified use of several of these means. Immediately after the formation of the Situationist International, Potlatch, no. 29, warned the Situationists ("The S.I. in and against Decomposition"1 ):

Just as there is no "situationism" as doctrine, one must not let certain former experiments be called Situationist achievements — or everything to which our ideological and practical weakness now limits us. But, on the other hand, we cannot concede even a temporary value to mystification. The abstract empirical fact that constitutes this or that manifestation of today's decayed culture only takes on concrete meaning by its connection with the overall vision of an end or a beginning of civilization. Which is to say that in the long run our seriousness can integrate and surpass mystification, as well as whatever promotes it as evidence of an actual historical state of decayed thought.

Indeed, these empty exercises seldom escape the temptation to rely on some kind of external justification, thereby to illustrate and serve a reactionary conception of the world. Klein's purpose, as we are told by the same article in Le Monde, "seems to be to transpose this purely plastic theme of color saturation into a sort of incantatory pictorial mystique. It involves being swallowed up in spellbinding blue uniformity like a Buddhist in Buddha." We know, alas, that John Cage participates in that Californian thought where the mental infirmity of American capitalist culture has enrolled in the school of Zen Buddhism. It is not by chance that Michel Tapié, the secret agent of the Vatican, pretends to believe in the existence of an American school of the Pacific Coast, and in its decisive importance: all kinds of spiritualists are closing ranks these days. Tapié's slimy procedure also aims, in parallel fashion, at destroying the theoretical vocabulary (in which he plays an artist's role, unacknowledged as such, but as a true contemporary of Cage and Klein). In a catalogue for the Galerie Stadler, on November 25, he thus decomposes language, using as a pretext a painter, naturally Japanese, named Imaï: "In recent months, Imaï has reached a new stage in a fruitful three-year pictorial development, which had progressed from a 'signifying Pacific' climate to a dramatic totalist graphism."

There is no need to point out how Klein and Tapié are spontaneously in the forefront of a fascist wave that is making headway in France. Others have been so more explicitly, if not perhaps more consciously — first of all, the putrid Hantaï, who proceeded directly from surrealist fanaticism to the royalism of Georges Mathieu. The simplicity of the recipe for Dadaism in reverse, as well as Hantaï's obvious moral rot, have not stopped the worthy imbeciles of the Swiss orthodox neo-Dadaist journal Panderma from giving him massive publicity, nor from admitting that they have not been able "to understand the slightest thing" about discussions of the show at the Galerie Kléber, in March 1957, though it was clearly denounced — in the same way — by the Surrealists, and by us in Potlatch, no. 28. It is true that the same journal, speaking for some reason of the S.I., also reveals its perplexity: "What's it all about? No one knows." We would probably be amazed to be a current subject of conversation in Basel. Nevertheless, Laszlo, the editor of Panderma, has been making several vain attempts to meet Situationists in Paris. It all goes to show that even Laszlo has read us. Except that his calling lies elsewhere: he is the mainspring of one of those vast gatherings where people who have no connection with each other put their signatures for a day to a manifesto that in itself has no content. Laszlo's great work, his simple but proud contribution to the sovereign nothingness of his time, is a "manifesto against avant-gardism," which, after some thirty lines of critical remarks, utterly acceptable because unfortunately quite trite, about the tiredness of modern art and the repetitions of what is called avant-gardism, suddenly turns into a profession of faith in a future of interest only to the signers. Since their chosen future is not otherwise defined, and is therefore probably awaited and accepted in its entirety and with enthusiasm — as by Hantaï — one of the signers, Edouard Roditi, has been careful to hold back, reserving for himself "the right to judge the future as uninteresting as the present." Roditi aside, all these thinkers (of whom the best known is the singer and composer Charles Estienne, a former art critic) are probably, for the moment, interested in, and perhaps gratified by, the future that has necessarily followed the publication of their manifesto.

One can bet that a good number of these lovers of the future met again at the "rendezvous of the international avant-garde" held in September at the Palais des Expositions in Charleroi, of which nothing is known except the title "Art of the Twenty-first Century" displayed on a modest advertising poster. One can also bet that the formula, which fell flat, will be repeated, and that all those who were so thoroughly incapable of discovering an art of 1958 will subscribe to that if the twenty-first century, nagged only by extremists trying to sell the same repetitions under a twenty-second century label. The flight to the future, in its boastfulness, is thus the consolation of those who turn around and around in front of the wall that separates them from present-day culture.

Translated by John Shepley. From: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/absence.html

• 1https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/onemore.html

When the French bourgeois parliamentary republic was swept away without a fight, the revolutionary intellectuals came together to denounce the collapse of the workers' parties, the unions, somnambulistic ideologies and the myths of the Left. The only thing that didn't seem worthy of mention was their own collapse.

As it happened, they weren't that brilliant a generation of intellectuals. The philosophical discussions, lifestyle and artistic fashions that they loved were completely laughable. They probably even suspected this themselves. It was only in political thought that they appeared in a good light. Here they were sure of themselves, shining brightly in contrast to a communist party whose absence gave them the monopoly on free thinking.

But this freedom was not put to good use. They never reached a general conception of revolutionary thought. Symptomatically, in issue 7 of Arguments (April 1958), Morin was obliged to conclude an article full of very accurate remarks ("La dialectique et l'action") with a sudden discovery: "the greatest art, the only art" was politics, for "today, all other arts are worn out, dried up, transmuted into science or converted into infantile magic." But while Morin was completely content to have seen in passing an artistic future he had previously neglected, he forgot to add that the goal of revolutionaries is the suppression of politics (government by the people taking the place of the administration of things).

As soon as the May crisis began, the majority of revolutionary intellectuals, along with the workers' parties, were stranded in a bourgeois republican ideology which could not correspond to any real force, neither from the bourgeoisie or from among the workers. The Socialisme ou Barberie group, on the other hand, for whom the proletariat is a sort of Hidden God of History, has closed its eyes and congratulates itself on its own disarmament, corresponding only to a pinnacle of class consciousness in the liberation from the nefarious influence of parties and trade unions, a liberation that comes too late.

But the absence of a revolutionary response in May has led to the complete derailing of the parliamentary Left that "wouldn't speak of civil war." The only forces that retain a presence in France are those which made the most of the struggle against the colonial revolution in order to accomplish their programs: the capitalist reaction, which wanted to control a State better adapted to the new economic structures in the most direct manner possible; and the fascist reaction of the army and the settlers, who wanted to win the Algerian war at any cost (the contradictions between these two tendencies did not prevent their relative solidarity, and on account of the dispersal of worker opposition to Gaullism and the weakening of the armed struggle of the Algerians, there was nothing to push them into an immediate show of strength: the colonists and de Gaulle could settle into a few more years of war in Algeria, as long as they could strike a suitable balance).

With its lack of revolutionary organization and the absence of links with the struggle of the colonized, the proletariat was incapable of taking advantage of the colonial crisis of the bourgeois republic in order to accomplish its own program. But it had no more of a program than it did a leadership capable of launching an insurrectional strike on the day after 13 May. The full extent of this defeat has yet to be seen.

The principle lesson that should be drawn from all this is that revolutionary thought must undertake the critique of everyday life in bourgeois society, propagating a new idea of happiness. Left and Right seem to agree on the antiquated idea of poverty as basic privation, which is the root of the mystification that has led to the defeat of the workers' movement all over the industrialized world.

The role of revolutionary propaganda is to present everyone with the possibility of a complete and immediate personal change. This richness that the demands of this task take on in Europe is intended to make the masses aware of the intolerable poverty of scooters and televisions. The revolutionary intellectuals have to abandon the debris of their decomposed culture and find for themselves a revolutionary way to live. In doing this, they can finally confront the problems of a popular avant-garde. The masses' right to live will no longer be symbolized by steak alone. The revolutionary intellectuals will eventually learn about politics. But it is beginning to look more and more like this will take an unpleasantly long time.

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

At the center of our present collective action, there is the urgent obligation to provide a better understanding of the exact nature of our specific task: a qualitative leap in culture and everyday life. We must examine everything that such an intention entails, but also the outdated attitudes that it definitively rejects, or whose only preservation should be as temporary and residual tactics. First of all, this consciousness should be brought, in every sense of the word, to those comrades so impressed by their adherence to a new program that they are not sufficiently concerned with the new practical activity that corresponds to it.

Could the situationist organization, which pushes problems as far as possible in order to clarify them and verify their data in the light of experience, be useless after all? This is what we must conclude if the SI proves to have arrived prematurely, if sooner or later it cannot utilize whatever means are necessary for the constructions it has in mind.

But in spite of the general economic and political aspect of the question, the possession of these means depends largely on us, on our theoretical lucidity, and on our propaganda for new desires. If our ideas themselves have a vague, utopian side, this is due less to the impossibility, at such a primitive stage, of verifying the bulk of our hypotheses in practice, than from our incapacity to think rigorously enough in common.

This or that detail of our undertaking can hold no interest whatsoever if all the elements that pass through the SI fail to complete situationist operations on their own ground. If, despite the necessity of the leap into a higher sphere of action, the difficulty of understanding this leap cannot be overcome, artistic traditions will seize control of the SI and no moral or organizational severity will be able to prevent their triumph. Such a retreat in the necessary cultural revolution would have an enormous impact.

With modern conditions as its point of departure, ours is the first systematic effort to discover new possibilities, new needs, higher forms of play. We are the first to experience a new kind of passion, linked to the present and to the near future of urban civilization, that should not be interpreted (taking traditional artistic expression as a new theme), but whose transformative energy should instead be embraced and directly lived.

We stand for the day that the power of freedom gains infinite earthly means, for those who will obtain such leisure. We therefore have a duty not to devalue, in polite opposition to dominant culture, whatever precursory slogans we might find. If situationist action cannot be achieved, we should not allow any deceptive behavior to be publicized. More modest, more clandestine forms of action should therefore be adopted. Everyone has made up their mind on this point: is a large enough number of situationists — not formally rallied artists, but professionals of this new activity — going to answer our call?

The absolute priority of the problem of our reinforcement by this virtual mass must take precedence over every aspect of the SI, in particular leading us to reject proposed alliances. The call to order of a "revolutionary front in culture" adopted by our groups from the Alba Congress was positive to the degree that it contributed to our unification in the SI; but disappointing with regard to our relationship with the Czechoslovakian group, or with others publishing small journals in Italy and Belgium. The pressure from these external elements, incapable of conceiving of the turn before which we find ourselves, can only add to the confusion in the SI, reinforcing its "right wing."

We must quickly extend our truly situationist base and develop its program. This question will dominate our next international conference. The majority and minority will be defined along these lines.

From: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/darkturn.html

The average age of the SI, which was at the time of its foundation a little over 29 and a half (whereas only four years before, in the summer of 1953, the average age of the Lettrist International was established at slightly below 21), rose in only one year to the current figure of over 32 years.

●

The reshuffle that occurred on the editorial board of this bulletin (the replacement of Pinot-Gallizio with Jorn) corresponds only to the fact that Gallizio, who continues to personally direct the production of industrial painting, must temporarily devote all his energy to this immense task.

W. Korun, however, who was not in a position to carry out the complete program of publications for Belgium adopted last May, is discharged until further notice from the responsibilities that he had assumed for the SI in that country.

●

The fight against gaullism should not detach us from revolutionary combat in forms other than the economic and political. . . . The situationist enterprise appeals to the function which perhaps best expresses the freedom of man, and which is even the source of artistic creation: play. Such an experiment, placed in the perspective of integral revolution (to transform, indissolubly, all structures, material and spiritual, of collective life), cannot leave us indifferent.
— René Fugler, Le Monde Libertaire, no.41-42 (August-September 1958)

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. . . a self-styled "Situationist International," which imagines it is making a new contribution when in fact it is merely creating ambiguity and confusion. But is it not in such troubled waters that one fishes for a situation?
— Benjamin Péret, Bief, no.1 (November 15, 1958)1

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. . . our ambitions are clearly megalomaniac, but perhaps not measurable with the prevailing criteria of success. I believe all my friends would be content to work anonymously at the Ministry of Leisure in a government that would finally undertake to change life, for a salary commensurate with that of skilled workers.
— G.-E. Debord, Potlatch, no. 29 (November 5, 1957) [One More Try if You Want to be Situationists]

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The SI will study the development, for the purpose of constructing a series of situations there, of the group of buildings designed by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux at Saline-de-Chaux (see the short film by Pierre Kast devoted to the work of this architect).

A plan for the transformation of these buildings, which remain in a state of abandonment, will be developed and carried out as soon as circumstances permit. If the prospect of a ludic transformation of Saline-de-Chaux remains closed, the observations and conclusions of the plan could be adapted for the détournement of other European architecture.

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The refusal of the English ex-situationist Rumney to comprehend the definitive character of his exclusion, as announced in our previous number 2 , obliges us to restate that we have no interest in him whatsoever, neither for his ideas nor for his life. Anything he chooses to publish, on psychogeography or any other matter, in the review Ark or elsewhere, or whatever use to which he wishes to put the names of certain of our members, bears absolutely no relation to the SI.

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

• 1See also Nostalgia Beneath Contempt in the same issue.
• 2Venice has Vanquished Ralph Rumney

In actual fact, to achieve the simplest of improvements in social relations requires the mobilization of such extraordinary collective energy that if the real importance of this disproportion were to appear to public consciousness in its true light, it would act as a discouraging factor . . . This frightful disproportion has to be considerably attenuated for consciousness through an artificial and substantial mythological amplification of the anticipated results, taken to lengths more in keeping with the aim of exerted effort and whose importance it is already impossible to hide, since it is directly experienced. These deformations which, seen from the outside, have a fantastic aspect, are precisely the work of ideologies which, for that reason, constitute the indispensable condition of social progress.
— Leszek Kolakowski, Responsabilité et Histoire

The world we live in, and beginning with its material décor, is discovered to be narrower by the day. It stifles us. We yield profoundly to its influence; we react to it according to our instincts instead of according to our aspirations. In a word, this world governs our way of being, and it grinds us down. It is only from its rearrangement, or more precisely its sundering, that any possibility of organizing a superior way of life will emerge.

The Situationists believe themselves capable, due to their current methods and to the foreseeable development of these methods, not only of rearranging the urban environment, but of changing it almost at will. Up till now the dearth of backing and the lack of help accorded us by people who largely claim to be interested in all that relates to urbanism, to culture and to their reaction to life, has, by default, only permitted us to undertake a minimum of experimentation, remaining almost at the level of personal play. But what we seek is nothing less than direct, effective intervention, taking us from those preliminary studies that suggest themselves — and here psychogeography will be of great import — to the instituting of new Situationist ambiances, whose essential traits are of short duration and permanent change.

Psychogeography, the study of the laws and precise effects of a consciously or unconsciously elaborated geographical environment acting directly on affective behavior, subsumes itself, according to Asger Jorn's definition, as the science fiction of urbanism.

The means specific to psychogeography are many and varied. The first, and most solid, is the experimental dérive. The dérive is a form of experimental behavior in an urban society. At the same time as being a from of action, it is a means of knowledge, particular to the notions of psychogeography and the theory of unitary urbanism. Other means, such as the reading of aerial views and plans, the study of statistics, graphs or the results of sociological investigations, are theoretical and do not possess the active and direct side which belongs to the experimental dérive. Nevertheless, thanks to them we can arrive at a first representation of the environment under study. In return, the results of our study will permit imbuing these cartographic and intellectual representations with greater complexity and richness.

Plan #1: The Les Halles Unity of Ambiance

We have chosen as the subject of a psychogeographical study the Les Halles quarter which, unlike other areas which have been the object of certain psychogeographical descriptions till now (Continent Contrescarpe, the Missions Étrangères area), is extremely animated and well known, both to the Parisian population and to those foreigners who have spent some time in France.

To begin with, we will define the limits of the quarter as we conceive of it; the characteristic divisions from the viewpoint of its ambiances; the directions one is led to take inside and outside this terrain; then we will make some constructive suggestions.

In terms of its administrative definition, the Les Halles quarter is the second quarter of the first arrondissement. Placed at the center of Paris, it is in contact with areas which are wholly different from one another. Considered from the viewpoint of the unity of ambiance, the quarter differs only slightly from its official limits, and principally from an extremely large encroachment on the second arrondissement to the north. We observe the following boundaries: the Rue Saint-Denis to the east; the Rues Saint-Sauveur and Bellan to the north; the Rues Hérold and d'Argout to the north-west; the Rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs to the west; and finally to the south the Rue de Rivoli, which must be extended, beginning with the Rue de l'Arbre-Sec, to include the Rue Sainte-Honoré.

The architecture of the streets, and the changing décor which enriches them every night, can give the impression that Les Halles is a quarter that is difficult to penetrate. It is true that during the period of nocturnal activity the logjam of lorries, the barricades of panniers, the movement of workers with their mechanical or hand barrows, prevents access to cars and almost constantly obliges the pedestrian to alter his route (thus enormously favoring the circular anti-dérive). But despite appearances the quarter of Les Halles is one of the easiest to cross, via the access routes which border or cross it in every direction.

Four great thoroughfares cross Les Halles from end to end and thus help to break them down into areas of different, but absolutely interconnected, ambiance: the most important of these thoroughfares, running east-west, is formed by the Rue Rambuteau, whose various extensions finish up in the Banque de France area; the Rue du Louvre, running north-south; the Rue des Halles, running south-east to north-west. There are numerous secondary entry routes, for example the continuation of the Rues du Pont-Neuf-Baltard, in contact with the Left Bank via the Pont-Neuf and various sectors to the north via the Rues Montmatre, de Montorgueil and, to a lesser extent, de Turbigo. This route must nevertheless be considered as secondary due to the two relative breaks made by the crossing of the Rue de Rivoli and the large buildings of the Halles Centrales.

The essential feature of the urbanism of Les Halles is the mobile aspect of pattern of lines of communication, having to do with the different barriers and the temporary constructions which intervene by the hour on the public thoroughfare. The separated zones of ambiances, which remain strongly connected, converge in the one place: the Place des Deux-Ecus and the Bourse du Commerce (Rue de Viarme) complex.

To the east the first area is enclosed by Rues Saint-Denis, de Turbigo, Pierre-Lescot and the Place Sainte-Opportune. This is the prostitution area, with its multitude of small cafés. At the weekend a masculine and miserable horde from other quarters seeks amusement there. A population of down-and-outs holds sway around the Square des Innocents. The whole area is depressing. [...]

The Rue Saint-Denis marks a very sudden break between this area and the Saint-Merri and Saint-Avoye quarters towards the east, but this break still plays its part in the ambiance of Les Halles. The break being immediately aggravated by the Boulevard de Sévastapol, the area known as the Place Saint-Merri finds itself under the diminished influence of Les Halles, while its participation in the quarter's economic activity (the parking of lorries) would, rather, tend to integrate it there.

To the south, the second area extends between the Rues de Rivoli, Arbre-Sec, Saint-Honoré and the Rue Berger. In contact, by day, with the feverish commercialism of the Rue de Rivoli and the flower-market occupying the Halles Centrales, this area is, by night, hard-working and lively. It is here that there are the greatest number of restaurants and cafés frequented by the workers of Les Halles. [...]

The third area, which is in the west (between the Rue du Louvre and the Rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs), is calm by day and by night. An extreme order reigns there, and the activity, together with the ambiance, of Les Halles goes on diminishing from east to west, before petering out in front of the Banque de France and the Place de Valois. This bordering territory already announces the rich quarters which are to be found nearby (Palais-Royal, l'Opera). Almost everything encourages the idea that one is in some residential quarter rather than in a part of Les Halles. However, passages like the Galerie Véro-Dodat or the Cour des Fermes reveal this mobile ambiance, and confer a bizarre and nebulous character to the area. [...]

The Rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs forms a line tangential to the unity of ambiance of Les Halles. Its interest resides in the possibilities of contact that it furthers, above all when it passes alongside the turntable of the Place-Deux-Écus and the Rue de Viarme. As for the Place des Victoires, onto which it gives in the north, this is a frontier foreign to Les Halles and manages not to accede to them. The Place des Victoires is a bastion defending the bourgeois quarters (the class struggle freighted in town planning also informs, it must be said, the overbearing Palais de Justice in Brussels, right on the edge of the poorest quarters).

With the fourth area, which constitutes the northern flank of Les Halles, we arrive at the most extensive, and above all most-celebrated, part of this vast urban complex. Let us trace its limits. To begin with, the Rue Rambuteau, prolonged west of the Église Saint-Eustache by the Rue Coquillère, constitutes in principle frontage (the opposite side of this thoroughfare being none other than the alignment of pavilions of the Halles Centrales). The eastern frontier follows the Rue Pierre-Lescot then slides up the Rue Turbigo to reach the Rue Saint-Denis. To the west the area comes to a halt in the Rues Hérold and d'Argout. In the northern part, beyond the Rue Étienne Marcel, one discovers a territorial border where the influence of Les Halles, which gets progressively weaker the further one progresses towards the north, is exerted along various secondary routes, generally oriented south-west to north-east, such as the Rues Rousseau and Tiquetonne, the Rue du Jour continued in the passage de la Reine de Hongrie, the Rues Mauconseil and Française. The area includes both a particularly miserable residential part and those renowned restaurants which form the pole of attraction for the rich tourism of Les Halles; an intense activity in food retailing and an important administrative center (Hôtel des Postes, the Centre de l'E.D.F., on the Rue Mauconeil, many schools). These elements entail a considerable difference between the diurnal and nocturnal ambiance. At night it is in this area that almost all the different entertainments of Les Halles are concentrated, in the traditional, bourgeois sense of this term. [...]

Plan #2: Les Halles Internal Currents and External Communications

The zone of central interference, the turntable of the different ambient directions of Les Halles is, as we have pointed out, the Bourse du Commerce-Place des Deux-Écus complex. This area is found at the western extremity of the block constituted by the juxtaposition of the large pavilions of the Halles Centrales. But since these edifices do not act as a link, but on the contrary as a break, the Rue Carême which traverses them longitudinally does not participate in this relation.

The different directions which intersect at this turntable strongly affect the path any individual or group will, with apparent spontaneity, follow inside as well as outside Les Halles.

According to the theory of concentric urban zones, Les Halles belongs to the transitional zone of Paris (social deterioration, acculturation and the intermixing of population making the environment propitious to cultural exchanges). One knows that in the case of Paris this concentric division is complicated by an east-west opposition between the predominantly popular and bourgeois quarters, business or residential. South of the Seine the line of rupture is formed by the Boulevard Saint-Michel. North of the Seine it deviates slightly towards the west and then passes along the Rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs, the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires and their prolongations. It is at the western limit of Les Halles that the Ministère des Finances, the Bourse and the Bourse du Commerce form the three points of a triangle whose center is occupied by the Banque de France. The institutions concentrated in this restricted space turn it, practically and symbolically, into the defensive perimeter of capitalism's smartest neighborhoods. The projected displacement of Les Halles to the outskirts of the city will entail a new blow to popular Paris, which has for a century now been constantly exiled, as we know, to the suburbs.

As opposed to this, any solution aimed at creating a new society requires that this space at the center of Paris be preserved for the manifestations of a liberated collective life. One must profit from the blow to practical-alimentary activity and must encourage large-scale development of those tendencies towards constructional play and mobile urbanism which have emerged 'in the icy water of egotistical calculation.' The first step, architecturally, would obviously be to replace the current pavilions with an autonomous series of small Situationist architectural complexes. Among these new architectures and on their peripheries, corresponding to the four zones we have envisaged here, ought to be built perpetually changing labyrinths, and this with the aid of more adequate objects than the fruit and vegetable panniers which make up the sole barricades of tod.
Given the brutalizing effect maintained by today's radio, television, cinema and the rest, the extension of leisure under another regime will call for a much doughtier response. Should the Paris Halles have survived until such time as these problems will be posed by everyone, it would be fitting to try to turn them into a theme park for the ludic education of workers.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This study is incomplete on several fundamental points, principally those concerning the ambiant characteristics of certain barely defined zones. This is because our collaborator was subject to police harrassment in light of the fact that since September, North Africans have been banned from the streets after half past nine in the evening. And of course, the bulk of Abdelhafid Khatib's work concerned the Halles at night. After being arrested twice and spending two nights in a holding cell, he relinquished his efforts. Therefore the present — the political future, no less — may be abstracted due to considerations carried out on psychogeography itself.

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

1. Do you have any theoretical knowledge of human ecology? Of psychogeography? Which?
2. Have you conducted one or more dérive experiments? What did you think?
3. What exactly is your experience of the Les Halles district (short visits, regular frequenting, ongoing habitation)?
4. Do you agree with the limits of this unity of ambiance as they are proposed in our plan? What adjustments would you see fit to make to it?
5. Does the division of Les Halles into distinct zones conform to your experience of the terrain? What other potential divisions would you judge to be closer to reality?
6. Do you believe in the existence of psychogeographical hubs in the urban environment in general? Particularly in Les Halles? If this is case, where would you locate them?
7. Could you recognize a center in the unity of ambiance studied? At what point?
8. How do you enter Les Halles? How do you leave it? (Draw the axes of your main progression, excluding all usage of mechanized transport).
9. What route do you follow within Les Halles?
10. What emotions does Les Halles provoke (sector by sector)? Why?
11. What changes in ambience do you notice during that time?
12. What sort of encounters have you had in Les Halles? And elsewhere?
13. What changes to the architecture of Les Halles seem desirable to you? In what area, and in what direction, would you like to see an extension of this unity of ambiance? Or, conversely, a destruction?
14. If the economic activity of Les Halles is moved elsewhere, to what should the area be devoted next?
15. Do you feel that you have what it takes to be a psychogeographer?
16. If you are not a situationist, briefly explain what's stopping you from becoming one?

Address your responses to A.Khatib, 32 Rue de la Montagne-Geneviève, Paris-5e.

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

One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive1 , a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.

In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.

But the dérive includes both this letting-go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities. In this latter regard, ecological science -- despite the narrow social space to which it limits itself -- provides psychogeography with abundant data.

The ecological analysis of the absolute or relative character of fissures in the urban network, of the role of microclimates, of distinct neighborhoods with no relation to administrative boundaries, and above all of the dominating action of centers of attraction, must be utilized and completed by psychogeographical methods. The objective passional terrain of the dérive must be defined in accordance both with its own logic and with its relations with social morphology.

In his study Paris et l'agglomération parisienne (Bibliothèque de Sociologie Contemporaine, P.U.F., 1952) Chombart de Lauwe notes that "an urban neighborhood is determined not only by geographical and economic factors, but also by the image that its inhabitants and those of other neighborhoods have of it." In the same work, in order to illustrate "the narrowness of the real Paris in which each individual lives . . . within a geographical area whose radius is extremely small," he diagrams all the movements made in the space of one year by a student living in the 16th Arrondissement. Her itinerary forms a small triangle with no significant deviations, the three apexes of which are the School of Political Sciences, her residence and that of her piano teacher.

Such data -- examples of a modern poetry capable of provoking sharp emotional reactions (in this particular case, outrage at the fact that anyone's life can be so pathetically limited) -- or even Burgess's theory of Chicago's social activities as being distributed in distinct concentric zones, will undoubtedly prove useful in developing dérives.

If chance plays an important role in dérives this is because the methodology of psychogeographical observation is still in its infancy. But the action of chance is naturally conservative and in a new setting tends to reduce everything to habit or to an alternation between a limited number of variants. Progress means breaking through fields where chance holds sway by creating new conditions more favorable to our purposes. We can say, then, that the randomness of a dérive is fundamentally different from that of the stroll, but also that the first psychogeographical attractions discovered by dérivers may tend to fixate them around new habitual axes, to which they will constantly be drawn back.

An insufficient awareness of the limitations of chance, and of its inevitably reactionary effects, condemned to a dismal failure the famous aimless wandering attempted in 1923 by four surrealists, beginning from a town chosen by lot: Wandering in open country is naturally depressing, and the interventions of chance are poorer there than anywhere else. But this mindlessness is pushed much further by a certain Pierre Vendryes (in Médium, May 1954), who thinks he can relate this anecdote to various probability experiments, on the ground that they all supposedly involve the same sort of antideterminist liberation. He gives as an example the random distribution of tadpoles in a circular aquarium, adding, significantly, "It is necessary, of course, that such a population be subject to no external guiding influence." From that perspective, the tadpoles could be considered more spontaneously liberated than the surrealists, since they have the advantage of being "as stripped as possible of intelligence, sociability and sexuality," and are thus "truly independent from one another."

At the opposite pole from such imbecilities, the primarily urban character of the dérive, in its element in the great industrially transformed cities -- those centers of possibilities and meanings -- could be expressed in Marx's phrase: "Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive."

One can dérive alone, but all indications are that the most fruitful numerical arrangement consists of several small groups of two or three people who have reached the same level of awareness, since cross-checking these different groups' impressions makes it possible to arrive at more objective conclusions. It is preferable for the composition of these groups to change from one dérive to another. With more than four or five participants, the specifically dérive character rapidly diminishes, and in any case it is impossible for there to be more than ten or twelve people without the dérive fragmenting into several simultaneous dérives. The practice of such subdivision is in fact of great interest, but the difficulties it entails have so far prevented it from being organized on a sufficient scale.

The average duration of a dérive is one day, considered as the time between two periods of sleep. The starting and ending times have no necessary relation to the solar day, but it should be noted that the last hours of the night are generally unsuitable for dérives.

But this duration is merely a statistical average. For one thing, a dérive rarely occurs in its pure form: it is difficult for the participants to avoid setting aside an hour or two at the beginning or end of the day for taking care of banal tasks; and toward the end of the day fatigue tends to encourage such an abandonment. But more importantly, a dérive often takes place within a deliberately limited period of a few hours, or even fortuitously during fairly brief moments; or it may last for several days without interruption. In spite of the cessations imposed by the need for sleep, certain dérives of a sufficient intensity have been sustained for three or four days, or even longer. It is true that in the case of a series of dérives over a rather long period of time it is almost impossible to determine precisely when the state of mind peculiar to one dérive gives way to that of another. One sequence of dérives was pursued without notable interruption for around two months. Such an experience gives rise to new objective conditions of behavior that bring about the disappearance of a good number of the old ones.2

The influence of weather on dérives, although real, is a significant factor only in the case of prolonged rains, which make them virtually impossible. But storms or other types of precipitation are rather favorable for dérives.

The spatial field of a dérive may be precisely delimited or vague, depending on whether the goal is to study a terrain or to emotionally disorient oneself. It should not be forgotten that these two aspects of dérives overlap in so many ways that it is impossible to isolate one of them in a pure state. But the use of taxis, for example, can provide a clear enough dividing line: If in the course of a dérive one takes a taxi, either to get to a specific destination or simply to move, say, twenty minutes to the west, one is concerned primarily with a personal trip outside one's usual surroundings. If, on the other hand, one sticks to the direct exploration of a particular terrain, one is concentrating primarily on research for a psychogeographical urbanism.

In every case the spatial field depends first of all on the point of departure -- the residence of the solo dériver or the meeting place selected by a group. The maximum area of this spatial field does not extend beyond the entirety of a large city and its suburbs. At its minimum it can be limited to a small self-contained ambiance: a single neighborhood or even a single block of houses if it's interesting enough (the extreme case being a static-dérive of an entire day within the Saint-Lazare train station).

The exploration of a fixed spatial field entails establishing bases and calculating directions of penetration. It is here that the study of maps comes in -- ordinary ones as well as ecological and psychogeographical ones -- along with their correction and improvement. It should go without saying that we are not at all interested in any mere exoticism that may arise from the fact that one is exploring a neighborhood for the first time. Besides its unimportance, this aspect of the problem is completely subjective and soon fades away.

In the "possible rendezvous," on the other hand, the element of exploration is minimal in comparison with that of behavioral disorientation. The subject is invited to come alone to a certain place at a specified time. He is freed from the bothersome obligations of the ordinary rendezvous since there is no one to wait for. But since this "possible rendezvous" has brought him without warning to a place he may or may not know, he observes the surroundings. It may be that the same spot has been specified for a "possible rendezvous" for someone else whose identity he has no way of knowing. Since he may never even have seen the other person before, he will be encouraged to start up conversations with various passersby. He may meet no one, or he may even by chance meet the person who has arranged the "possible rendezvous." In any case, particularly if the time and place have been well chosen, his use of time will take an unexpected turn. He may even telephone someone else who doesn't know where the first "possible rendezvous" has taken him, in order to ask for another one to be specified. One can see the virtually unlimited resources of this pastime.

Our loose lifestyle and even certain amusements considered dubious that have always been enjoyed among our entourage -- slipping by night into houses undergoing demolition, hitchhiking nonstop and without destination through Paris during a transportation strike in the name of adding to the confusion, wandering in subterranean catacombs forbidden to the public, etc. -- are expressions of a more general sensibility which is no different from that of the dérive. Written descriptions can be no more than passwords to this great game.

The lessons drawn from dérives enable us to draw up the first surveys of the psychogeographical articulations of a modern city. Beyond the discovery of unities of ambiance, of their main components and their spatial localization, one comes to perceive their principal axes of passage, their exits and their defenses. One arrives at the central hypothesis of the existence of psychogeographical pivotal points. One measures the distances that actually separate two regions of a city, distances that may have little relation with the physical distance between them. With the aid of old maps, aerial photographs and experimental dérives, one can draw up hitherto lacking maps of influences, maps whose inevitable imprecision at this early stage is no worse than that of the first navigational charts. The only difference is that it is no longer a matter of precisely delineating stable continents, but of changing architecture and urbanism.

Today the different unities of atmosphere and of dwellings are not precisely marked off, but are surrounded by more or less extended and indistinct bordering regions. The most general change that dérive experience leads to proposing is the constant diminution of these border regions, up to the point of their complete suppression.

Within architecture itself, the taste for dériving tends to promote all sorts of new forms of labyrinths made possible by modern techniques of construction. Thus in March 1955 the press reported the construction in New York of a building in which one can see the first signs of an opportunity to dérive inside an apartment:

"The apartments of the helicoidal building will be shaped like slices of cake. One will be able to enlarge or reduce them by shifting movable partitions. The half-floor gradations avoid limiting the number of rooms, since the tenant can request the use of the adjacent section on either upper or lower levels. With this setup three four-room apartments can be transformed into one twelve-room apartment in less than six hours."

(To be continued.)

GUY DEBORD (1958)

“Théorie de la dérive” was published in Internationale Situationniste #2 (Paris, December 1958). A slightly different version was first published in the Belgian surrealist journal Les Lèvres Nues #9 (November 1956) along with accounts of two dérives.

• 1dérive: literally “drift” or “drifting.” Like détournement, this term has usually been anglicized as both a noun and a verb.
• 2"The dérive (with its flow of acts, its gestures, its strolls, its encounters) was to the totality exactly what psychoanalysis (in the best sense) is to language. Let yourself go with the flow of words, says the psychoanalyst. He listens, until the moment when he rejects or modifies (one could say detourns) a word, an expression or a definition. The dérive is certainly a technique, almost a therapeutic one. But just as analysis unaccompanied with anything else is almost always contraindicated, so continual dériving is dangerous to the extent that the individual, having gone too far (not without bases, but...) without defenses, is threatened with explosion, dissolution, dissociation, disintegration. And thence the relapse into what is termed 'ordinary life,' that is to say, in reality, into 'petrified life.' In this regard I now repudiate the Formulary's propaganda for a continuous dérive. It could be continual like the poker game in Las Vegas, but only for a certain period, limited to a weekend for some people, to a week as a good average; a month is really pushing it. In 1953-1954 we dérived for three or four months straight. That's the extreme limit. It's a miracle it didn't kill us." (Ivan Chtcheglov, "Letter from Afar," Internationale Situationniste #9, p. 38.)

The following three documents are the notes of a debate begun by Constant in the SI in September. The second text sets out, in response, the position of the editorial committee of this review, following a discussion with Asger Jorn.

1

Re-reading Jorn's writings ("Against Functionalism," "Structure and Change," etc.), it's obvious to me that some of the ideas expressed therein must be attacked directly. To me, these ideas as well as his pictorial activity seem indefensible vis-à-vis the conception of what unitary urbanism can become. As for the history of modern art, Jorn underestimates the positive importance of Dadaism and overestimates the role of the romantics (Klee) played in the first Bauhaus. His attitude towards industrial culture is naive, and according to him imagination is the prerogative of the isolated individual.

I have as little taste for individual primitivism in painting as for so-called cold abstraction in architecture, even though one likes to stress an antagonism between these two tendencies that is both false and artificial.
Industrial and machine culture is an indisputable fact and artisanal techniques, including the painting of both tendencies (the idea of a 'free' art is an error), are finished.

The machine is an indispensable model for all of us, even artists, and industry is the sole means of providing today for the needs, even aesthetic ones, of humanity on a worldwide scale.

These are no longer 'problems' for artists, this is a reality they cannot afford to ignore.

Those who scorn the machine and those who glorify it display the same inability to utilize it.

Machine work and mass production offer unheard-of possibilities for creation, and those who know how to put these possibilities at the service of an audacious imagination will be the creators of tomorrow.

The artist's task is to invent new techniques and to utilize light, sound, movement, and any invention whatsoever that might influence ambiance.

Without this, the integration of art in the construction of the human habitat remains as chimerical as the proposals of Gilles Ivain 1 .

Ten years separate us from COBRA and the subsequent history of so-called experimental art shows us its errors.

I drew the inference from this six years ago in abandoning painting and launching myself into more effective experimentation, and this in relation to the idea of a unitary habitat.

I believe discussion should go in this direction, which seems decisive to me for the development of the SI.

2

No painting is defensible from the Situationist point of view. This kind of problem no longer poses itself, i.e., applicable to a particular construction. We must look beyond divisive expressions, beyond, even, the whole spectacle (as complex as the latter may become).

Only being able to proceed from the reality of present culture, we obviously run the risk of confusion, compromise and failure. If current artistic practice managed to impose certain of its values on the SI, then the authentic cultural experiments of our time would be undertaken elsewhere.

All art that seeks to cling to a bygone artisanal freedom is lost in advance. (Jorn has underlined somewhere this reactionary aspect of the Bauhaus.) A free art of the future is an art that would master and use all the new conditioning techniques. Beyond this perspective, there is only enslavement to the past, kept alive artificially, and commerce.

We are all, it seems, in agreement on the positive role of industry. It is the material development of the epoch that has created both the general crisis of culture and the possibility of its overthrow in a unitary construction of everyday life.

We approve of the formula: 'those who scorn the machine and those who glorify it display the same inability to utilize it.' But we would add: 'and to transform it.' Account must be taken of the dialectical relation. The construction of ambiances is not only the application to everyday existence of an artistic standard permitted by technical progress. It is also a qualitative changing of life, susceptible to producing a permanent reconversion of technical means.

Gilles Ivain's proposals are not opposed on any point to these considerations on modern industrial production. On the contrary, they are built upon this historical base. If they are chimerical it is to the extent that, concretely, we do not have at our disposal the technical means of today (or put another way, to the extent that no form of social organization is yet capable of making 'artistic' experimental use of these means); not because these means do not exist or that we are unaware of them. In this sense, we believe in the revolutionary value of such monetarily utopian demands.

The failure of the COBRA movement, as well as the posthumous favour it has found among a certain public, can be explained by the term 'so-called experimental art.' COBRA believed that it sufficed to have good intentions, the slogan of experimental art. But in fact it is the moment when such slogans are coined that the difficulties begin: what can be the experimental art of our time be, and how is it made?

The most effective experiments will lead in the direction of a unitary habitat, not isolated and static, but linked to transitory unities of behavior.

Delegates from the groups that would make up the SI meeting at the Alba Congress

No matter how much they scribble, praise one another, wax enthusiastic, enlist women and fops to their cause, they will never be anything but insolent mediocrities.

Fréron (Letter to Malesherbes, regarding the Encyclopedists)

3

The culminating point in our discussion seems to me to rest on the use being proposed for present culture.

For my part, I consider that the shocking character called for by the construction of ambiances excludes traditional arts like painting and literature, which are threadbare and incapable of any revelation. These arts, which are linked to a mystical and individualist attitude, are useless to us.

We must, then, invent new techniques in every domain, visual, oral, psychological, in order to unite them later in the complex activity unitary urbanism will engender.

The idea of replacing the traditional arts by a larger and freer activity has marked all the artistic movements of this century. Since Duchamp's 'readymades' (beginning in 1913), a succession of gratuitous objects, whose creation was directly linked to an experimental attitude, has intersected the history of artistic schools. Dada, Surrealism, de Stijl, Constructivism, COBRA, the Lettrist International -- all have searched for techniques that go beyond the artwork. Over and above the apparent opposition of the diverse movements of this century, it is that which they have in common. And that is the true development of present culture, suffocated by the noise of pseudo-successes in the domains of painting and literature, which drag out their agony down to our own day.

The history of modern art has been falsified to an incredible degree, out of commercial interest. We can no longer be tolerant. As for present culture, even if we must reject it in its entirety, one must distinguish strictly between the true and the false, between what is usable for the moment, and what is compromising.

I believe that purely formal researches, if they are appropriated and transformed to our own ends, are highly usable.

Let us leave to the official gravediggers the sad task of burying the corpses of pictorial and literary expression. The devalorization of what no longer serves us is not our affair; let others take care of it.

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

• 1Gilles Ivain's "Formulary for a New Urbanism" appeared in International Situationniste #1.

Activity of the Italian Section

NOTICE

This translation is a first draft, and has not been independently proofread. However, to the best of my knowledge this text has never been translated into English. Therefore I am making it available in this form with the caveat that there are likely to be mistakes in it. PLEASE APPROACH IT WITH CAUTION!

An exhibition showing the the first rolls of industrial painting produced by Pinot Gallizio, (with the assistance of Giors Melanotte in our Experimental Laboratory in Alba) opened at a Turin gallery on May 30 last year. This exhibition, which almost immediately moved to Milan (July 8), marks in our eyes a decisive turning point in the movement to overcome the old forms of art, and at the same time signals the beginning of their transformation with new vigour. As the slogan of our Italian comrades goes: “Against art-for-art’s-sake, against applied art – the application of art in the construction of ambiances”

In a text published in Turin and subsequently reissued in Milan, Michèle Bernstein presents the theoretical justification for this experiment:

“It is difficult to grasp every one of the benefits of this amazing invention at the same time. In no particular order: no more problems with size – the canvas is cut before the eyes of the satisfied buyer; no more poor periods – the outcomes of industrial painting, due to the mix of chance and mechanical processes, are never ‘uninspired’; no more metaphysical themes – industrial painting does not support them; no more doubtful reproductions of eternal masterpieces; no more gallery openings. And of course, soon, no more painters, even in Italy …

“The progressive domination of nature is the history of the overcoming of certain problems, moved from ‘artistic’ practice – casual, unique – into mass distribution in the public domain, ultimately resulting in the loss of all economic value.

“Faced with such a process, the reaction is always to give currency to old problems: the real Henry II buffet vs. the fake Henry II buffet, the forged canvas that is not signed, the excess numbers of a limited edition of something or other by Salvador Dali, the primacy of the hand-made. Revolutionary creation attempts to define and disseminate new problems and new constructs, and they alone have any value.

“When faced with the profitable tom-foolery which has continuously propagated itself over the last twenty years – the industrialisation of painting appears to be a technical innovation which must be implemented without any further delay. The greatness of Gallizio is that he has boldly pursued his tireless research, and has reached the point where nothing is left of the old pictorial world. No-one can be unaware that the previous steps in trying to overcome and destroy the pictorial object – whether abstraction pushed to its limits (the way opened by Malevich), or painting deliberately subjected to extra-artistic concerns (eg the work of Magritte) – haven’t been able, after all these decades, to leave the current repetitive state of artistic negation, all within the framework imposed by pictorial means themselves: a negation of “the interior”.

“Posing the problem in this way, however, will always result in endless repetitive activity, which cannot provide any of the elements of a solution. Meanwhile, all around us, the world keeps on changing before our eyes.

"At the stage we have now reached, that of experimenting with new collective constructions and new syntheses, there is no time to fight the values of the old world ​​with a neo-Dadaist refusal. It necessitates the unleashing of inflation everywhere – as these values ​​are ideological, artistic, even financial. Gallizio is at the forefront."

In his contribution, Asger Jorn declared at the end of the exhibition:

“It would be wrong to imagine that the industrial painting of Pinot Gallizio can be placed amongst the efforts of Industrial Design. There is no model to reproduce, instead it is the realisation of a unique creation, perfectly useless except in Situationist experiments with ambiances – it is painting to buy ‘by the yard’.

“Social success is measured by the appreciation of effort. It is obvious that this type of assessment is in direct conflict with Gallizio’s intention of devaluing painting.”

Commenting on the unexpected commercial success of industrial painting (“No one came to buy a piece of painting at an economical price, rather the production was sold in entire rolls to collectors who are amongst the most intelligent in Europe and America…”), Jorn emphasised that we should take into account this unexpected, additional economic experience. It is, in fact, the first defensive reaction of the art market which, hesitating to declare that this painting was not part of the real art world, has preferred at this point to simply integrate it into its own values, treating each roll as if it was a single huge painting, subject to the usual criteria of taste and talent.

The Situationists responsible for “Operation Industrial Painting” are now trying to counter this risk by two measures: increasing the price (quickly raised from 10,000 to 40,000 lire-per-meter at the end of August), and the production of longer individual rolls (until June the longest did not reach 70 meters). The use we can make of industrial painting depends, in the immediate present, on the opportunity for implementing a radical break with the presentation of art in galleries, and also in the development of work processes – which must get beyond the artisanal stage, to reach truly industrial efficiency.

On this technical question Giors Melanotte and Glauco Wuerich have completed a well-documented study which emphasises the following:

“It is especially important to answer the questions that arise around the term ‘industrial’. With this word we do not want to link artistic production to the criteria of industrial production (working time, cost of manufacture), or to the intrinsic qualities of the machine, rather we are establishing a quantitative idea of ​​production.

“Lack of space was one of the biggest difficulties we encountered during the execution of the first examples of industrial painting. In a suitable installation for this type of production, it is necessary to have ample premises, very large in the sense of a lot of air and light. For us, without an adequate space, it was necessary to use gas masks to avoid the harmful effects of the solvents’ fumes…

The main difficulty to get over in order to achieve a sufficient quantity of production is actually to get hold of paint that is fast drying.. This is what will give character to industrial painting, it will work well with it. ”

Just as they presented industrial painting to an astounded public and the stupid commentary of the newspapers (who were especially struck by the presence of two cover-girls dressed in industrial-paintings at the opening in Turin), the Italian Situationists found themselves driven to act on another front.

At the end of June, a young Milanese painter, Nunzio Van Guglielmi (who is otherwise completely insignificant), slightly damaged a painting by Raphael (“The Coronation of the Virgin”) in an attempt to attract attention to himself. On the protective glass of the painting he placed a sticker with a handwritten sign reading: “Long live the Italian Revolution! Down with the Clerical Government!” Arrested on the spot, he was immediately (without any possibility of contestation and for that act alone) declared insane and interned in an asylum in Milan.

The Italian section of the Situationist International issued a protest in the tract “Difendete la Libertà Ovunque”, published July 4 by themselves, having had several Italian printers prudently refuse to publish it.

“We certify”, said the leaflet, “that the content of the placard affixed to Raphael’s painting by Guglielmi… expresses the opinion of a large number of Italians, ourselves included.

“We would like to draw attention to the fact that it would be a crime against veritable psychiatric science to interpret this act of hostility towards the Church and the dead cultural values of the museum, with the help of the psychiatric police, as a sufficient proof of madness.

“We emphasise the peril that such a precedent poses to all free men and all cultural and artistic development to come.

“Freedom lies in the destruction of idols.

“Our appeal is addressed to all the artists and intellectuals of Italy, for whom the liberation of Nunzio Van Guglielmi from life-long internment is an immediate question. Guglielmi can only be condemned in terms of the law that foresees the alienation of public goods.”

In a second tract, “Help Van Guglielmi!”, published in French on July 7, Asger Jorn, on behalf of the SI, supported the action undertaken:

“The rationale of Guglielmi lies at the heart of modern art, from Futurism to the present day. No judge, no psychiatrist, no museum director is able to prove otherwise without falsification …”

“The photo of the Raphael which was sent to the world’s press is an official falsification. So little real damage was done to the canvas that it could not possibly be seen when reproduced in a newspaper. The lines which can be seen in the photo, which seem to indicate a massive destruction of the canvas, are actually only the broken glass in front of the picture. In the photo these lines have even been artificially enhanced with black and white to make the incident seem more serious. And somehow the text of the manifesto pasted on the glass has become, through a strange process, totally illegible in the Italian newspapers.”

That very same day was the Milan exhibition’s opening. Our Italian section, reinforced by other situationists who were in Italy (Maurice Wyckaert, of the Belgian section, Jorn), distributed the leaflets in Milan amidst general hostility. A magazine went as far as to publish a reproduction of the Raphael to be compared to a reproduction of a painting by the fools who wanted to destroy it. However on July 19, to the amazement of all, Guglielmi was declared perfectly sane by the director of the asylum in Milan, and released.

The conclusion of this incident is very instructive: Guglielmi (who was fearful) agreed, in order to obtain his pardon, to be photographed kneeling and praying before the Virgin by Raphael – at the same time worshiping both the art and the religion he had previously abused. And the wholly justified position of the Italian section in this affair, from beginning to end perfectly rational, nevertheless helped increase its isolation from the intellectual rabble of Italy – whose nauseating elements (such as the merchant Pistoi, director of the magazine Notizie), after having the fraudulence to turn against the Situationists, had clearly revealed where they had their true camp: with Michel Tapie, that export of French neo-fascism that the priests cannot forget.

From Internationale Situationniste no. 2, December 1958 (pp. 27-30). Translated by Ian Thompson (July 2013), except for quote from ‘Difendete la Libertà Ovunque’ translated by NOT BORED! From here: https://isinenglish.com/2013/07/13/activity-of-the-italian-section/

The Situationists in America

While in London in October, Jorn requested a visa from the U.S. embassy so that he could travel through New York on his way to Mexico. In the past, he had received several invitations from American cultural organisations. However when Jorn was required to swear that he had never been a member of the Communist Party or any related organisation, and that he had never been jailed for any crime, he obviously refused with indignation. With his entry to the United States forbidden, Jorn wrote to the Carnegie Foundation in Pittsburgh, forbidding any official showcase of his artistic work in America – as its creator is considered “undesirable” in that country.

Before leaving France, Jorn had (in his letter of 20 September to the Danish newspaper Politiken) exposed another form of hypocrisy which, posing as mindless praise, aims at the falsification of the recent history of the experimental avant-garde, and his own role in it:

“On September 10, Politiken published an article entitled ‘The Great Asger’. Let me correct certain mistakes. My encounter with Dotremont at the Silkeborg sanatorium in 1951 did not mark the beginning of Cobra (the Internationale of Experimental Artists), nor of our personal friendship. On the contrary, this period actually constitutes an end on two levels: first, the financial failure of of the Cobra experiment had driven each of us to physical exhaustion; further, the deep ideological differences that arose between Cobra’s various members had already led to the definitive end of their collaboration …

“The Cobra movement (which was strongly supported by artistic authorities in Holland and Belgium, but had never received recognition in Denmark) chose to dissolve itself in 1951 (see the notice in issue 10 of the journal Cobra).

"Between 1953 and 1957, I was involved with the Imaginist Bauhaus, primarily in Italy, France and Great Britain. As the movement’s experimentalist posture opposed any practical teaching of the arts, I could not have run the school of ceramics that you refer to.

“My recent book, “Pour la Forme” summarizes the theoretical work I undertook during this time, having moved beyond Cobra’s orientation. This period itself has ended … I am now involved with the research activities of the Situationist International, and I like to hope that such activities will be understood in my own country more quickly and more accurately than the earlier phases of my involvement with modern art. ”

Politiken’s editor replied a few days later with embarrassment, claiming to apologize by suggesting that the incriminating article, written by Dotremont, had suffered from cuts. This response had the audacity to suggest that Dotremont might have honestly believed to be a greater friend of ours than he in fact was, and, giving his current address, scandalously suggested making direct contact with him to clear up the misunderstanding. Meanwhile Politiken deemed it less than appropriate to publish the corrections, which amounted to less than a tenth of the confusionist article. The SI, in a letter signed by Khatib, clearly broke from the dishonest attempt at dialogue:

“Mr. Editor, the part played by the systematic false-witness of Christian Dotremont is in no way diminished because the editor of Politiken carried out various cuts in the assistance of his counter-truths.

“We maintain no ties with Dotremont, who knows perfectly the contempt in which we hold him.

"On the other hand, if Politiken, which took it upon itself to release such a text, now refuses to publish the corrections it requires, we will publish these elsewhere – including, obviously, in the next issue of our journal – making note of how right of reply is treated in your newspaper.”

Translated by Ian Thompson, October 2014. Proofread and Edited by Mehdi el H. From: https://isinenglish.com/2-12-the-situationists-in-america/

The Amsterdam Declaration - Constant & Guy Debord

Amsterdam, 10 November 1958 reprinted in Internationale Situationniste #2 (December 1958)

1. The Situationists must take every opportunity to oppose retrograde forces and ideologies, in culture and wherever the question of the meaning of life arises.
2. Nobody shall consider their membership in the SI as a simple agreement of principle; the essential activity of all participants must relate to perspectives elaborated in common, to the necessity of disciplined action, in the practical as well as the public sphere.
3. The possibility of unitary and collective creativity is already announced in the decomposition of the individual arts. The SI cannot justify any attempt to renovate them.
4. The SI's minimum program is the development of complete environments, which must extend to a unitary urbanism, and research into new modes of behavior in relation to these environments.
5. Unitary urbanism is defined as the complex, ongoing activity that consciously recreates man's environment according to the most advanced conceptions in every domain.
6. The solution to problems of housing, traffic, and recreation can only be envisaged in relation to social, psychological and artistic perspectives that are combined in one synthetic hypothesis at the level of daily life.
7. Unitary urbanism, independently of all aesthetic considerations, is the fruit of a new type of collective creativity; the development of this spirit of creation is the prior condition of unitary urbanism.
8. The creation of ambiances favorable to this development is the immediate task of today's creators.
9. All means are usable, on condition that they serve in a unitary action. The coordination of artistic and scientific means must lead to their total fusion.
10. The construction of a situation is the edification of a transient micro-ambiance and of the play of events for a unique moment in the lives of several persons. Within unitary urbanism, it is inseparable from the construction of a general, relatively more lasting ambiance.
11. A constructed situation is a means for unitary urbanism, just as unitary urbanism is the indispensable basis for the construction of situations, in both play and seriousness, in a freer society.

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

The question, "Is surrealism dead or alive?" was chosen for a theme of debate by the [journal] Open Circle on 18 November [1958]. The session was presided over by Noel Arnaud. Invited to represent themselves in the debate, the situationists accepted after having demanded and obtained the official invitation of a representative of surrealist orthodoxy to speak to this tribune. The surrealists took good care to not take the risk of a public discussion, but announced that they would sabotage the meeting, because they wrongly believe that the subject was their specialty.

On the evening of the debate, Henri Lefebvre was sick unfortunately. Arnaud and [Guy] Debord were present. But the three other participants announced on the posters slipped away at the last minute so as to not confront the frightful surrealists (Amadou[1] and [Jacques] Sternberg under poor pretexts, [Tristan] Tzara without any explanation).

From the first words of Noel Arnaud, more than 15 surrealists and auxilliaries, timidly concentrated at the back of the hall, tried their skill at indignant howling and were ridiculed. One discovered that the surrealists of the New Wave, burning to enter into the career in which their elders are no longer present, have a great lack of practical experience in "scandal," their sect having never been constrained to go to these extremes in the last 10 years. The trainer of these conscripts, the pitiful [Jean] Schuster -- the director of Medium, the editor-in-chief of Surrealism Even, and the co-director of 14 July, who has shown a hundred times that he does not know how to think, that he does not know how to write, that he does not know how to speak -- this time proved that he does not know how to cry out.

Their assault did not go beyond a disagreement on a single theme: the passionate opposition to the techniques of sound recording. Arnaud's voice, actually, was diffused by a tape recorder,[2] certainly taboo for the surrealist youths who wanted to see the orator speak, since he was present. The remaining surrealists keep a respectful silence for a single moment, during which one read a message from their friend Amadou, full of obscene declarations of mysticism and Christianity, but good and paternal to them.

Then they did their best against Debord, whose intervention was not only tape-recorded, but also accompanied on guitar.[3] Having stupidly summoned Debord to mount the podium, and as he was soon there alone, the 15 surrealists did not think of disputing anything with him, and nobly left, after throwing a symbolic flaming newspaper.

Surrealism [said the tape recorder] is obviously alive. Its creators are still not dead. The new people, more and more mediocre, it is true, claim kinship with it. Surrealism is known to the public as the extreme of modernism and, on the other hand, it has become an object for university studies. It is indeed one of the things that live at the same time that we do, like Catholicism and General de Gaulle.

The real question is thus: what is the role of surrealism today? . . .

From the beginning, there was in surrealism -- comparable in this regard to Romanticism -- an antagonism between the attempt to affirm a new use of life and a reactionary flight beyond the real.

At the beginning, the progressive side of surrealism was present in its demand for total freedom and in several attempts at intervening in everyday life. A supplement to the history of art, surrealism is -- in the field of culture -- like a shadow of the absent person in a painting by de Chirico: it reveals the lack of a necessary future.

The retrograde side of surrealism is easily seen in the over-estimation of the unconscious and its monotonous artistic exploitation; the dualistic idealism that tends to understand history as a simple opposition between the precursors of surrealist irrationality and the tyranny of Greco-Latin logical conceptions; [and] the participation in the bourgeois propaganda that presents love as the only possible adventure in modern conditions of existence. . . .

Surrealism today is perfectly boring and reactionary. . . .

Surrealist dreams correspond to bourgeois powerlessness, to artistic nostalgia, and to the refusal to envision the liberatory use of the superior technical means of our times. The seizure of such means, and the collective and concrete experimentation with new environments and behaviors, correspond to the beginning of a cultural revolution beyond which there is no authentic revolutionary culture.

It is in this line that my comrades in the Situationist International advance. (This last phrase is followed by several minutes of very lively applause, also pre-recorded. Then another voice announces: "You have been listening to Guy Debord, spokesperson for the Situationist International. This intervention was offered to you by the Open Circle." A female voice goes on speaking, to finish in the style of radio advertising: "But don't forget that your most urgent problem remains fighting the dictatorship in France.")

The confusion did not diminish after the departure en masse of the surrealists. One simultaneously heard from [Isidore] Isou and the Ultra-Lettrist Group,[4] re-grouped against him by former disciples who want to purify the initial programme of Isou (but which seems to place itself on the pure aesthetic plane, outside the totalizing intention that characterized the most ambitious phase of the action previously inspired by Isou; none of them had been in the Lettrist International.[5] A single one had been part of the Lettrist movement before 1952.[6]) There was even a representative of a "Popular Surrealist Tendency," who gave out many copies of a short tract finely entitled "Alive? I am still dead," so perfectly unintelligible that it could have been written by Michel Tapie.[7] The majority of these substitute polemics produced the quite comic and slightly touching impression that the gathering was a retrospective of the sessions of the Parisian avant-garde over the last 10 years, minutely reconstructed with their [respective] personnel and arguments. But everyone agreed that the youth of surrealism, its importance, passed away a long time ago.

Unsigned, perhaps written by Guy Debord. Published in Internationale Situationniste #2, December 1958. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! July 2007. Footnotes by the translator. From: http://www.notbored.org/surrealism.html

[1] We have been unable to identify this person.

[2] Note that this must have been one of the very first uses of tape recorders by avant-garde artists who were not primarily musicians in the field of musique concrete: it wasn't until 1961 that Robert Morris began his experiments with tape recorders; until 1962 that William S. Burroughs began his experiments; 1964 that Brian Eno began his; etc etc.

[3] Flamingo-style. A scratchy recording of a different version of this intervention has been uploaded by Ubu.

[4] This group existed between 1957 and 1961, and included Jean-Louis Brau, Gil J Wolman, Francois Dufrene, and Robert Estivals, among others.

[5] Wolman must not have been present at the event, because he was certainly a member of the Lettrist International.

[6] Jean-Louis Brau.

[7] An art critic and Jesuit.

1. The Situationists must take every opportunity to oppose retrograde forces and ideologies, in culture and wherever the question of the meaning of life arises.
2. Nobody shall consider their membership in the SI as a simple agreement of principle; the essential activity of all participants must relate to perspectives elaborated in common, to the necessity of disciplined action, in the practical as well as the public sphere.
3. The possibility of unitary and collective creativity is already announced in the decomposition of the individual arts. The SI cannot justify any attempt to renovate them.
4. The SI's minimum program is the development of complete environments, which must extend to a unitary urbanism, and research into new modes of behavior in relation to these environments.
5. Unitary urbanism is defined as the complex, ongoing activity that consciously recreates man's environment according to the most advanced conceptions in every domain.
6. The solution to problems of housing, traffic, and recreation can only be envisaged in relation to social, psychological and artistic perspectives that are combined in one synthetic hypothesis at the level of daily life.
7. Unitary urbanism, independently of all aesthetic considerations, is the fruit of a new type of collective creativity; the development of this spirit of creation is the prior condition of unitary urbanism.
8. The creation of ambiances favorable to this development is the immediate task of today's creators.
9. All means are usable, on condition that they serve in a unitary action. The coordination of artistic and scientific means must lead to their total fusion.
10. The construction of a situation is the edification of a transient micro-ambiance and of the play of events for a unique moment in the lives of several persons. Within unitary urbanism, it is inseparable from the construction of a general, relatively more lasting ambiance.
11. A constructed situation is a means for unitary urbanism, just as unitary urbanism is the indispensable basis for the construction of situations, in both play and seriousness, in a freer society.

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

Bourgeois civilization, now spread all over the planet, and which has yet to be successfully overcome anywhere, is haunted by a shadow: its culture, which appears in the modern dissolution of all its artistic means, is being called into question. This dissolution, first manifested at the starting point for the productive forces of modern society, i.e., Europe and later in America, has long been the prime truth of Western modernism. Everywhere the liberation of artistic forms has signified their reduction to nothing. One can apply to the whole of modern expression that W. Weildé, in 1947, wrote in the second issue of Cahiers de la Pléiade about Finnegans Wake: "This enormous Summa of the most enticing verbal contortions, this Ars poetica in ten thousand lessons, is not an artistic creation: it is the autopsy of its corpse."

Reactionary critics, to support their stupid dream of a return to the stylistic beauties of the past, never fail to point out that behind the inflationary flowering of novelties that can serve only once, the road of this liberation leads only to the void. For example, Emile Henriot (Le Monde, February 11, 1959) notes "The turn, many times signaled, that a certain literature of today has taken in the direction of the 'language of forms' for the use of literati specializing in the exercise of a 'literature for literati,' an object unto itself, just as there are experiments by painters for experimental painters and a music for musicians." Or Mauriac (L'Express, March 5, 1959): "The very philosophers whose lesson is that the end of a poem should be silence write articles to persuade us of it, and publish novels to prove to us that one shouldn't tell stories."

In the face of these jeers, those critics who have chosen to be modernists extol the beauties of dissolution, while hoping that it doesn't proceed too quickly. They are embarrassed, like Geneviève Bonnefoi taking not under the title "Death or Transfiguration?" of the ill-starred Paris Biennale (Lettres Nouvelles, no.25). She concludes sadly: "Only the future will tell if this 'annihilation' of pictorial language, fairly similar to the one attempted on the literary plane by Beckett, Ionesco, and the best of the current young novelists, foreshadows a renewal of painting or its disappearance as a major art of our time. I have no space here to speak of sculpture, which seems to be in total disintegration." Or else, renouncing any sense of the comical, they loudly take the side of quasi nothingness in formulas worthy to pass into history as the summing-up of the poverty of an era, like Françoise Choay, who eulogistically entitles an article on Tapiès: "Tapiès, Mystic of Almost Nothing" (France-Observateur, April 30, 1959).

The embarrassment of modernist critics is completed by the embarrassment of modern artists, on whom the accelerated decomposition in all sectors constantly imposes the need to examine and explain their working hypotheses. They bustle about in the same confusion and often in a comparable imbecility. Everywhere one can see the traces, among modern creators, of a consciousness traumatized by the shipwreck of expression as an autonomous sphere and absolute goal; and by the slow emergence of other dimensions of activity.

The fundamental work of a present avant-garde should be an attempt at general criticism of this moment, and a first attempt to respond to new requirements.

If the artist has passed, by a slow process, from the state of entertainer — pleasantly occupying people's spare time — to the ambition of a prophet, who raises questions and claims to impart the meaning of life, it is because, more and more, the question of how to spend our lives looms at the edge of the expanding freedom we have achieved by our appropriation of nature.

Thus the pretensions of the artist in bourgeois society go hand in hand with the practical reduction of his or her realm of real action to zero, and denial. All modern art is the revolutionary claim to other professions, once the current specialization is one-sided, canned expression has been relinquished.

The delays and distortions of the revolutionary project in our time are well known. The regression that has therein manifested itself has nowhere been so obvious as in art. This has been made easier by the fact that classical Marxism had not developed a real body of criticism in this area. In a famous letter to Mehring, written at the end of his life, Engels noted: "we all laid, and were bound to lay, the main emphasis, in the first place, on the derivation of political, juridical and other ideological notions, and of actions arising through the medium of these notions, from basic economic facts. But in doing so we neglected the formal side — the ways and means by which these notions, etc., come about — for the sake of the content." Moreover, at the time when Marxist thought was coming into its own, the formal movement in the dissolution of art was not yet apparent. Likewise, it can be said that it is solely in the presence of fascism that the workers' movement encountered in practical terms the problem of the formal "mode of appearance" of a political idea. It found itself poorly equipped to deal with it.

Independent revolutionary thinkers themselves show a certain reluctance to become involved in today's cultural problems. When we look at the endeavors, from more than one angle, of such intellectuals as Henri Lefebvre — in recent years — and Lucien Goldmann, we find in them the common trait of having amassed a number of positive contributions, important appeals to progressive truth at a moment when the ideology of the left is lost in a sense of confusion, to whose advantage it is all too clear, while at the same time being absent or insufficient when two kinds of questions come up: the organization of a political force, and the discovery of cultural means of action. These questions are indeed two essential and inseparable elements of the transitory action that would be needed from now on to lead to that enriched praxis usually offered to us as an external image, entirely separate from ourselves, instead of being linked to us by the slow movement of the future.

In an unpublished article of 1947 ("Le matérialisme dialectique, est-il une philosophie?"), included in his book Recherches dialectiques, Goldmann gives a good analysis of the future result of the cultural movement that lies before his eyes. "Like law, economics, or religion," he writes, "art as an independent phenomenon separated from other realms of social life will be led to disappear in a classless society. There will probably no longer be art separated from life because life will itself be a style, a form in which it will find its adequate expression." But Goldmann, who traces this very long-term perspective on the basis of the overall forecasts of dialectical materialism, does not recognize its verification in the expression of his time. He judges the style or art of his time in terms of the classical/romantic alternative, and in romanticism he sees only the expression of reification. Now, it is true that the destruction of language, after a century of poetry, has come about as a consequence of a deep-seated romantic, reified, petit-bourgeois tendency, and also — as Paulhan had shown in Les Fleurs de Tarbes — by postulating that the inexpressible thought was worth more than the word. But the progressive aspect of this destruction, in poetry, fiction, or all the plastic arts, is that of being at the same time the testimony of a whole epoch on the insufficiency of artistic expression, of pseudocommunication. It is the practical destruction of the instruments of this pseudocommunication that brings to the fore the question of inventing superior instruments.

Henri Lefebvre (La Somme et le Reste) wonders "if the crisis of philosophy does not mean its decline and end, as philosophy," while forgetting that this has been the basis of revolutionary thought since the eleventh of the Theses on Feuerbach. He has offered a more radical criticism in Arguments, no. 15, considering human history as the successive traversal and abandoning of various spheres: the cosmic, the maternal, the divine, as well as philosophy, economics, and politics, and finally "art, which defines man by dazzling flashes and the human by exceptional moments, thus still external, alienating in the attempt at deliverance." But here we are back with the science fiction of revolutionary thought that is preached in Arguments, as daring in engaging thousands of years of history as it is incapable of proposing a single new element from now to the end of the century, and naturally bewitched in the present by the worst fumes of neo-reformism. Lefebvre is well aware that each realm collapses in explicating itself, when it has reached the end of its possibilities and its imperialism, "when it has proclaimed itself a totality on the human scale (thus complete). In the course of this development, and only after this illusory and extreme proclamation, the negativity already long contained in this world asserts itself, disowns it, corrodes it, dismantles it, casts it down. Only a finished totality can reveal that it is not a totality." This scheme, which applies rather to philosophy after Hegel, perfectly defines the crisis of modern art, as can be easily verified by examining an extreme trend: for example, poetry from Mallarmé to Surrealism. These conditions, already dominant beginning with Baudelaire, constitute what Paulhan calls the Terror, which he takes to be an accidental crisis of language, without considering the fact that they apply equally to all the other artistic means of expression. But the breadth of Lefebvre's views is of no avail to him when he writes about poems that are, as far as their date is concerned, on the historical model of 1925, and as for the effective level attained by this formula, at the lowest. And when he proposes a conception of modern art (revolutionary-romantic), he advises artists to come back to this style of expression — or to others still older — to express the profound feeling of life, and the contradictions of men ahead of their time, i.e., both of their public and of themselves. Lefebvre would prefer not to see that this feeling and these contradictions have already been expressed by all modern art, and indeed up to and including the destruction of expression itself.

For revolutionaries, there can be no turning back. The world of artistic expression, whatever its content, has already lapsed. It repeats itself scandalously in order to keep going as long as the dominant society succeeds in preserving the privation and scarcity that are the anachronistic conditions of its reign. But the preservation and subversion of this society is not a utopian question: it is the most burning question of today, the one governing all others. Lefebvre should pursue the thought on the basis of a question he raised in the same article: "Has not every great period of art been a funeral rite in honor of a vanished moment?" This is also true on the individual scale, where every work is a funeral and memorial celebration of a vanished moment in one's life. The creations of the future should shape life directly, creating "exceptional moments" and making them ordinary. Goldmann weighs the difficulty of this leap when he remarks (in a note in Recherches dialectiques, page 144): "We have no means of direct action on affects." It will be the task of the creators of a new culture to invent such means.

We need to find operative instruments midway between the global praxis in which every aspect of the total life of a classless society will one day dissolve and the present individual practice of "private" life with its poor artistic and other resources. What we mean by situations to be constructed is the search for a dialectical organization of partial and transitory realities, what André Frankin, in his Critique du Non-Avenir, has called a "planning of existence" on the individual level, not excluding chance but, on the contrary, "rediscovering" it.

Situations are conceived as the opposite of works of art, which are attempts at absolute valorization and preservation of the present moment. That is the fancy aesthetic grocery of a Malraux, of whom it might be remarked that the same "intellectuals of the left" who are indignant to day at seeing him at the head of the most contemptible and imbecile political swindle once took him seriously — an admission that countersigns their bankruptcy. Every situation, as consciously constructed as can be, contains its own negation and moves inevitably toward its own reversal. In the conduct of an individual life, a situationist action is not based on the abstract idea of rationalist progress (which, according to Descartes, "makes us masters and possessors of nature"), but on the practice of arranging the environment that conditions us. Whoever constructs situations, to apply a statement by Marx, "by bringing his movements to bear on external nature and transforming it... transforms his own nature at the same time."

In conversations that lead to the formation of the SI, Asger Jorn put forth a plan for ending the separation that had arisen around 1930 between avant-garde artists and the revolutionary left, who had once been allies. The root of the problem is that, since 1930, there has been neither a revolutionary movement nor an artistic avant-garde to respond to the possibilities of the time. A new departure, on both sides, will certainly have to be made to bring together problems and responses.

The obvious obstacles of the present have produced a certain ambiguity in the Situationist movement as a magnet for artists ready to embark on a new course. Like the proletarians, theoretically, before the nation, the Situationists are encamped at the gates of culture. They do not want to establish themselves inside, they decline to inscribe themselves in modern art, they are the organizers of the absence of that aesthetic avant-garde that bourgeois critics and which, forever disappointed, they are prepared to greet on the first occasion. This does not go without the risk of various retrograde interpretations, even within the S.I. Decadent artists, for example at the last fair held in Venice, are already talking about "situations." Those who understand everything in terms of old-hat artistic ideas, as tame verbal formulas destined to assure the sale of tamer little paintings, may see the S.I. as having already achieved a certain success, a certain recognition: that is because they have not understood that we have gathered at a great turning point still to be taken.

Of course, the decay of artistic forms, while indicated by the impossibility of their creative renewal, does not immediately involve their actual disappearance in practice. They can go on repeating themselves with various nuances. But everything shows "the upheaval of this world," as Hegel says in the preface to the Phenomenology of Mind: "The frivolity and boredom that are invading what still exists, and the vague presentiment of something unknown, are the preliminary signs of something else that is on its way."
We must keep moving ahead, without attaching ourselves to anything either in modern culture or its negation. We do not want to work toward the spectacle of the end of the world, but toward the end of the world of spectacle.

Translated by John Shepley. From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/decay.html

The so-called "New Wave" of directors currently attempting to revitalize French cinema can be defined first of all by its complete and notorious lack of artistic innovation, quite simply at the stage of intention. To speak in less negative terms, it is characterized by a number of specific economic conditions whose dominant trait is without a doubt the importance in France of a certain school of cinema criticism that represents a sort of moral support — by no means insignificant — in the use of film. These critics have learnt to employ this support to their direct advantage as cinematic auteurs. This is the only thing that unifies them. The praise they heap on a production that otherwise completely escapes them is only for the benefit of their own works, which consequently become cheaper to make precisely because, for a wide section of the public, this game of praise can replace the painfully expensive attractions of the star system. Thus, this "new wave" expresses little more than the vested interests of this particular group of film critics.

In the confusion that has always surrounded them, as critics and as filmmakers, Alain Resnais' Hiroshima mon amour is carried along with the rest of this famous wave, and is met by the same sort of admiration. The superiority of Resnais' film is easy to recognize, but it seems that very few people are concerned with defining its exact nature.

A talented director, Resnais has already made several impressive short films (Nuit et Brouillard), but it is Hiroshima that represents a qualitative leap in the development both of his work and of the worldwide cinematic spectacle. If we are to put aside those cinematic experiments that remain marginal at best (for example, in terms of content, some of Jean Rouch's films; or in terms of formal investigation, those of the lettrist group circa 1950: Isou, Wolman, Marco — interestingly enough, the resemblance of Resnais' work to that of Isou in particular has never been mentioned), Hiroshima seems like the most original, most innovative film since the invention of talkies. Not discounting a mastery of the power of the image, Hiroshima relies on the pre-eminence of sound: the importance of the dialogue proceeds not only from an unusual quantity or even quality, but from the fact that the development of the film is determined far less what its characters do than by what they say (to the extent that they provide the images with the bulk of their meaning, as is the case with the lengthy journey through the streets that concludes the first sequence).

The conformist public knows that Resnais is okay to like, and thus likes him just as much as it does someone like Chabrol. Through a variety of declarations, Resnais has made it clear that he is traveling a well worn road through the investigation of cinema based on the autonomy of sound (by defining Hiroshima as a "long short film" with a commentary; by acknowledging his interest a few of Guitry's films; and by speaking of his tendency toward cinematic opera). Nevertheless, Resnais' modesty and personal discretion have helped obscure the problem of the meaning of the evolution that he represents, in such a way that critics are torn between equally inadequate reservation and praise.

The most typical and deluded objection involves dissociating Resnais from Marguerite Duras by hailing the director's talent while lamenting the pretentiousness of the script. But the film is what it is precisely because of this use of language, which is precisely what Resnais wanted, and which is precisely where his scriptwriter has succeeded. Denouncing rather accurately the "retrospective revolution" led by the pseudo-modernism of the literary and cinematic "new waves" in Arts magazine (26-8-59), Jean-François Revel makes the mistake of lumping Resnais in with this lot because of his commentary, "a pastiche of Claudel." Revel, who has long been appreciated for the intelligence of his attacks without ever having to point out what he was aiming at, demonstrates a sudden weakness when it comes to distinguishing what is really new about such fashionable trash. According to his article in Arts, he prefers the pathetically conventional cinema of Bernard-Auberts' Tripes au soleil, simply because of its sympathetic content.

Resnais' apologists speak so freely of genius because of the prestigious mystery of the term, which spares them from having to explain Hiroshima's objective importance: the appearance in "commercial" cinema of the self-destruction that dominates all modern art.

The film's admirers do their best to find admirable little details wherever they can. Everyone ends up going on about Faulkner and his sense of timing (on that point, we might add that Agnes Varda, who has absolutely no good points, owes everything to Faulkner). In fact, the reason they insist on the fragmented rhythm of Resnais' film is so that they don't have to see any of its destructive aspects. In the same way, they talk of Faulkner as a specialist — an accidental specialist — of the dissipation of time, accidentally encountered by Resnais, so that they can forget the time that has already passed, and more generally the literary works of Proust and Joyce. The timing — the confusion — of Hiroshima is not the annexation of cinema by literature: it is the continuation in cinema of the movement of all writing, and first of all poetry, toward its own dissolution.
There is also a tendency to explain Resnais as much by his personal psychological motivations as by his exceptional talents — both of course having roles that we won't go into here — thereby leading to talk that the theme of all his films is memory, just as that of every Hawks film, for example, is male bonding. But at the same time there is a blissful ignorance of the fact that memory is the most significant theme of the appearance of the phase of immanent criticism in art, of its bringing itself into question, of its dissolving contestation. The question of the meaning of memory is always linked to the question of the meaning of a permanence transmitted by art.

The most simple access of cinema to the method of free expression is at the same time already within the perspective of the demolition of this method. As soon as cinema enriched itself with the powers of modern art, it found itself encompassed by the total crisis of modern art. At the same time that this step brought cinema closer to its freedom, it also brought it closer to its death, to the proof of its inadequacy.
In cinema, the claim of a freedom of expression equal to that of other arts masks the general failure of expression at the end of all modern arts. Artistic expression is in no way an actual self-expression, a realization of its life. The proclamation of "auteur film" is already past its use-by-date before really having gone beyond pretension and pipedream. Cinema, whose potential is far greater than that of other traditional arts, is too heavily bound up in moral and economic chains to ever have the capacity to be free under present social conditions. And when the coming overthrow of social and cultural conditions allows the possibility of a free cinema, many other theaters of operation will necessarily have been introduced. It is probable that at that time the freedom of cinema will largely be superseded, forgotten in the general development of a world where the spectacle is longer be dominant. The fundamental trait of the spectacle is the mise en scène of its own ruin. The importance of Resnais' film — conceived, of course, outside of this historical perspective — is to add a new confirmation to this.

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

Détournement, the reuse of preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble, has been a constantly present tendency of the contemporary avant-garde, both before and since the formation of the SI. The two fundamental laws of détournement are the loss of importance of each detourned autonomous element -- which may go so far as to completely lose its original sense -- and at the same time the organization of another meaningful ensemble that confers on each element its new scope and effect.

Détournement has a peculiar power which obviously stems from the double meaning, from the enrichment of most of the terms by the coexistence within them of their old and new senses. Détournement is practical because it is so easy to use and because of its inexhaustible potential for reuse. Concerning the negligible effort required for détournement, we have already noted that "the cheapness of its products is the heavy artillery that breaks through all the Chinese walls of understanding" (A User's Guide to Détournement, May 1956). But these points would not by themselves justify recourse to this method, which the same text describes as "clashing head-on against all social and legal conventions." Détournement has a historical significance. What is it?

"Détournement is a game made possible by the capacity of devaluation," writes Jorn in his study Detourned Painting (May 1959), and he goes on to say that all the elements of the cultural past must be "reinvested" or disappear. Détournement is thus first of all a negation of the value of the previous organization of expression. It arises and grows increasingly stronger in the historical period of the decomposition of artistic expression. But at the same time, the attempts to reuse the "detournable bloc" as material for other ensembles express the search for a vaster construction, a new genre of creation at a higher level.

The SI is a very special kind of movement, different in nature from preceding artistic avant-gardes. Within culture, the SI can be likened to a research laboratory, for example, or to a party in which we are situationists but nothing that we do can yet be situationist. This is not a disavowal for anyone. We are partisans of a certain future of culture and of life. Situationist activity is a particular craft that we are not yet practicing.

Thus the signature of the situationist movement, the sign of its presence and contestation in contemporary cultural reality (since we cannot represent any common style whatsoever), is first of all the use of détournement. Examples of our use of detourned expression include Jorn's altered paintings; Debord and Jorn's book Mémoires, "composed entirely of prefabricated elements," in which the writing on each page runs in all directions and the reciprocal relations of the phrases are invariably uncompleted; Constant's projects for detourned sculptures; and Debord's detourned documentary film, On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Period of Time. At the stage of what the "User's Guide to Détournement" calls "ultradétournement, that is, the tendencies for détournement to operate in everyday social life" (e.g. passwords or the wearing of disguises, belonging to the sphere of play), we might mention, at different levels, Gallizio's industrial painting; Wyckaert's "orchestral" project for assembly-line painting with a division of labor based on color; and numerous détournements of buildings that were at the origin of unitary urbanism. But we should also mention in this context the SI's very forms of "organization" and propaganda.

At this point in the world's development, all forms of expression are losing their grip on reality and being reduced to self-parody. As the readers of this journal can frequently verify, present-day writing invariably has an element of parody. As the "User's Guide" notes: "It is necessary to conceive of a parodic-serious stage where the accumulation of detourned elements, far from aiming to arouse indignation or laughter by alluding to some original work, will express our indifference toward a meaningless and forgotten original, and concern itself with rendering a certain sublimity."

This combination of parody and seriousness reflects the contradictions of an era in which we find ourselves confronted with both the urgent necessity and the near impossibility of initiating and carrying out a totally innovative collective action -- an era in which the most serious ventures are masked in the ambiguous interplay between art and its necessary negation, and in which the essential voyages of discovery have been undertaken by such astonishingly incapable people.

SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL (1959)

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

Site for a house for situationist use. At the mid-point of the Allée des Cygnes in Paris, the base of the building would be the remodeled bridge of the railway which bisects the island, currently out of use. The width of the house is the same as that of the island. The thoroughfare, already restricted to pedestrians by the stairs commanding the north of the island, continues under the house, which can communicate directly with both banks (the 15th and 16th arrondissements) via the bridge connecting with its side elevations. This project for establishing a permanent residence aims at nothing less than populating, after the example of Antarctic ice-stations, the third island of Paris, deserted to this day.

In August 1956, a tract signed by the groups preparing the founding of the SI called for the boycott of a would-be "Festival of Avant-Garde Art" being held in Marseille at the time, an event that the tract called the most complete, official selection of "what in twenty years will represent the idiocy of the 1950s." 1

And, indeed, the modern art of this period turns out to have been dominated by, and almost exclusively composed of, camouflaged repetitions — a stagnation that bespeaks of both the definitive exhaustion of the entire old cultural theater of operations as well as the incapacity to discover a new one. At the same time, however, underground movements have come into existence. Such is the case with the origins of unitary urbanism (UU), intuited as early as 1953 and first named as such at the end of 1956 in a tract distributed on the occasion of a demonstration by our Italian comrades in Turin. ("Obscure statements," wrote La Nouva Stampa on 11 December, on the subject of the following warning: "Your children's future depends on it: demonstrate in favor of unitary urbanism!"). Unitary urbanism is one of the central concerns of the SI and, despite any delays and difficulties that might arise in its application, it is entirely correct (as the opening report of the Munich conference confirms) that unitary urbanism has already begun at the moment that it appears as a program of research and development.

The 1950s are about to come to a close. Without trying to predict whether the idiocy of this decade in the art and practice of life — itself a function of more general causes — will diminish or intensify in the short run, it is time to examine the current state of UU following the first stage of its development. A number of points need to be clarified.

First all of, UU is not a doctrine of urbanism but a critique of urbanism. By the same token, our participation in experimental art is a critique of art, and sociological research ought to be a critique of sociology. No isolated discipline whatsoever can be tolerated in itself; we are moving toward a global creation of existence.

UU is distinct from problems of housing and yet is bound to engulf them; it is all the more distinct from current commercial exchange. At present, UU envisages a terrain of experience for the social space of the cities of the future. It is not a reaction to functionalism, but rather a move past it; UU is a matter of reaching — beyond the immediately useful — an enthralling functional environment. Functionalism, which still has avant-garde pretensions because it continues to encounter outdated resistance, has already triumphed to a large extent. Its positive contributions — the adaptation to practical functions, technical innovation, comfort, the banishment of superimposed ornament — are today banalities. Yet, although its field of application is (when all is said an done) a narrow one, this has not led functionalism to adopt a relative theoretical modesty. In order to justify philosophically the extension of its principles of renovation to the entire organization of social life, functionalism has fused, seemingly without a thought, with the most static conservative doctrines (and, simultaneously, has itself congealed into an inert doctrine). One must construct uninhabitable ambiances; construct the streets of real life, the scenery of daydreams.

The issue of church construction provides a particularly illuminating instance. Functionalist architects tend to agree to construct churches, thinking — if they are not stupid deists — that the church, the edifice without function within a functional urbanism, can be treated as a free exercise in plastic form. Their error is that they fail to consider the psycho-functional reality of the church. The functionalists, who are the expression of the technological utilitarianism of the era, cannot successfully build a single church if one considers that the cathedral was once the unitary accomplishment of a society that one has to call primitive, given that it was much further embedded than we are in the miserable prehistory of humanity. In the very era of the technologies that give rise to functionalism, the Situationist architects, for their part, are searching to create new frames of behavior free of banality as well as of all the old taboos. The Situationist architects are thus absolutely opposed to the construction and even the conservation of religious buildings with which they find themselves in direct competition. UU merges objectively with the interests of a comprehensive subversion.

Just as UU cannot be reduced to questions of housing, it is also distinct from aesthetic problems. It opposes the passive spectacle, the principle of our culture (where the organization of the spectacle extends all the more scandalously the more the means of human intervention increase). In light of the fact that today cities themselves are presented as lamentable spectacles, a supplement to the museums for tourists driven around in glass-in buses, UU envisages the urban environment as the terrain of participatory games.

UU is not ideally separated from the current terrain of cities. UU is developed out of the experience of this terrain and based on existing constructions. As a result, it is just as important that we exploit the existing decors — through the affirmation of a playful urban space such as is revealed by the derive — as it is that we construct completely unknown ones. This interpenetration (employment of the present city and construction of the future city) entails the deployment of architectural détournement.

UU is opposed to the temporal fixation of cities. It leads instead to the advocacy of a permanent transformation, an accelerated movement of the abandonment and reconstruction of the city in temporal and at times spatial terms. We are thus able to envisage making use of the climatic conditions in which two major architectural civilizations arose — in Cambodia and in southwest Mexico — in order to construct moving cities in the jungle. The new neighborhoods of such a city could be constructed increasingly toward the west (which would be gradually reclaimed as one goes along), while to the same extent the east would be abandoned to the overgrowth of topical vegetation, thereby creating, on its own, zones of gradual transition between the modern city and wild nature. This city, pursued by the forest, would offer not only unsurpassable zones of derive that would take shape behind it; it would also be a marriage with nature more audacious than anything attempted by Frank Lloyd Wright. Furthermore, it would advantageously provide a mise-en-scène of time passing over a social space condemned to creative renovation.

UU is opposed to the fixation of people at certain points of a city. It is the foundation for a civilization of leisure and play. One should note that in the shackles of the current economic system, technology has been used to further multiply the pseudo-games of passivity and social disintegration (television), while the new forms of playful participation that are made possible by this same technology are regulated and policed. Amateur radio operators, for example, are reduced to technological boy scouts.

Since the situationist experience of the derive is simultaneously a means of study of and a game in the urban milieu, it is already on the track of UU. If UU refuses to separate theory from practice, this is not only in order to promote construction (or research on construction by means of models) along with theoretical ideas. The point of a such a refusal is above all not to separate the direct, collectively experienced, playful use of the city from the aspect of urbanism that involves construction. The real games and emotions in today's cities are inseparable from the projects of UU just as, when they have been realized, the projects of UU will not be isolated from games and emotions that will arise within these accomplishments. The derives that the Situationist International is committed to undertake in the spring of 1960 in Amsterdam — using quite powerful means of transportation and telecommunication — are envisaged as both an objective study of the city and as a game of communication. In fact, beyond its essential lessons, the derive furnishes only knowledge that is very precisely dated. In a few years, the construction or demolition of houses, the relocation of micro-societies, and the changes in fashion will suffice to change a city's network of superficial attractions — which is a very encouraging phenomenon for the moment when we will able to establish an active link between the derive and situationist urban construction. Until then, the urban milieu will certainly change on its own, anarchically, ultimately rendering obsolete the derives whose conclusions could not be translated into conscious transformations of their milieus. But the first lesson of the derive is its own status as a game.

We are only at the beginning of urban civilization; it is up to us to bring it about ourselves, using the pre-existing conditions as our point of departure. All the stories that we live — the drive(s) of our life — are characterized by the search for, or the lack of, an over-arching construction. The transformation of the environment calls forth new emotional states that are first experienced passively and then, with heightened consciousness, lead to constructive reactions. London was the first urban result of the industrial revolution, and the English literature of the nineteenth century bears witness to an increasing awareness of the problems of the atmosphere and of the qualitatively different possibilities of a large urban area.

The love between Thomas de Quincey and poor Ann, separated by chance and searching for one another, yet never finding themselves, "through the mighty labyrinths of London; perhaps even within a few feet of each other," marks a turning point in the slow historical evolution of the passions. In fact, Thomas de Quincey's real life from 1804 to 1812 makes him a precursor of the dérive: "Seeking ambitiously for a northwest passage, instead of circumnavigating all the capes and headlands I had doubled in my outward voyage, I came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys . . . I could almost have believed, at times, that I must be the first discoverer of some of these terrae incognitae, and doubted whether they had yet been laid down in the modern charts of London." Toward the end of the century, this sensation is so frequently expressed in novelistic writing that [Robert Louis] Stevenson presents a character who, in London at night, is astonished "to walk for such a long time in such a complex decor without encountering even the slightest shadow of adventure" (New Arabian Nights). The urbanists of the twentieth century will have to construct adventures.

The simplest situationist act would consist in abolishing all the memories of the employment of time in our epoch. It is an epoch that, up until now, has lived far below its means.

Map of the Land of Feeling, 1656

An experimental zone for the dérive. The center of Amsterdam, which will be systematically explored by situationist teams in April-May 1960.

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

• 1see "Failure of the Marseille Demonstration" https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/presitu/failure.html

The Dutch Section of the SI (address: Polaklaan 25, Amsterdam C) organized two events featuring conferences conducted — in the customary situationist manner — by tape recorder, as well as some rather animated debates: one in April at the Académie d'Architecture; the other in June at the Stedelijk Museum. In March, it adopted a resolution against the restoration of the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, demanded from every artistic point of view, instead proposing

"the demolition of the Stock Exchange and the redevelopment of the land as a playground for the population of the district," and pointing out that "the conservation of antiquities, like the fear of new constructions, is the proof of the current impotence . . . the center of Amsterdam is not a museum, but the habitat of living beings."

In a special issue of the journal Forum (no 6) in August, the Dutch situationists explained our positions on the unification of the arts and their integration into everyday life. Dispelling a number of misunderstandings on this theme, Constant's presentation immediately declared: "A total modification of social structures and artistic creativity must precede this integration."

●

The German Section of the SI can now be contacted at the following address: Deutsche Sektion der Situationistischen Internationale, Kaulbachstrasse 2, Munich. In order to contribute to preparatory discussions in the lead-up to the Third Conference, they have translated and published two documents under the titles: Erklärung von Amsterdam and Thesen über die Kulturelle Revolution.

●

A note concerning the average age of the situationists, appearing in issue 2 of this journal1 was intended to be both completed by the evolution recorded since that time, and rectified for the interpretation of the statistics — in themselves correct — that were employed. This note indicated that the average age of twenty nine and a half at the founding of the SI was raised in a single year to a little more than thirty two. To throw some light on the accelerated aging process, and considering that the SI is largely presented as the continuation of the "lettrist" avant-garde movement of the early 50's, we will compare the same figure of twenty nine and a half with the average of less than twenty one years, which, only four years earlier, was that of the Lettrist International "in the summer of 1953."

Here the oscillations of figures should be closely examined, and their relationship with the variations in the recruitment of the movement understood. The average age of the entire lettrist movement, in 1952, rose to 24.4. On the day of the rupture — the lettrist left was generally composed of younger members — it fell to 23 in the Lettrist International. This last movement was inclined toward an extremism much further away from the cultural economy and was thus joined by very young elements, the average age in effect descending to 20.8 in summer of 1953 (basic figures evaluated in our second issue).

Therefore, in taking as point of departure the figure of 24.4 in 1952, the normal aging process would lead to an average age of 29.4 in 1957. In fact, by the time of the Conference in Cosio d'Arroscia it equalled 29.53. This analogy shows that the old elements expelled were replaced by another group coming from various avant-garde tendencies of the same generation. The adolescents of 1953 were almost completely replaced by these new professionals. After one year of the SI's existence, the age rose to 32.08 (instead of 30.4 from 1952, or of 32.53 from Cosio d'Arroscia, according to the normal aging rate). This is certainly rather notable, expressing the rallying of elements previously engaged in experimental postwar art. Looking back over a period of six years, however, this aging is far from the catastrophic rate that appeared in our last analysis. But one can certainly worry about the absence of renewal by younger factions.

The signs of such a renewal presented themselves for the first time in 1959. Indeed, after the Munich Conference, the average age of the SI was established at 30.8, a very important reduction on the figure of the previous year (32.08) and a reduction even in terms of the figure of normal aging rate calculated from summer 1952 (31.4).

It remains to be said, however, that besides the fact that most of its causes are confined to Germany, this reduction in age only presents a comparatively weak rejuvenation when considered over a period of several years; and that one cannot yet talk of a younger generation having totally replaced that of 1952 in the most advanced cultural research.

●

A note in the first issue (15-7-59) of the new series of Potlatch ("Taking Out the Intellectual Trash") declaring that Hans Platschek was excluded in February due to his collusion with the "dadaist-royalist" journal Panderma, underlines the fact that "Platschek is only the sixth case of exclusion since the formation of the SI."
We would like to point out in comparison that the Lettrist International, in the first two years of its existence, had already excluded a dozen members.

●

Between June and October 1959, the editors of Internationale Situationniste received 127 anonymous letters. All appeared to come from the same people, who were excluded a long time previously, and who remain about as capable of comprehending the indifference toward their rather tired misadventure as they are likely to have any chance of reinstatement, now or ever.

●

The survivors of classical lettrism, of whom Isou is the most notorious, have failed to rid themselves of several old followers, who are as faithful as they can be to the method, but have now developed the ambition of starting all over again on their own "creative" account: Isou gives some idea of extremities suffered in the conflict surrounding this split, arguing (in issue 8 of Nouvelle Poésie) with a most mysterious follower, known as X:

• X then treats me as if I were self-taught. Now, I have almost as many qualifications as he does and a bit more than his little friends, most of whom don't even have a high school certificate.
• While I was preparing to complete several courses, X went off to get one last supplementary diploma before I could: nevertheless, I'm sure I'll soon have more diplomas than him. . . .
• But already, some among us have taken to using knives to settle their cultural differences. Some of my followers think that buying themselves revolvers can silence their adversaries. Here, I must stand up and show my opposition. . . . Even if this line of blood had to be crossed, I don't believe that, in a world where racism and fascism are on the return — and where Buffet, Françoise Sagan, Elle, the nouveau roman represent "modern culture" — we should cross this line among ourselves, creators of the avant-garde and, on many levels, revolutionaries.

●

In a tract distributed in November by the Experimental Laboratory in Alba [In Defense of Freedom], the situationists Eisch, Fischer, Nele, Pinot-Gallizio, Prem, Sturm and Zimmer publicly exposed the Spanish painter Modesto Cuixard, who, in order to increases his chances of securing the Sao-Paulo Grand Prize for Painting, was not afraid of denouncing the communism of his compatriots Antonio Saura and Antoni Tàpies, at the risk of putting them "in a position of great difficulty with the police in their country."

●

The extra information expected from the series of dérives to be carried out in Amsterdam in April and May 1960, as well as the complimentary construction of a labyrinth, has led us to postpone the continuation of the study of the dérive that began in our preceding issue 2 , and also the plan for a situation announced at the same time.

Translated by Reuben Keehan. Text from: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/news3.html

• 1Situationist News in issue 2.
• 2Theory of the Dérive

The third Conference of the Situationist International was held in Munich, 17-20 April 1959, fifteen months after the Second Conference in Paris (January 1958). The situationists of Germany, Belgium, Denmark, France, Holland and Italy were represented by: Armando, Constant, G.-E. Debord, Ervin Eisch, Heinz Höfl, Asger Jorn, Giors Melanotte, Har Oudejans, Pinot-Gallizio, Heimrad Prem, Gretel Stadler, Helmut Sturm, Maurice Wyckaert, Hans-Peter Zimmer.

The first session of work, 18 April, begins with a report by Constant on unitary urbanism [Inaugural Report to the Munich Conference]. He announces the foundation in Holland of a bureau of investigation for a unitary urbanism. The discussion which continues along this line extends to all aspects of the situationists' common activity. Prem poses various questions on the subordination of individual investigations to the discipline of the movement; then, on the very definition of a constructed situation, and its relationship to reality as a whole. In response, Jorn presents three initial possibilities for envisaging the construction of a situation "as a utopian place; as an isolated ambiance through which one may pass; or as a series of multiple ambiances combined in life." All the participants immediately dismiss the first option and show their preference for the third. Armando poses the question of the revolutionary role of the proletariat at the present time.

Next, the Italian delegation asks for details of the concrete program of the "bureau of investigation for a unitary urbanism"; worrying about the autonomy that it could attain within the movement, and (supported on this point by Jorn) of the dangerous specialization that it risks acquiring. Melanotte asks, "How will the importance of a work be evaluated? And can one still be situationist if one develops a work which does not concern unitary urbanism?" It should be pointed out that the notion of unitary urbanism also covers behavior, and that some behavior can be situationist without anything having been created. Constant responds that the responsibility of giving directives for unitary urbanism belongs to the whole of the SI and that no situationist can be disinterested. The activity of the "bureau of investigation for UU," like that of the Experimental Laboratory in Alba, depends on the situationist movement — neither of these particular organisms must engage the SI; but the inverse.

The second session opens with a report by Zimmer on the conditions of our action in Germany, and the history of the formation, since 1957, of the new tendency of the German avant-garde (the "Spur" group) that has now joined the Situationist International. Zimmer and his comrades, beginning with a simply pictorial opposition to modernist uniformity (comprised mainly by recently introduced tachism) wanted to move toward a total work of art — here referring to the architecture of King Louis II of Bavaria related to Wagnerian opera — including its social and political aspects. They therefore realized that "they had other still inexpressible goals, different from all those of German art." In this investigation into a total art, they have been encouraged by their involvement with the situationists and by the huge scandal caused here by their attack on the philosopher Bense at the beginning of the year. They targeted Bense because he is a disciple of what they characterize as "a typical post-war philosophy: a philosophy in ruins." The collective action that they support is opposed to the anti-creative collectivism of Bense, who aims "to make a meal of constructivism." The journals representing these dominant reactionary positions in Germany are principally Kunstwerk, Zero and Kunst Schönehaus.
Jorn responds by evoking the relationship between the single and the multiple. Debord appreciates favorably the decisive extremism demonstrated by Zimmer's report. He insists on the necessity and the difficulties of making it concrete; and warns our German comrades of importing into their country artificial novelties already used elsewhere. In an era when culture can no longer be considered in any terms but those of global unity, the task of an international avant-garde organization is precisely to thwart this regulating mechanism of pseudo-modernism.

Oudejans intervenes, on behalf of the Dutch delegation, to point out that rationalization can and must be utilized, as it is the basis of superior constructions. To refuse it would be to choose the impotent dreams of the past. Sturm contructs a lively critique of what he considers the pragmatism of Oudejans' positions. To the contrary, Constant underlines their dialectical sense. Pinot-Gallizio and Jorn comment on the next few points.

After an adjournment, the session recommences with a discussion on the eleven points of the Amsterdam declaration1 , presented to the conference as a proposal for a minimum program of the SI. After a long enough debate, the declaration is unanimously adopted by the participants, with amendments slightly modifying the first, third, ninth and eleventh points (see the Documents published below this report [Corrections to Adopting the Eleven Points of Amsterdam]).

The 20 April session is devoted to practical organizational decisions. The Conference approves the movement's activities since the Paris Conference, particularly the Italian section's action during the Guglielmi affair, an action which provoked the aesthetic indignation of the only enemies of freedom. The quasi-dissolution of the activities of the French SI group is explained by the conditions of overwhelming conformism inspired by the military and the police, currently dominating the new regime in that country, and the length of the colonial war in Algerian, which has conditioned and broken the youth of France: from now on, Paris can no longer be considered as the center of modern cultural experimentation. On the other hand, the Conference congratulates the SI's progress in Germany and Holland. A Fourth Conference is considered for England, in order to develop situationist possibilities that appear there.

The editorial committee of International Situationniste, the central bulletin of the SI, is enlarged. The old committee, still in place, is completed by Constant (Holland) and Helmut Sturm (Germany). Wyckaert proposes the revival of the publication of Potlatch as the interior periodical of the SI. The conference approves this project, whose execution is entrusted to the Dutch section. A German edition of Internationale Situationniste is decided in principle for before the end of the year, under the direction of Heinz Höfl.

The conference adopts the transitional resolution of a "situationist presence in the arts today," which must unleash the most extreme experimental growth, which would be linked to whatever constructive perspectives emerge in the future. It will lead an effective action in culture from its present reality. Accompanying the above arrangements, the Conference allows SI members to support our ideas in newspapers and journals not controlled by us, under the sole condition that these publications are not considered reactionary in their field; and that the situationists do not allow any ambiguity as to their taking no part in the editorship responsible for these publications.

One last discussion on the present state of properly situationist projects is concluded with a clarification by Melanotte: "None of what we do is situationist. Only unitary urbanism, when it is realized, will start to be situationist."

As soon as speeches by Pinot-Gallizio, Jorn, Constant and Oudejans mark the end of the Conference, an experimental alcohol made especially for the occasion by Pinot-Gallizio is distributed around the room. It is well into the night before it is succeeded by more classical drinks.

On the morning of 21 April, the tract "Ein kultureller Putsch während Ihr schlaft!" (A Cultural Putsch While You Sleep!) is distributed in Munich, by which time the situationists have already begun leaving the city.

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

• 1https://libcom.org/article/amsterdam-declaration-constant-guy-debord

Among the preparatory work for the Munich conference, the project of an "Inaugural Declaration of the Third SI Conference to Revolutionary Intellectuals and Artists" had been examined in Copenhagen and Paris, and submitted for the approval of other participants present in Munich. The text, intended to be published in German, English and French on the same day as the situationist conference gathered, read as follows:

Comrades,

The defeats of the revolution and the prolonging of a formally decomposing dominant culture are reciprocally explanatory, and the revolutionary supersession of existing conditions depends first of all on the appearance of perspectives concerning the totality.

The question of culture, that is to say, in the final analysis, of the organization of life, is contingent upon a qualitative rupture inseparable from the overthrow of contemporary society. The material forces of our era and the free play that must be obtained entail the transformation of isolated and durable expressions into momentary collective actions that directly construct our surroundings and the events of our everyday lives.

A new advance of the revolution is linked to the constitution of a passionate solution to replace the immediate use of life; linked to propaganda in favour of these possibilities and against present-day boredom and its exaggeration in the mystified idea of bourgeois happiness.

Revolutionaries in culture must not discover new doctrines but new skills. This can be accomplished through unitary urbanism, experimental behavior, and the construction of real situations as prime terrain for experience. A vast common labor must be undertaken, from the disillusioned critique of the entire field of action where traditional culture is silenced at the end of its self-destruction; and from the consciousness of the profound unity of all revolutionary tasks.

The social basis for the cultural revolution already exists among artists who, in arriving at the most extreme modernism possible in the old society, are still not content; and its development interests the entire world, in which cultural unification has already been accomplished, for the most part, by capitalism.
At this time, we think that desiring this leap into another practice of life is not particularly advanced; it is to seek sadly to live in a present encumbered by intellectual and moral cadavers.

It must be understood that social revolution cannot exist in the poetry of the past, but only of the future.

However, at the beginning of April, the Bureau of Investigation for a Unitary Urbanism in Amsterdam made its opposition to this text known:

Our objections are as follows: cultural perspectives remain insufficient. We insist on the central position of unitary urbanism as point of departure; and on a direct and practical activity in this domain, as an alternative to the current artistic activity, which we refuse.

In our view, these perspectives do not depend on a "revolutionary overthrow of contemporary society" when these conditions are absent. Rather, for the working class, the suppression of a painful material poverty seems to announce a slow evolution. . . These are the intellectuals who rebel against cultural poverty: in unity with a non-existent and utopian social revolution. . . We reject any romanticized notion of a past reality. The current avant-garde is united by the revolt against existing cultural conditions.

On April 4th, Debord, addressing the members of the Bureau of Investigation in defense of the text of the appeal, which had been modified by Frankin (see the two theses reproduced below [Platform for a Cultural Revolution]), recognized firstly the insufficient elaboration of the project, which "must designate more clearly our practical originality instead of remaining in well-worn positions"; but remarked:

The position that you maintain in the second point is purely reformist. Without wanting to start a debate on reformism, I would remind you in passing that in my estimation, capitalism is incapable of abolishing the fundamental reality of exploitation, and therefore incapable of allowing its peaceful replacement by the superior forms of life that its own material development necessitates. . . The perspective of social revolution is profoundly altered in relation to all these classical schemas, but it is real. On the other hand, when you found the progressive forces only in the "intellectuals who rebel against cultural poverty," you were yourselves utopian. . . Should we not question the relationship of such a moderate optimistic ideology to the practical of architects working in a country with a high standard of living, where a bourgeois democratic State takes part in urbanism, and exercises in its natural anarchy a reformist authority?

You naturally have reason to conclude by pointing out that "the current avant-garde is united by the revolt against existing cultural conditions" . . . the revolt against existing cultural conditions cannot be stopped in any of the artificial divisions of bourgeois culture within culture or between culture and life (for in that case we have no real need for a revolt). Unitary urbanism is not a conception of the totality, and must not become one. It is a mere instrument. . . UU is "central" in so far as it is the center of a construction of a whole environment. One cannot think, by this theoretical vision or even by its application, that it could determine and dominate a lifestyle. This would be something of an idealist dogmatism. Reality, richer and more complex, is comprised of all the relations of these lifestyles and of their surroundings. This is the terrain of our present desires, an it is into this terrain that we must intervene.

One last clarification by Constant insisted that he acted from a perspective of realism and practical labor; not from a choice between reform and revolution:

We have no need for a dogmatic conception of revolution because is it "profoundly altered in relation to all these classical schemas."

If André Frankin states that "the proletariat risks disappearing without having made its revolution," I ask why would anyone want to link our activities to a revolution that risks never being made? Why "the interaction" at all costs with a social action that does not exist? The situation in the world, it is true, is revolutionary from any perspective — politically, scientifically and artistically. . . Just as Frankin sees "the essential task of the century" in cultural revolution, I have stated that the current revolution is made by intellectuals and artists. . . The collective creation of a unitary urbanism is based, naturally, on a conception of totality. But if one confuses this with an activity that understands the totality, one supersedes these real powers, and one is condemned to complete inactivity. Unitary urbanism will be at the center of our preoccupations, or it will not exist.

The importance of the divergence — principally on the question of a dialectical relationship between culture and politics or of a subordination of one to the other — and the imminence of the Munich conference, entailed the abandonment of the preliminary publication of the Appeal in this form. This discussion remains significant for judging the problems posed from the outset in situationist action, and the direction of its eventual progress.

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

1

The question of culture, that is to say, in the final analysis, of its integration into everyday life, is integral to the necessity of the overthrow of contemporary society. Making a social and political revolution is not sufficient unless such a transformation is accompanied by a qualitative disruption in culture of the same magnitude as that brought about by the revolutionary creation of socialist society, at a superior stage of a society which is no longer simply the antithesis of capitalist society, but the expression of socialism in its totality.

2

All cultural revolutions of the past were inseparable from the social conditions imposed on artists. Today, capitalism has separated them from culture, substituting what should be the real practice of life with false modes of life and leisure. To this false dichotomy of technology and culture is born a false unitary vision of civilization. The future and the present of every political and social revolution depend above all on the consciousness of this second alienation, more profound and more intractable than economic alienation.

Just as the proletariat risks disappearing without having made its revolution, without having assumed the historical role that Marx had assigned it, the cultural revolution risks becoming more and more dependent on what is conveniently known as "public relations" if it is not assigned above all to the essential revolutionary task of the century: the dissolution of the technological milieu by technology itself.

Frankin's first thesis modifies the second paragraph of the Appeal printed above1 . The second replaces the fifth and sixth paragraphs.

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

• 1https://libcom.org/article/discussion-appeal-revolutionary-artists-and-intellectuals

Since the lettrist experiment of 1953 into the behavioral games permitted by the urban environment of the time, the notion of the conscious construction of ambient surroundings in relation to life and its changing habits has given rise to the idea of unitary urbanism. We speak of urbanism only to the extent that with the concept of conscious creation and its relationship to a superior life, we advocate a definitive break with current notions of urbanism.

If we are going to commit ourselves to the study and practice of a creative change in the urban environment linked to a qualitative change in behavior and way of life, then it is necessary for truly collective creation to be put into place at an artistic level.

Current cultural conditions, the decomposition of the individual arts, and the impossibility of the renewal or the perpetuation of these arts have produced a creative vacuum that can only be favorable to our undertaking. The disappearance of traditional artistic forms and the progressive organization of social life has brought about a increasing lack of ludic possibilities in everyday life. Not only does our refusal of this state of things drive us to seek out new conditions of play, but it obliges us to reconsider every cultural problem in order to finally arrive at a unified theory of the practice of consciously constructing ludic environments.

We are willing to bet that even the most advanced contemporary artists possess nowhere near the creativity required for such ideas, which our collective labor alone is capable of realizing. Only in our perspectives does creation exist.

The idea of a unitary urbanism was generated on the one hand by the experiments into the dérive and psychogeography, invented and practiced by the lettrists; and on the other by the building research undertaken by a few modern architects and sculptors. In both cases, the need to arrive at the organization of complete decors and the integral unity of behavior and surroundings has led to a common action.

In 1958, in a declaration made in Amsterdam, we established a few points in the attempt to define unitary urbanism and our present task in the face of this perspective. This declaration proposed the experimentation with complete decors that should be extended to a unitary urbanism and the investigation into new behavior in relation to these decors as the minimum program of the Situationist International. Thus, according to the Amsterdam Declaration1 , if we have no idea how to realize any practical activity in this area then we should consider the situationist program lacking.

A situationist praxis from the perspective of a unitary urbanism must be our main task and the principal goal of this conference. We cannot give up without collectively examining existing possibilities for practical experiments.

Unitary urbanism, as the Amsterdam Declaration states, can be defined as a complex and permanent activity that consciously recreates the human environment according to the most evolved concepts of all disciplines. This permanent activity must not be carried out in a future more favorable than the present, but should immediately be put in motion by the efficient execution of our program. At present, it is possible distinguish three tasks that we can undertake or that we have already begun:

• Firstly: The creation of environments favorable to the propagation of unitary urbanism. We must rigorously denounce the disappearance of the individual arts and force artists to choose to change their profession;
• Secondly: We must realize a collective creative labor by forming teams and proposing real projects;
• Thirdly: This collective creation must be sustained by the permanent study of the problems that we foresee and the solutions at which we arrive.

The architect, as with other workers in our enterprise, finds himself faced with the necessity of changing his profession: he will no longer construct mere forms but complete environments. What makes the architecture of today so infuriating is its primarily formal preoccupations. Architecture's problem is no longer the opposition between function and expression; this question has been superseded. In all use of existing forms, in the creation of new forms, the architect's principle concern should be the effect that all this has on the behavior and existence of inhabitants. All architecture will therefore be part of a more extended and more complete activity, and finally, like all other arts, architecture will move toward its own disappearance, beneficial to this unitary activity.

The new urbanism will find its first facilitators in the domains of poetry and theater, among plastic artists and architects, in the ranks of urbanists and advanced sociologists. Even in perfect collaboration, however, all these will not be capable of fully realizing our vision. In the end it must be a total effort of everyone alive, for we consider life to be the very material of future creation.

If we propose perspectives as ambitious as these, this is not to say that we limit ourselves to predictions and prophecies. This attitude is the gravest danger we face at the moment, entailing as it does the loss of the practical passage indispensable to our progress.

The life we currently lead should already organize every possible condition for the development and realization of our ideas. Unitary urbanism is not a cultural work but a permanent activity, and this activity began at the very moment that the notion of unitary urbanism was born. Unitary urbanism has been on a course of realization for years. All the thoughts that we have had about it, the dérive experiments and the environmental models have contributed to this from the start. We are going to take the appropriate measures to quicken its pace.

To this end, we have come to an agreement on the founding in Amsterdam of a Bureau of Investigation for a Unitary Urbanism, with the task of the realization of teamwork and the study of practical solutions. This work must be severely distinguished from teamwork as it exists today between individual architects; for us, collective creation is not a simple unity, but an infinite quantity of variable elements. The Bureau of Investigation for a Unitary Urbanism must be the first real step in our elaborate projects, which, at the same time as completely illustrating our ideas, should constitute the micro-elements of what unitary urbanism will become.

The activity of the Bureau can succeed to the degree that it can attract qualified collaborators who understand the spirit of our investigations, and to the degree that it can realize the projects that will be the criteria of the efficiency of our step.

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

• 1https://libcom.org/article/amsterdam-declaration-constant-guy-debord

The Amsterdam Declaration published in our previous number1 has been adopted by the Munich Conference with the following modifications:

The first point should read: 'The Situationists must take every opportunity to oppose ideological systems and retrograde practices, in culture and wherever the question of the meaning of life arises.' (Instead of: 'every opportunity to oppose retrograde ideologies and forces, etc.')

In the third point replace: 'The S.I. cannot justify any attempt to renovate these arts' (individual) with 'The S.I. cannot justify any attempt to practice these arts.' And add the following: 'Unitary creation will entail the authentic accomplishment of the creative individual.'

At the end of the ninth point ('The coordination of artistic and scientific means must lead to their total fusion') add 'Artistic and scientific research must attain total freedom.'

Complete the last sentence of the eleventh point ('...the construction of situations, as play and as seriousness in a freer society') like this: '... the construction of situations as at once play and as seriousness in a freer society.'

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

• 1https://libcom.org/article/amsterdam-declaration-constant-guy-debord

There is no longer any meaning in the search to develop this or that cultural activity if one does not start from a general view extended to the whole of society. This idea, which forms the basis of all theories of the post-War avant-garde, is the characteristic that distinguishes it from the avant-garde of the previous period. Since the war, purely formal researches have ground to a halt and new developments in the style of a given art are no longer produced.

On the contrary, the interest of the individual arts has diminished considerably, the work of art has become degraded into a banal commercial product, and truly all creative activity concentrates on the synthesis and liaison of forces.

The collapse of the dominant culture has become a fact that can be observed everywhere. There is no longer a single thought, gesture or product of existing culture that demonstrates an understanding of our epoch. Culture is reduced to naught! The principles of the COBRA movement have not led to anything either, and the heritage COBRA bequeathed to us at its inglorious death consisted merely in formal variations on individual techniques in decomposition: neo-expressionism in painting and poetry.

Yet memories of the misery of the war, from which this expressionism drew its inspiration, were growing weaker and weaker. A new generation came to the fore. In France the Lettrist International was taking the initiative. In 1955, in Number 22 of Potlatch, it said: "It must be understood that a literary school, a renewal of expression, or modernism, was not what we were about. It's a matter of a way of living that comes through exploration and provisional formulae; that itself only tends to occur in the provisional. The nature of this enterprise means that we work in a group, and that we rarely show ourselves: we expect much of the people and the events to come. We also possess that other great strength of no longer expecting anything of the host of known activities, individuals and institutions. We have to experiment with forms of architecture as well as rules of conduct." ["Why Lettrism?"]

The people from whom the Lettrists expected something began to arrive after 1956. The International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, founded by Jorn and Gallizio to oppose the functionalist Bauhaus in Ulm, organized a congress in Alba. Constant's intervention showed us the way: "For the first time in history, architecture shall become an authentic art of construction. . . . It is in poetry that life will be housed." And the Lettrists' delegate formulated that Congress's conclusion: "The parallel crises that currently affect all modes of creation are determined by a general process, and one can only arrive at the resolution of these crises from within a general perspective. The movement of negation and destruction that has manifested itself with increasing swiftness against all antiquated conditions of artistic activity is irreversible: it is a consequence of the appearance of superior possibilities for action in the world."

A year later the Situationist International was founded at the Cosio d'Arroscia Conference.

The new forces orient themselves toward a complex of human activities that extend beyond utility: leisure, superior games. Contrary to what the functionalists think, culture is situated at the point where usefulness ends. Isn't the absence of culture today felt most distressingly in the misery of televisions and motor scooters? A revolution in life precedes a revolution in art. Unitary urbanism is only realizable using situationist means.

The need is finally seen, in the realization of unitary urbanism, for entirely new methods and techniques to replace existing artistic techniques.

Culture is already so old-fashioned, so backward when compared to the reality of life, that it is not even capable of using the technical inventions man already has at his disposal. Before any advance is possible, the whole arsenal of cultural conventions has to be renewed. One will only accede to this through teamwork.

But above all it is the construction of new situations that is required, the framework of new activities. The construction of situations is the prior condition for the creation of new forms; it is here that today's creators encounter their task.

The primitive conception of current urbanism as the organization of buildings and spaces according to aesthetic and utilitarian principles will of necessity be superseded by a conception of the habitat as a decor for life as a whole, as a collective creative at the level of an authentic art, a complex art of extremely varied means.

The artist today confronts an absolute cultural void: the absence of aesthetics, morality, lifestyle. Everything is to be invented.

Caught in this difficult position, he has one great strength: his acceptance of the transitory, his conception of life founded on the speeding by of time. Our essential need to create will only be satisfied through this new attitude. By renouncing fixed form, we arrive at all forms, which we invent and afterwards reject. It is abundance that will make a culture. This new attitude also implies that we renounce the work of art. It is uninterrupted invention that interests us: invention as a way of life.

The individual arts were tied to an idealist conception, to a seeking after the eternal.

Only urbanism will be able to become that unitary art that responds to the exigencies of dynamic creativity, the creativity of life.

Unitary urbanism will be the ever variable, ever alive, ever actual, ever creative activity of the man of tomorrow.

Everything we do today must be considered in relation to this perspective, and to prepare the path.

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

Last Thursday, the day of the preview of the Paris Biennale, on the little esplanade that separates the two buildings of the Museum of Modern Art, below Avenue de Président-Wilson, a curious machine – a painting machine – shuddered into motion. Set on a tripod with casters, from afar its silhouette appeared strikingly similar to that of a Calder mobile. On closer inspection, however, it consisted of a tangled series of pullies that driving a small motor at top speed. As long roll of paper unravelled itself, convulsing pipes covered it with automatic drips and slashes of ink. The finished product was then sliced into sections by a blade that whirred and sputtered in a chaotic circular movement.
– Jean-François Chabrun (L'Express, 8-10-59)

Colloidal Macromolecules have already made their appearance in the field of art, and although their poet has not yet been found, thousands of artists are busying themselves with the effort to master them.

The great era of resin is inaugurated and with it has commenced the use of matter in motion; the colloidal macromolecule will etch itself profoundly onto the concept of relativity, and the constants of matter will suffer a definitive collapse. Concepts of eternity and immortality will disintegrate, and the woes of eternalization of matter will be reduced ever more to nothing, leaving to the artists of chaos the infinite joy of the "always new."

The novel — conceived amidst the risks of infinite imagination and invention: drawn from the liberated energy that man will harness toward the deconstruction of the gold standard, understood as the congealed energy of the infernal banking system already decomposing.

The patented society, conceived of and based on the simplistic notions, the elementary gestures of artists and scientists reduced in captivity from ants to lice, is about to end. Man is expressing a collective consciousness and wielding a tool adequate to the transformation to a potlatch system of gifts which cannot be purchased if not with other poetic experiences.

The machine may very well be the appropriate instrument for the creation of an industrial-inflationist art, based on the Anti-Patent; the new industrial culture will be strictly "Made Amongst People" or not at all! The time of the Scribes is over.

Only a continual and implacable creation and destruction will result in an anxious and pointless quest for object-things of transitory use, planting mines beneath the foundations of the Economy, destroying its values or impeding their formation; the ever-novel will destroy the boredom and anguish created by man's slavery to the infernal machine, queen of the all-equivalent; the new possibility will create a new world of the total-diverse.

Quantity and quality will be fused; the arising society of the luxury-standard will annihilate traditions.
Proverbs will no longer have meaning.

For example, the proverb, "He who leaves the old path for the new," etc., will be replaced by, "The proverbs of the old starve the young to death."

A new, ravenous force of domination will push men toward an unimaginable epic poetry.

Not even the habit of establishing time will be preserved.

From now on, time will be merely an emotive value, a newly minted coin of shock, and will be based on the sudden changes arising in moments of creative life, and upon rare instants of boredom.

Men without memories will be created; men in a continual violent ecstasy, forever starting at ground zero; a "critical ignorance" will come into being with extensive roots in the long prehistory of savage man, the magus of the caves.

The new magic will have the more recent spice of the sparks of the conflagration of the library of Alexandria which was the synthesis of the Neolithic revolution and which continues in our own times to burn the residue of the urban society of the Sumerians and the nomadism of the Phoenicians, flavoring like a narcotic incense the hopes of man.

So great will be the artistic productions that machines will produce, compliantly bending to our wills, that we will not even be able to fix it in memory; machines will remember for us.

Other machines will intervene to destroy, determining situations of non-value; there will be no more works of the art-champion, but open air ecstatic-artistic exchanges among the people.

The world will be the stage and the by-play of a continuous representation; the new earth will transform itself into an immense Luna Park, creating new emotions and new passions.

The cosmic spectacle offered by humanity will be effectively universal and visible in its total simultaneity at telescopic distance, obliging man to ascend in order to embrace the entire spectacle; the laziest will put their names down in Paradise.

Man is thus launched on the quest of myth.

In the past, the epic was able to create itself on earth; lack of communication, wars, great fears, and the confusion of languages and customs favored in time deformations and distortions of reality; they transformed actions, and synthesized into myth.

Today a myth can only be created with difficulty and when man manages to find himself in special conditions, or launches himself into macrocosm with immense instruments, or descends with minuscule ones into microcosm.

Because of this we must depict the roads of the future with unknowable materials, marking the long path of the Heavens with methods of signing adequate to the grandiosity of our undertakings.

Where today one makes signs with spokes in sodium, tomorrow we will use new rainbows, fatas morganas, aurora borealises that we will construct; the stripteases of the constellations, the rhythmic dances of asteroids and ultrasonic music of thousands of fragmented sounds will supply us with moments worthy of demigods.

For all those things and men already powerful: sooner or later you will give us machines to play with or we will fashion them ourselves to occupy that leisure time which you, with demented voracity, look forward to passing in Banality and in making minds progressively into mush. We will use these machines to draw the highways, to make the most fantastical and unique fabrics in which for a single instant the joyous throngs will dress themselves with an artistic sense.

Kilometers of printed paper, engraved, colored, will sing hymns to the strangest and most zealous follies.

Houses of painted leather, of pottery, lacquered, of metal, of alloys, of resin, of vibrantly colored cements will form on the earth an asymmetrical and continuous moment of shock.

We will fix images at our pleasure with cine-photographic and televisual machines, which the collective genius of the people has created, and which you have until now evilly employed in securing for yourselves an absolute reign of Boredom.

Each person will feel the joy of color, of music; architectonic airs of colored gasses, hot walls of infrareds that provide eternal springtime - we will make it so that man plays from the cradle to the grave, and even death will be nothing but a game.

Colored poetic signs will create emotional moments and give us the infinite joy of the magico-creative-collective moment, on the platform of the new myths and passions.

With automation there will no longer be work in the traditional sense, and there will be no more "after work" time, but a free time to liberate anti-economic energies.

We want to found the first establishment of industrial poetry and from this unimaginable and monstrous birth which machines will grant us, we will create establishments of immediate destruction, to obliterate at once the emotional products already created, so that our brains will be forever immune to plagiarism and will be able to find themselves immediately in the state of grace of ground zero.

A people of artists only can survive guided by its brilliant minority: the creators of belief.

The ancient cultures give us examples of this with their inflation; everything was unique and this immense production was impossible without the inclusion of popular elements dragged along in their works of immense poetry.

Once the poetic font dried up, it was a brief step to the ruin of the Maya, of the Cretans, of the Etruscians, etc.
Today man is a part of the machine he has created and which negates him and by which he is dominated.

We must invert this non-sense or there will be no more creation; we must dominate the machine, force it to make the unique gesture — useless, anti-economic, artistic — in order to create a new anti-economic society, one that is poetic, magical, artistic.

Powerful and symmetrical lords: asymmetry, at the heart of modern biology, is expanding in the artistic and scientific fields, undermining the foundations of your symmetrical world calculated upon the axioms of poetic moments of a long gone past that has arrived at an absolute immobility in the crystalline Boredom of Your devising.

The ultimate modern artistic creations actuated with a magico-prophetic sense have destroyed space; the long kilometric cloths can be translated and measure chronometrically, like films, like cinerama (twenty minutes of painting, thirty, an hour).

Time, the magic box with which men of ancient agrarian cultures would regulate their vital and poetic experiences, has halted and compelled you to change speed.

The instruments which are the basis of your dominion: space and time, will be useless toys in your childish, crooked, paralytic hands.

Useless your idealist constructs of the Superman and of genius; useless your proprieties, your immense urbanistic formations that bore the insomniac nights of aristocratic spirits capable only of limping about empty palaces, like bats and owls in search of the foul foods of artificial paradises.

Useless and vain your centuries of urbanism, because only to you and for you the people have vainly consecrated their best free creative energies, believing you to be the effective representatives of a poetic message. Today anti-matter, the physical anti-world has been discovered and your whole unwieldy dwelling trembles on the precipice.

The anti-man has already appeared in the dramatic scenario of physics. The people will have no use in the future for your purposeless proprieties, which are nothing but vast cemeteries in which you have entombed over the centuries all the pains and the poetry that man has created for you.

New proprieties are required; true nomadism requires scenes for camping, for gypsy caravans, for the weekends.

The return to nature with modern instrumentation will allow man, after thousands of centuries, to return to the places where Paleolithic hunters overcame great fear; modern man will seek to abandon his own, accumulated in the idiocy of progress, on contact with humble things, which nature in her wisdom has conserved as a check on the immense arrogance of the human mind.

Lords already powerful in the East and the West, you have built subterranean cities to protect yourself from the radiation which you have savagely: very well, the ingenious artists will transform your sewers into sanctuaries and into atomic cathedrals tracing with emotional magic the signs of the industrial culture that will swiftly transform into the symbols of the new zodiac, the new calendars of fleeting moments.

New energies gathered from the sensitive minority that the masses will express in extended lethargy will transform your termitai [trans: termites? terminals?] of armored cement into opulent, transmittable and exchangeable moments.

Artists will be the teddy-boys of the old culture: that which you have not already destroyed will be destroyed by them in order that nothing is remembered, since your dullness has come to such a point that it has destroyed the last possibility of rebirth left to you: war.

This was always your last resort, since destruction requires renovation: today your cowardice, your fear has exploded in your hands.

You are indefatigable fabricators of Boredom.

Your progress will sterilize the last of your sensibilities, and nothing, if not your civilization, will help you to gasp the last particles of an infected oxygen, prolonging your agony in the emissions of the machines which you yourselves have overworked and exhausted.

The new decorums, stretching from cloth to dwellings, from means of transport to glasses and plates and lighting fixtures to the experimental cities, will be unique, artistic and unrepeatable.

We will no longer use the term "fixed" but "shifting", seeing that they will be ephemeral instruments of joy and play; in a word, we will return to poverty, extreme poverty but possessed of wealth of spirit in a new way of acting and being.

Possessions will be collective and have a swiftness of self-destruction.

Poetry will no longer be about the senses which we already know, but those which we have yet to know; it will have no more architecture, nor painting, nor words, nor images, but will be without external surfaces and without volume. We are nearing the fourth dimension, nearing pure poetry, magic without a master, but it can only be if it is total, we are near the savage state with a modern sense, with modern instruments: the promised land, paradise, Eden, can be nothing other than to breathe the air, to eat, to touch, to penetrate. To purify one's self in the air in order to create with these new, impalpable proprieties the new passionate and free man, who no longer has time to satiate all his desires and create new ones.

All ideologies, all religions, follow the politics of desire, never satisfying them if not in the hereafter: the result is that today science and art find themselves facing an impenetrable wall of whys.

We want to wipe out the whys for good.

The new prophets have already breached this infinite and sweet wall of new poetry at its foundations.

The man of tomorrow will, guided by these pioneers, tap into the indestructible nectar which flows from it.

The entire new human way of being and acting will be a game, and man will live all his life for play, preoccupying himself with nothing but the indulgence of emotions arising from the play of his desires.

The first rudimentary tools of this revolution are, in our opinion, artistic-industrial and devaluating, simply because these are above all instruments of joy: and so this is why in proposing our minor results, like industrial painting, we feel arrogantly certain that our hopes are good, judging from the spreading enthusiasm with which they have been received.

Industrial painting is the first attempted success in playing with machines, and the result has been the devaluing of the work of art.

When thousands of painters who today labor at the non-sense of detail will have the possibilities which machines offer, there will be no more giant stamps, called paintings to satisfy the investment of value, but thousands of kilometers of fabric offered in the streets, in markets, for barter, allowing millions of people to enjoy them and exciting the experience of arrangement.

It will be the triumph of great numbers moved by quality, which will establish unknown values, and the speed of exchange will determine a new identity: Value will become identical to Exchange.

It will be the end of all speculation.

The great game began at Turin in 1958, continued in Milan and Venice, was reconfirmed in Monaco in 59 where the Congress of Situationists established that the ten points of the Amsterdam Declaration1 were the fruit of a silent but effective premise for a unitary-urbanism.

The subsequent Exhibition of Paris, where environmental construction was successfully demonstrated, the emotion of an instant, demonstrated how cultural unity is the only idea capable of dominating the machine.

We are poor and it doesn't matter, our poverty is our strength.

Its useless for us to stew in our own juices, they will be able to exclude us from their Exhibitions, they will be able to silence us, insult us, humiliate us.

The people have already understood our poetry and already the tribulation of the new poetic moment beats anxiously in the heart of the throngs bored with the exhausted idols fabricated by the hypocritical and self-interested fornication of phantom powers of the earth and their impoverished and miserable artists, snarlingly superintended by all the wheels of the human automatic mechanism of thought and of technology and of the most impotent race on the globe: the intellectuals.

Thus begin the long days of atomic creation.

Now it is the turn of we artists, scientists, poets to create the earth anew, the oceans, the animals, the sun and the other stars, the air, the water, and the things.

And it will be our turn to breathe life into clay to create the new man fit to rest on the seventh day.

Pinot-Gallizio's manifesto was published in Italy in November under the title Per un arte unitaria applicabile.

Translated by Molly Klein. Text from: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/industrial.html

• 1https://libcom.org/article/amsterdam-declaration-constant-guy-debord

1

A mistake made by all the city planners is to consider the private automobile (and its by-products, such as the motorcycle) as essentially a means of transportation. In reality, it is the most notable material symbol of the notion of happiness that developed capitalism tends to spread throughout the society. The automobile is at the center of this general propaganda, both as supreme good of an alienated life and as essential product of the capitalist market: It is generally being said this year that American economic prosperity is soon going to depend on the success of the slogan "Two cars per family."

2

Commuting time, as Le Corbusier rightly noted, is a surplus labor which correspondingly reduces the amount of "free" time.

3

We must replace travel as an adjunct to work with travel as a pleasure.

4

To want to redesign architecture to accord with the needs of the present massive and parasitical existence of private automobiles reflects the most unrealistic misapprehension of where the real problems lie. Instead, architecture must be transformed to accord with the whole development of the society, criticizing all the transitory values linked to obsolete forms of social relationships (in the first rank of which is the family).

5

Even if, during a transitional period, we temporarily accept a rigid division between work zones and residence zones, we must at least envisage a third sphere: that of life itself (the sphere of freedom and leisure -- the essence of life). Unitary urbanism acknowledges no boundaries; it aims to form an integrated human milieu in which separations such as work/leisure or public/private will finally be dissolved. But before this is possible, the minimum action of unitary urbanism is to extend the terrain of play to all desirable constructions. This terrain will be at the level of complexity of an old city.

6

It is not a matter of opposing the automobile as an evil in itself. It is its extreme concentration in the cities that has led to the negation of its function. Urbanism should certainly not ignore the automobile, but even less should it accept it as its central theme. It should reckon on gradually phasing it out. In any case, we can envision the banning of auto traffic from the central areas of certain new complexes, as well as from a few old cities.

7

Those who believe that the automobile is eternal are not thinking, even from a strictly technological standpoint, of other future forms of transportation. For example, certain models of one-man helicopters currently being tested by the US Army will probably have spread to the general public within twenty years.

8

The breaking up of the dialectic of the human milieu in favor of automobiles (the projected freeways in Paris will entail the demolition of thousands of houses and apartments although the housing crisis is continually worsening) masks its irrationality under pseudopractical justifications. But it is practically necessary only in the context of a specific social set-up. Those who believe that the particulars of the problem are permanent want in fact to believe in the permanence of the present society.

9

Revolutionary urbanists will not limit their concern to the circulation of things, or to the circulation of human beings trapped in a world of things. They will try to break these topological chains, paving the way with their experiments for a human journey through authentic life.

GUY DEBORD (1959)

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

The crisis in urbanism is worsening. The construction of neighborhoods, ancient and modern, is in obvious disagreement with established forms of behavior and even more so with the new forms of life that we are seeking. The result is a dismal and sterile ambiance in our surroundings.

In the older neighborhoods, the streets have degenerated into freeways, leisure activities are commercialized and denatured by tourism. Social relations become impossible there. The newly-constructed neighborhoods have but two motifs, which dominate everything: driving by car and comfort at home. They are the abject expression of bourgeois well-being, and all ludic preoccupations are absent from them.

Neighborhood in a traditional town. A quasi-social space: the street. Logically built for traffic, the streets are only marginally used as a meeting place.

Faced with the necessity of building whole towns quickly, cemeteries of reinforced concrete — in which great masses of the population are condemned to die of boredom — are being constructed. So what use are the extraordinary technical inventions the world now has at its disposal, if the conditions are lacking to profit from them, if they add nothing to leisure, if imagination is wanting?

We crave adventure. Not finding it on earth, some men have gone to seek it on the moon. We prefer to wager on a change on earth. We propose creating situations, new situations, here. We count on infringing the laws that hinder the development of effective activities in life and in culture. We are at the dawn of a new era and are already attempting to sketch out the image of a happier life, of unitary urbanism (the urbanism intended to bring pleasure).

Our domain, then, is the urban nexus, the natural expression of collective creativity, capable of subsuming the creative energies that are liberated with the decline of the culture based on individualism. We are of the opinion that the traditional arts will not be able to play a role in the creation of the new ambiance in which we want to live.

Green city. Isolated housing units, maximum social space: meetings only occur by chance and individually, in corridors or in the park. Traffic dominates everything.

We are in the process of inventing new techniques; we are examining the possibilities existing cities offer; we are making models and plans for future cities. We are conscious of the need to avail ourselves of all new inventions, and we know that the future constructions we envisage will need to be extremely supple in order to respond to a dynamic conception of life, which means creating our own surroundings in direct relation to incessantly changing ways of behavior.

Our conception of urbanism is therefore social. We are opposed to all the conceptions of a ville verte, a "green town" where well-spaced and isolated skyscrapers must necessarily reduce the direct relations and common action of men. Conurbation is indispensable for the direct relation of surroundings and behavior to be produced. Those who think that the rapidity of our movements and the possibilities of telecommunications are going to erode the shared life of the conurbations are ignorant of the real needs of man. To the idea of the ville verte, which most modern architects have adopted, we oppose the image of the covered town, in which the plan of roads and separate buildings has given way to a continuous spatial construction, disengaged from the ground, and included in which will be groups of dwellings as well as public spaces (permitting changes in use according to the needs of the moment). Since all traffic, in the functional sense of the term, will pass below or on the terraces above, the street is done away with. The large number of different traversable spaces of which the town is composed form a complex and enormous space. Far from a return to nature, to the idea of living in a park as individual aristocrats once did, we see in such immense constructions the possibility of overcoming nature and of submitting the climate, light and sounds in these different spaces to our control.

Principle of a covered city. Spatial "plan." Suspended collective housing, extended over the whole down and separate from traffic, which passes beneath or above.

Do we intend this to be a new functionalism, which will give greater prominence the idealized utilitarian life? It should not be forgotten that, once the functions are established, play will succeed them. For a long time now, architecture has been a playing with space and ambiance. The ville verte lacks ambiances. We, on the contrary, want to make more conscious use of ambiances; and so they correspond to all our needs.

The future cities we envisage will offer an original variety of sensations in this domain, and unforeseen games will become possible through the inventive use of material conditions, like the conditioning of air, sound and light. Urbanists are already studying the possibility of harmonizing the cacophony that reigns in contemporary cities. It will not take long to encounter there a new domain for creation, just as in many other problems that will present themselves. The space voyages that are being announced could influence this development, since the bases that will be established on other planets will immediately pose the problem of sheltered cities, and will perhaps provide the pattern for our study of a future urbanism.

The levels of the city

Above all, however, the reduction in the work necessary for production, through extended automation, will create a need for leisure, a diversity of behavior and a change in the nature of the latter, which will of necessity lead to a new conception of the collective habitat with a maximum of space, contrary to the conception of a ville verte where social space is reduced to a minimum. The city of the future must be conceived as a continuous construction on pillars, or, rather, as an extended system of different structures from which are suspended premises for housing, amusement, etc., and premises destined for production and distribution, leaving the ground free for the circulation of traffic and for public messages. The use of ultra-light and insulating materials, which are being experimented with today, will permit the construction to be light and its supports well-spaced. In this way, one will be able to create a town on many levels: lower level, ground level, different floors, terraces, of a size that can vary between an actual neighborhood and a metropolis. It should be noted that in such a city the built surface will be 100% of that available and the free surface will be 200% (parterre and terraces), while in traditional towns the figures are some 80% and 20%, respectively; and that in the ville verte this relation can even be reversed. The terraces form an open-air terrain that extends over the whole surface of the city, and which can be sports fields, airplane and helicopter landing-strips, and for the maintenance of vegetation. They will be accessible everywhere by stair and elevator. The different floors will be divided into neighboring and communicating spaces, artificially conditioned, which will offer the possibility of create an infinite variety of ambiances, facilitating the dérive of the inhabitants and their frequent chance encounters. The ambiances will be regularly and consciously changed, with the aid of every technical means, by teams of specialized creators who, hence, will be professional situationists.

An in-depth study of the means of creating ambiances, and the latter's psychological influence, is one of the tasks we are currently undertaking. Studies concerning the technical realization of the load-bearing structures and their aesthetic is the specific task of plastic artists and engineers. The contribution of the latter is an urgent necessity for making progress in the preparatory work we are undertaking.

If the project we have just traced out in bold strokes risks being taken for a fantastic dream, we insist on the fact that it is feasible from the technical point of view and that it is desirable from the human point of view. The increasing dissatisfaction that dominates the whole of humanity will arrive at a point at which we will all be forced to execute projects whose means we possess, and which will contribute to the realization of a richer and more fulfilled life.

Cross section of the covered city

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

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.

The conditions of the SI’s activity explain both its discipline and the forms of hostility it encounters. The SI is not interested in finding a niche within the present artistic establishment, but in undermining it. The situationists are in the catacombs of visible culture.

Anyone who is at all familiar with the social milieu of those with special status in cultural affairs is well aware of how everyone there despises and is bored by almost everyone else. This fact is not even hidden, they are all quite aware of it; it is even the first thing they talk about whenever they get together. What is the cause of their resignation? Clearly the fact that they are incapable of being bearers of a collective project. Each one recognizes in the others his own insignificance and his own conditioning — the resignation he has had to accept in order to participate in this separate milieu and its established aims.

Within such a community people have neither the need nor the objective possibility for any sort of collective discipline. Everyone always politely agrees about the same things and nothing ever changes. Personal or ideological disagreements remain secondary in comparison with what they have in common. But for the SI and the struggle it sets for itself, exclusion is a possible and necessary weapon.

It is the only weapon of any group based on complete freedom of individuals. None of us likes to control or judge; if we do so it is for a practical purpose, not as a moral punishment. The “terrorism” of the SI’s exclusions can in no way be compared to the same practices in political movements by power-wielding bureaucracies. It is, on the contrary, the extreme ambiguity of the situation of artists, who are constantly tempted to integrate themselves into the modest sphere of social power reserved for them, that makes some discipline necessary in order to clearly define an incorruptible platform. Otherwise there would be a rapid and irremediable osmosis between this platform and the dominant cultural milieu because of the number of people going back and forth. It seems to us that the question of a present-day cultural avant-garde can only be posed at an integral level, a level not only of collective works but of collectively interacting problems.

This is why certain people have been excluded from the SI. Some of them have rejoined the world they previously fought; others merely console themselves in a pathetic community with each other, although they have nothing in common but the fact that we broke with them — often for opposite reasons. Others retain a certain dignity in isolation, and we have been in a good position to recognize their talents. Do we think that in leaving the SI they have ceased being avant-garde? Yes, we do. There is, for the moment, no other organization constituted for a task of this scope.

The sentimental objections to these breaks seem to us to reflect the greatest mystification. The entire socioeconomic structure tends to make the past dominate the present, to freeze living persons, to reify them as commodities. A sentimental world in which the same sorts of tastes and relations are constantly repeated is the direct product of the economic and social world in which gestures must be repeated every day in the slavery of capitalist production. The taste for false novelty reflects its unhappy nostalgia.

The violent reactions against the SI, especially those coming from people who were previously excluded from its collective activity, are first of all a measure of the personal passion that this enterprise has been able to bring into play. Reversed into a boundless hostility, this passion has spread it about that we are loafers, Stalinists, imposters and a hundred other clever characterizations. One person claimed that the SI was a cunningly organized economic association for dealing in modern art. Others have suggested that it was rather for the purpose of dealing in drugs. Still others have declared that we have never sold any drugs since we have too great a propensity for taking them ourselves. Others go into detail about our sexual vices. Others have gotten so carried away as to denounce us as social climbers.

These attacks have long been whispered around us by the same people who publicly pretend to be unaware of our existence. But this silence is now beginning to be broken more and more frequently by sharp public critiques. The recent special issue of Poésie Nouvelle, for example, mixes several accusations of the above sort with two or three possibly sincere misunderstandings. These people characterize us as “vitalists,” despite the fact that we have made the most radical critique of the poverty of all presently permitted life; and they are so completely caught up in the world of the spectacle that when they try to relate our notion of a “situation” to something they are familiar with, they can only imagine that it must refer to some form of theatrical presentation. Last June these same neo-lettrists put on an exhibition of “supertemporal” art calling for audience participation, and wanted to include in it the SI’s antiart, particularly some of Asger Jorn’s détourned paintings. This would have amounted to putting our antiart in the context of their metaphysical system of permanent, signed spectacles, thereby attributing the ridiculous ambitions of the official art of the last century to a total attack on art itself.

Certain expressions of critical art now being used by the situationist current could be considered part of the general cultural disintegration. Not only détourned painting, but a film like Critique of Separation, for example, or the “scenic unity” evoked elsewhere in the present issue of Internationale Situationniste. The difference is that our actions within culture are all linked to the project of overthrowing this culture itself, and to the formation and development of a new organized situationist instrumentation.

Strange emissaries journey across Europe and beyond, meeting each other, bearing incredible instructions.

To the question, Why have we promoted such an impassioned regrouping in this cultural sphere whose present reality we reject? the answer is: Because culture is the center of meaning of a society without meaning. This empty culture is at the heart of an empty existence, and the reinvention of a project of transforming the world as a whole must also and first of all be posed on this terrain. To give up demanding power in culture would be to leave that power to those who now possess it.

We are quite aware that the culture to be overthrown will really fall only with the totality of the socioeconomic structure that supports it. But without waiting any longer, the Situationist International intends to confront it in its entirety, on every front, to the point of imposing an autonomous situationist control and instrumentation against those held by existing cultural authorities; that is, to the point of a state of dual power in culture.

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