Photographs of SI journal.

Online archive of English translations of Internationale Situationniste, aka International Situationist: the journal of the Situationist International.

Submitted by libcom on December 17, 2005

The Situationist International (SI) produced the journal Internationale Situationniste between 1958 and 1969. It functioned as the movement’s main organ, and over 12 issues its pages documented the evolution of Situationist theory, the members’ thoughts on everyday life, and the internal/external dramas of the group.

Comments

Juan Conatz

13 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Juan Conatz on June 3, 2012

Looking over these, they could use additional tags on specific articles, with pictures and descriptions. I'll periodically do this.

Steven.

13 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Steven. on June 4, 2012

Excellent, thanks! These were all copied across early on en masse before we were that tight with tagging/formatting

Fozzie

2 years 7 months ago

Submitted by Fozzie on November 17, 2022

I’ve added the “publications” tag which was scandalously omitted.

This site appears to have English translations of the complete contents of each issue.

https://isinenglish.com/about/

So that would be good to have here.

Fozzie

2 years 7 months ago

Submitted by Fozzie on November 18, 2022

Seems so - I think it’s just the texts from the SI Anthology so far. But there are more at that link.

Fozzie

2 years 5 months ago

Submitted by Fozzie on January 21, 2023

“As an interesting corollary to the many purges, Raspaud and Voyer have compiled an index of those who were insulted in the pages of IS. They number 540, but Raspaud and Voyer add the consoling statistic that a further 400 persons were mentioned in the magazine without insult.

The terminology of S.I. abuse has a certain curiosity value. At the bottom of the scale are the routine expressions of disapproval which come most easily to hand: ‘braggart’, ‘cheat’, ‘cretin’, ‘hypocrite’, ‘idiot’, ‘impostor’, ‘liar’, ‘mafioso’, ‘nonentity’, ‘pimp’, ‘scoundrel’, ‘traitor’, ‘upstart’. Next comes a more precise group of epithets: ‘anti-Semite’, ‘deist’, ‘lapassadist’, ‘mentally deficient Buddhist’, ‘militarist’, ‘mythomaniac’, ‘necrophage’, ‘plagiarist’, ‘royalist’.

Political invective also has its scale, from the simple to the more complex, starting with ‘argumentist’, ‘confusionist’, ‘integrationist’, ‘reformist’, ‘Trotskyist’ and proceeding to more sophisticated aberrations such as ‘anarcho- Maoist’, ‘anti-Boumediennist’, ‘Bourguibist’, ‘sub-Leninist’, ‘stalino- surrealist’.

At the very top there are maledictions which reach poetic heights: ‘coagulated undertaker’s mute’, ‘monogamous police hound’.

The lavish nature of all this surrealist abuse leads one to think that either the libel laws must be rather lenient in France or else that the magazine did not circulate very widely among the 540 insultees.”

From “Asger Jorn - The Crucial Years 1954-1964”

Steven.

2 years 5 months ago

Submitted by Steven. on January 21, 2023

It is fantastic that somebody spent the time indexing all of the insults

Fozzie

2 years 2 months ago

Submitted by Fozzie on April 24, 2023

So I think that is pretty much all of the easy to find English translations added now. There may be the odd small one missing here or there. And it seems that there are a handful of articles yet to be translated too.

It's has been a wild ride going through it all...

Submitted by Steven. on April 24, 2023

Fozzie wrote: So I think that is pretty much all of the easy to find English translations added now. There may be the odd small one missing here or there. And it seems that there are a handful of articles yet to be translated too.

It's has been a wild ride going through it all...

That is amazing! You must have read a lot of quite inventive and obscure insults over the past couple of months!

Cover of Internationale Situationiste #1

First issue of the journal of the Situationist International. Published June 1958.

Submitted by libcom on September 8, 2005

As a rule, this bulletin is edited collectively. The various articles written and signed individually must also be considered of interest to all of our comrades, and as particular points of their common research. We are opposed to the survival of such forms as the literary review or art journal.

All texts published in Internationale Situationniste may be freely reproduced, translated and adapted, even without indication of origin.

YOUNG GUYS, YOUNG GIRLS

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

Comments

A surrealist photo collage of several hands appearing out of a rocky landscape. The sky is occupied by a human eye.

Situationist International critique of the Surrealists, from International Situationniste #1.

Submitted by Fozzie on November 22, 2022

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)

Comments

John Arden
John Arden

An article on the emerging youth culture in the late 1950s that expressed some disillusionment with society.

Submitted by libcom on September 9, 2005

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).

Comments

A short text from Internationale Situationniste #1.

Submitted by Fozzie on November 23, 2022

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”)

Comments

A cartoon showing adults interacting with children - Reinforcement and Punishment

Text on psychological manipulation and influence from International Situationniste #1.

Submitted by Fozzie on November 24, 2022

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”

Comments

Cinema audience

Short situationist text on cinema, from Internationale Situationniste #1.

Submitted by Fozzie on November 25, 2022

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.

Comments

A photo of two boys playing football in front a "No Ball Games" sign.

A short text from Internationale Situationniste #1.

Submitted by Fozzie on November 26, 2022

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.

Comments

Preliminary Problems in Constructing a Situation

Submitted by libcom on September 9, 2005

"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).

Comments

Submitted by libcom on September 9, 2005

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

Comments

Extracts of maps in black are joined by red arrows. "Everyone will live in their own cathedral..."

One of the key texts of psychogeography, composed by Ivan Chtcheglov under the pseudonym Gilles Ivain when he was 19 years old. It was orginally an internal document adopted by the Lettrist International in October 1953, then published in International Situationniste #1.

Submitted by Fozzie on November 27, 2022

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”

Attachments

Comments

“Thèses sur la révolution culturelle” originally appeared in Internationale Situationniste #1 (Paris, June 1958). This translation by Ken Knabb is from the Situationist International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition, 2006). No copyright.

Author
Submitted by Fozzie on November 28, 2022

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

Comments

Asger Jorn on automation in modern society.

Author
Submitted by libcom on September 8, 2005

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

Comments

Submitted by libcom on September 9, 2005

"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).

Comments

BNB

16 years 5 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by BNB on January 25, 2009

better translation, full version

http://www.notbored.org/no-useless-indulgences.html

A short round up of Situationist publications from International Situationniste #1.

Submitted by Fozzie on November 29, 2022

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.

Comments

A very brief summary of the event, from Internationale Situationniste #1 (June 1958)

Submitted by Fozzie on November 30, 2022

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.

Comments

Ralph Rumney

A humourous short text on Rumney's failed attempt to produce a psychogeographical report on the city of Venice.

Submitted by Fozzie on December 1, 2022

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.

Attachments

Comments

Fozzie

2 years 7 months ago

Submitted by Fozzie on December 1, 2022

Yeah I assume that is covered in future issues, so watch this space ;-)

Steven.

2 years 7 months ago

Submitted by Steven. on December 1, 2022

Ha ha, I will await the 60+ year old gossip eagerly

The text of a leaflet distributed by the Situationists at a gathering of art critics.

Submitted by libcom on September 8, 2005

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).

Comments

A text on the May 1958 crisis in France and the Algerian war of independence.

Submitted by Fozzie on December 2, 2022

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.

Comments

Steven.

2 years 7 months ago

Submitted by Steven. on December 2, 2022

Thanks for this! I have merged and then deleted the duplicate France tag

Fozzie

2 years 7 months ago

Submitted by Fozzie on December 2, 2022

Ah nice one. I meant to do that and then forgot! There were two Vaneigem tags also - now one.

Steven.

2 years 7 months ago

Submitted by Steven. on December 3, 2022

Excellent, cheers

shamass

2 years ago

Submitted by shamass on July 6, 2023

Vaneigem did not write this article. He would not join the group for another 2 and a bit years. This attribution appears to be a mistake of the translator, Ruben Keehen (for instance, you will find it on his translation here: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/civilwar.html). If you check the original publication of this it is clear that it was published under the name of the Situationist International, not any one person.

Submitted by Fozzie on July 6, 2023

shamass wrote: Vaneigem did not write this article. He would not join the group for another 2 and a bit years. This attribution appears to be a mistake of the translator, Ruben Keehen (for instance, you will find it on his translation here: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/civilwar.html). If you check the original publication of this it is clear that it was published under the name of the Situationist International, not any one person.

Thanks for pointing this out, you are right and I have corrected.

Internationale Situationniste 2 cover - silver foil and black text

Issue two of the journal of the Situationist International, published December 1958.

Submitted by libcom on September 8, 2005

central bulletin published by the sections of the situationist international
December 1958
Director: Debord
Mail: 32, rue de la Montagne-Geneviève, Paris 5e
Editorial Committee: Mohamed Dahou, Asger Jorn, Maurice Wyckaert.

As a rule, this bulletin is edited collectively. The various articles written and signed individually must also be considered of interest to all of our comrades, and as particular points of their common research. We are opposed to the survival of such forms as the literary review or art journal.

All texts published in Internationale Situationniste may be freely reproduced, translated and adapted, even without indication of origin.

Comments

Benjamin Peret a photo of Benjamin Peret in a group of people. The photo is tinted purple except his face which is black and white.

The Situationist International responds to some criticism by surrealist poet Benjamin Péret in characteristically acerbic style.

From Internationale Situationniste #2 (December 1959)

Submitted by Fozzie on December 3, 2022

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.

Comments

A painting by Asger Jorn from his time in the Cobra group

The Situationist International is unimpressed with the relaunch of the European avant garde group Cobra.

From Internationale Situationniste #2 (December 1958)

Submitted by Fozzie on December 3, 2022

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

Comments

a black and white photograph of John Cage facing away from the camera in a garden

SI critique of several contemporary avant garde artists including John Cage. From International Situationniste #2 (December 1958)

Submitted by Fozzie on December 5, 2022

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

Comments

Critique of French intellectuals in the aftermath of the May 1958 crisis, including Edgar Morin and Socialisme ou Barberie.

From Internationale Situationniste #2 (December 1958)

Submitted by Fozzie on December 6, 2022

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

Comments

From Internationale Situationniste #2 (December 1958).

Submitted by Fozzie on December 7, 2022

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

Comments

General updates including the exclusions of W. Korun and Ralph Rumney. From Internationale Situationniste #2 (December 1958)

Submitted by Fozzie on December 8, 2022

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)

. . . 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

. . . 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]

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.

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

Comments

PLAN #2: LES HALLES INTERNAL CURRENTS AND EXTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS

From Internationale Situationniste #2 (December 1958). Les Halles was Paris' central fresh food market.

Submitted by Fozzie on December 12, 2022

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

Attachments

Comments

A photographi of a market, a child looks at the camera

Internationale Situationniste #2 (December 1958)

Submitted by Fozzie on December 12, 2022
  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

Comments

Debord on drifting, psychogeography etc.

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

Author
Submitted by libcom on September 8, 2005

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.)

Comments

A 1958 sculpture by Constant. A black wire sprial / spiders web effect.

Constant Nieuwenhuys critiques some texts by Asger Jorn on art and machines. From Internationale Situationniste #2 (December 1958)

Submitted by Fozzie on December 13, 2022

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

Attachments

Comments

A painting produced on a roll of canvas by a machine.

Updates from Internationale Situationniste #2: "machine-painting" and art vandalism in Italy, Asger Jorn refused entry to America, The Amsterdam Declaration by Debord and Constant.

Submitted by Fozzie on December 13, 2022

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

Comments

An account of a confrontation between surrealists and situationists from Internationale Situationniste #2, December 1958.

Submitted by Fozzie on December 14, 2022

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.

Comments

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

Submitted by Fozzie on January 4, 2023
  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

Comments

Cover of Internationale Situationiste #3

Issue three of the journal of the Situationist International, published December 1959.

Submitted by libcom on September 8, 2005

From Internationale Situationniste #3 (December 1959).

Submitted by Fozzie on December 28, 2022

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

Comments

Hiroshima mon amour film poster

The situationists on Alain Resnais and his film Hiroshima mon amour. From Internationale Situationniste #3 (December 1959).

Submitted by Fozzie on December 29, 2022

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

Comments

Submitted by libcom on September 8, 2005

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).

Comments

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

The situationist case for Unitary Urbanism. From Internationale Situationniste #3 (December 1959).

Submitted by Fozzie on January 3, 2023


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

Attachments

Comments

The usual updates, mudslinging and exclusions from Internationale Situationniste #3 (December 1959).

Submitted by Fozzie on January 3, 2023

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

Comments

A black and white photo of situationists sitting around a large table with papers in front of them

A report from Internationale Situationniste #3 (December 1959)

Submitted by Fozzie on January 4, 2023

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

Comments

From Internationale Situationniste #3 (December 1959).

Submitted by Fozzie on January 4, 2023

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

Comments

A brief statement on culture, from Internationale Situationniste #3 (December 1959)

Submitted by Fozzie on January 5, 2023

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

Comments

SI-munich.png

Constant Nieuwenhuys on unitary urbanism, from Internationale Situationniste #3 (December 1959)

Submitted by Fozzie on January 5, 2023

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

Comments

Some brief amendments to a previous SI document, from International Situationniste #3 (December 1959).

Submitted by Fozzie on January 6, 2023

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

Comments

From left to right: Har Oudejans, Constant, Guy Debord, Armando. Not present: A. Alberts

From Internationale Situationniste #3 (December 1959).

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

Comments

Two men examines rolls of painted canvas generated by the industrial painting method

A manifesto on industrial (or automated) painting, from Internationale Situationniste #3 (December 1959).

Submitted by Fozzie on January 10, 2023

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

Comments

A colour photograph of cars and bicycles driving in front of the Arc de Triomphe

Debord on traffic.

Author
Submitted by libcom on September 8, 2005

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).

Comments

From Internationale Situationniste #3 (December 1959).

Submitted by Fozzie on January 10, 2023

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

Attachments

Comments

cover of IS4

Issue four of the journal of the Situationist International, published June 1960.

Submitted by libcom on September 8, 2005

central bulletin published by the sections of the situationist international
June 1960
Director: G.-E. Debord
Mail: 32, rue de la Montagne-Geneviève, Paris 5e
Editorial Committee: Constant, Asger Jorn, Helmut Sturm, Maurice Wyckaert.
All texts published in Internationale Situationniste may be freely reproduced, translated or adapted, even without indication of origin.

Comments

Pond boats, Jardin des Tuileries, Paris, 1968.

From Internationale Situationniste #4 (June 1960)

Submitted by Fozzie on January 11, 2023


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

Attachments

Comments

A labyrinth

On the difficulties with a situationist installation at the Stedilijk Museum in Amsterdam. From Internationale Situationniste #4 (January 1960).

Submitted by Fozzie on January 12, 2023

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

Attachments

Comments

From Internationale Situationniste #4 (June 1960).

Submitted by Fozzie on January 13, 2023

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

Comments

The SI on Henri Lefebvre, etc. From Internationale Situationniste #4 (June 1960).

Submitted by Fozzie on January 13, 2023

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

Comments

A black and white photo of the Dutch church designed by Alberts and Oudejans at Volendam, which led to their expulsion from the SI

The usual updates, including the exclusion of architects Alberts and Oudejans of the Dutch section for participating in the construction of a church. From Internationale Situationniste #4 (June 1960).

Submitted by Fozzie on January 16, 2023

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.

Comments

"NO FUTURE - Maximum Penalty £5 - Sex Pistols"

Frankin sets out the concept of "No Future" and others. From Internationale Situationniste #4 (June 1960)

Submitted by Fozzie on January 16, 2023

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

Comments

A rural landscape is foregrounded by two very simple/childish figures

Jorn on art, value and the realisation of humanity. From Internationale Situationniste #4 (June 1960).

Author
Submitted by Fozzie on January 17, 2023

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

Comments

A street scene - a newspaper seller is asleep on a chair whilst a young woman walks by. Bicycles are propped up against a concrete pillar onto which billposters are affixed with hebrew writing

A view from Israel, "a country in the making". From: Internationale Situationniste #4 (June 1960).

Submitted by Fozzie on January 17, 2023

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

Comments

westartfromhere

1 year 4 months ago

Submitted by westartfromhere on March 5, 2024

All lies, but this one stands out:

The new industries established since the proclamation of the State of Israel have given birth to a proletariat...

In fact:

The 1936 general strike was the culmination of three years of intense class struggle against the landowners: British, Zionist and Palestinian. The ports and Haifa oil refinery were paralysed for six months. The world bourgeoisie was alarmed: the British state sent 30,000 troops to crush the struggle. It armed and organised local Zionist settlers and jointly they set about terrorising the working class into submission. Meanwhile Zionists organised Jewish labour to break the strikes. The local Arab bourgeoisie of Jordan and Iraq appealed to the working class to surrender. When they did not the struggle was finally suppressed by the execution of 5,000 strikers and the arrest of 6,000 by a combined effort of British, Arab and Zionist armies.

By the look of the social-democratic pretence at protest in Tel Aviv the "robotic proletariat" has been reduced to an handful of paid provocateurs.

General plan of the yellow zone

From Internationale Situationniste #4 (June 1960).

Submitted by Fozzie on January 18, 2023

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

Attachments

Comments

Yesterday I told you I'd discovered the secret of eternal youth... But I was wrong — I got the cultures mixed up. Everything is as it was before, and I even wonder if it might be going against the laws of nature to want to prevent man from losing his youth...

Jorn on the methodology of Lettrist Isidore Isou. From Internationale Situationniste #4 (June 1960)

Author
Submitted by Fozzie on January 18, 2023

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

Attachments

Comments

Gangland and Philosophy - Attila Kotányi

Submitted by libcom on September 8, 2005

"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.

Comments

Published 17 May 1960, reprinted in Internationale Situationniste #4 (June 1960)

Submitted by libcom on September 8, 2005

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.

Comments

Cover of Internationale Situationiste #5

English translations of the central bulletin published by the sections of the situationist international

December 1960

Director: G.-E. Debord

Mail: 32, rue de la Montagne-Geneviève, Paris 5e

This bulletin is edited by the Central Council of the SI: Debord, Jorn, Kotányi, Nash, Sturm, Wyckaert.

All texts published in Internationale Situationniste may be freely reproduced, translated or adapted, even without indication of origin.

Submitted by libcom on September 8, 2005

From Internationale Situationniste #5 (December 1960).

Submitted by libcom on September 8, 2005

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

Comments

Manifesto signed in by French intellectuals writers and artists concerning the right to civil disobedience...

The SI on the "Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War". From Internationale Situationniste #5 (December 1960).

Submitted by Fozzie on January 25, 2023

"The undersigned, considering that each person must take a position concerning the acts that are henceforth impossible to present as the diverse deeds of individual adventures; considering that they themselves, in their places and according to their means, have the duty to intervene, not to give advice to the men who have personally decided to face such serious problems, but to ask those who judge them to not let themselves be equivocal in their words and values, declare:

"-- We respect and judge to be justified the refusal to take up arms against the Algerian people.

"-- We respect and judge to be justified the conduct of the French people who estimate it to be their duty to bring aid and protection to the oppressed Algerians in the name of the French people.

"-- The cause of the Algerian people, which contributes in a decisive fashion to the ruin of the colonial system, is the cause of all free people."

Such are the conclusions of a Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War, signed by 121 artists and intellectuals, which was published at the beginning of September [1960]. Due to actions soon thereafter taken and the first indictments made, during the course of September, 60 or 70 people1 added their names to the first list; some of these people were known to be quite far from any political radicalism. To break the movement, the government did not hesitate to resort to exceptional sanctions, announced on 28 September. While civil servants (generally in education) were suspended, all of the signatories were banned from [French] radio-television, their very names could no longer be mentioned on it, and rejected from the subsidized theaters and films normally registered by the National Center for Cinema. In addition, at this date, the maximum penalties relative to the offense recognized in this text were raised from several months to several years in prison. By taking these measures, the government admitted that it could only contain the extension of the scandal through the means of an open war against all cultural freedoms in the country. These extreme actions, moreover, appeared to have little pay-off, since more than 60 [more] names were added to the prohibited declaration after the 28th -- which adds up to at least 254 signatures -- [and] since the indictments were only handed down with great slowness.

The effect of the "Declaration of the 121," thanks to the publicity that the repression assured it in France and abroad, has been far from negligible. One saw the sheltered French intelligentsia count on a noble manifesto that summoned power to strike quickly and strongly2 against the anti-France; the sacred newspaper of the intellectual Poujade3 stigmatized (eight columns to one) "the manifesto of the pederasts"; and some old specialists of the total questioning of several "perspectives" promptly questioned themselves about their own participation in this excess and immediately did their best to divert the signatories towards a respectful petition, through which the Federation of National Education made it known that it desires that the way be ended through negotiation (one thinks here particularly of E. Morin and C. Lefort).4

In the cultural stratum, the merit of this declaration is having drawn a very clear line of separation. The signatories did not at all represent a political avant-garde, nor a coherent programme, nor even an assembly in which -- beyond this gesture -- one could approve of the majority of the individuals. But all those who, in these circumstances, have not wanted to take sides concerning the joint cause of the Algerians' liberty and [that of] the indicted intellectuals have, on the contrary, counter-signed the confession that all of their pretenses to prowl around the vicinity of any "avant-gardism" must now be greeted with laughter and scorn. Thus one is hardly surprised at having hardly seen involved in such drudgery the cretins who, several months ago, organized an anti-trial, in which their sole idea -- so as to compensate for their hideous artistic, social and intellectual deficiencies -- was that one must reject any judgment so that liberty is truly defended. Faithful to themselves, they have not judged that there was some liberty to defend in the case of the 121.

Politically, this declaration was not without use in the relative awakening of French public opinion over the last three months. The evening of 27 October, despite the dazzling sabotage by the Communists5 and the brakes applied by all of the bureaucratic unions, the youth -- college students, especially -- led the first street demonstration against the war. After years of mystifications and resignation, a certain awakening is taking place.

On 11 December, the Algerian Revolution6 -- with the intervention of the masses in the streets of Algers and Oran -- made the people who are the most resolved to be deaf hear that it was indeed "the cause of the Algerian people" as a whole. The scandal is no longer expressed by a tract written by intellectuals, but by the blood of the unarmed crowds, which still addresses itself, finally to the proletariat of France, the intervention of which can only end the war quickly and properly.

Translated from the French by NOT BORED! July 2007. Footnotes by the translator.

  • 1Including Guy Debord and Michele Bernstein.
  • 2Rather than be "equivocal."
  • 3Pierre Poujade (1920-2003), a right-wing publisher and politician.
  • 4Edgar Morin and Claude Lefort, former members of Socialisme ou Barbarie.
  • 5The French Communist Party.
  • 6Not just Algerian independence from France, but Algeria's independence from the global capitalist order.

Comments

A black and white photo of Situationists sitting and standing in front of a cinema projection

From Internationale Situationniste #5 (December 1960).

Submitted by Fozzie on January 19, 2023

One knows what the SI isn't; what terrain it elects not to occupy any longer (or only in a marginal way, in its struggles against all existing conditions). It is more difficult to say where the SI is headed, to positively characterize the situationist project. Nevertheless, one can delineate, albeit fragmentarily, certain provisional positions along its way.

Unlike the hierarchical bodies of specialists that increasingly make up the bureaucracies, the armies and even the political parties of the modern world, the SI, it will one day be seen, evinces itself as the purest form of an anti-hierarchical body of anti-specialists.

Situationist critique and construction concerns, at every level, the use value of life. Just as our conception of urbanism is a critique of urbanism; just as our experience of leisure is in fact a refusal of leisure (in the dominant sense of separation and passivity); our designation of everyday life as our field of action means a critique of everyday life, one that will have to be "radical critique accomplished, and no longer advocated or indicated" (Frankin, Programmatic Sketches), since this practical critique of everyday life must veer toward its sublation into the "everyday that has become impossible."

We do not claim to have invented extraordinary ideas within modern culture, but rather to have begun to draw attention to how extraordinary the nothingness of modern culture is. Specialists in cultural production are the ones who resign themselves most easily to their separation, and thus to their deficiency. But it is the whole of present society that cannot avoid the problem of the recuperation of its countless alienated, uncontrolled capabilities.

Abundance, as human becoming, could not be abundance of objects, even of "cultural" objects of the past or created on that model, but abundance of situations (of life, of the dimensions of life). Within the current framework of consumerist propaganda, the fundamental mystification of advertising is to associate ideas of fulfillment with objects (televisions, or garden furniture, or automobiles, etc.) and furthermore by destroying the natural link these objects may have with other objects, so as to have them above all become a material environment with "status." This imposed image of fulfillment also constitutes the explicitly terrorist nature of advertizing. Nevertheless, "fulfillment" (the moment of happiness) depends upon a global reality that involves nothing less than people in a given situation: living persons and the moment that gives them light and direction (their margin of possibility). In advertizing, objects are treated as embodying passion in a passionate way ("how changed your life will be when you own a marvelous car like this"). But anything that would be worthier of interest cannot be treated without endangering the condition of the whole: when advertizing busies itself with a real passion, this means only the advertizing of a spectacle.

The architecture still to be made must keep its distance from preoccupations with the spectacular beauty of the old monumental architecture, and must privilege topological organizations that command general participation. We will play on topophobia and create a topophilia. The situationist considers his environment and himself as plastic entities.

The new architecture shall undertake its first practical exercises with the detournment of once well-defined affective blocks of ambiance (the castle, for example). The use of detournement, in architecture as in the constructing of situations, signifies the reinvestment of products abstracted from the ends contemporary socio-economic organization gives them, and a break with the formalist wish to abstractly create the unknown. This means liberating existing desires at once, and deploying them within the new dimensions of an unknown actualization.

This is how researches toward a direct art of situations have recently and, no doubt, considerably advanced with the first outline of a basic notation of the lines of force of events within a projected situation. It is a matter of schemas, of equations in which the participants can choose which unknowns they are going to play, seriously, without spectators, and with no other goal than this game. Here, assuredly, is a prototype weapon that is effective in the struggle against alienation, useful in any event for breaking with the sad convention of libertinage; here is a first step forward along the Fourierist path of the "routes to fulfillment." It must be added that we do not affirm any desirable form or give any guarantee of fulfillment, and that these more or less precise and complete schemas can only serve as starting points, opened up by a calculated arrangement of events, for making a leap into the unknown. These schemas are, morover, an application of the situationist principle of the catapult, observed during the course of the derive of 29-31 May in Brussels and Amsterdam.

In this case, the experiment revealed that an extreme acceleration of the traversal of social space, organized temporarily and under utilitarian pretexts, has the effect of suddenly launching the subjects, at the moment the acceleration ceases, into a derive that can proceed at faster, newly-acquired speeds. Obviously the fact should not be overlooked that any experiment that may be set up on a restricted basis, despite its informational and propagandanist value — being only at the laboratory stage, at an infinitesimal point of social totality — will exhibit not only a difference in scale but also a difference in kind in relation to the future construction of life. But this laboratory is heir to all the creations of an exhausted cultural sphere, and it opens the way to their practical supersession.

Here, then, are the latest advance-posts of culture. Beyond them begins the conquest of everyday life.

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

Comments

The usual updates, including the resignation of Constant and exclusions of Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio and Giors Melanotte (pseudonym of Giorgio Gallizio - son of Giuseppe). From Internationale Situationniste #5 (December 1960).

Submitted by Fozzie on January 25, 2023

The first issue of the magazine Spur (the trail), organ of the German section of the S.I., was published in Munich in August 1960, opening with a translation of the Situationist manifesto of the 17th of May [1960]. The second issue, published in November, is mostly devoted to rendering an account of the Conference in London.

Pinot-Gallizio and G. Melanotte were excluded from the S.I. in June [1960]. Through naivety or opportunism [arrivisme], they made contacts, then developed collaborations, in Italy, with unacceptable ideological milieus. An initial criticism (cf. Situationist News in our 4th issue in regards to the critique of Guasco, notoriously tied to the Jesuit Tapié) had not corrected their politics. The decision to exclude them has thus been taken without hearing more [from] them.

Constant, however, who had rightly denounced their conduct, was not happy with this break. He deplored, moreover, that we had to resort to the same measure some months before against the architects of the Dutch section, who had had no fear of undertaking the construction of a church. More profoundly, Constant found himself in opposition to the S.I. because he has been primarily concerned, almost exclusively, with structural questions of certain assemblies [architectural models] of unitary urbanism, so that other situationists had to recall that at the present stage of the project it was necessary to put the accent on its content (play, free creation of everyday life). Thus Constant’s theses promoted the technicians of architectural forms over any search for a global culture. And the simple equality of treatment, regarding the minimum required behaviour toward each other, appeared to him already disproportionate and severe. Thus Constant declared, in the same month of June, that because he disagreed with the discipline of the S.I., he wanted to regain his freedom in this regard, for a period that the course of the events would determine.

We replied, without any idea of hostility or demerit, that for a long time we have assured that breaks recorded by the S.I. have the meaning of a practical weapon, [and] allowed only the immediate choice between a definitive resignation or the renunciation of this form of pressure. Constant chose to quit the S.I.

In June, the first issue of the journal Cahier pour un paysage à inventer1 was published in Montréal. This first issue brings together around ten articles reproduced from the Internationale situationniste with texts by Patrick Straram, who is the editor, and some of his Canadian comrades. This is the first publication which openly manifests the extension of situationist propaganda onto the American continent.

Christian Christensen, to whom Jorn dedicated his Critique of Political Economy, died on the 10th of June 1960, in Denmark.

On the 20th of July a document drawn up by P. Canjuers2 and Debord on capitalism and culture was published, in France: Preliminaries Toward Defining a Unitary Revolutionary Program. It is a platform for discussion in the S.I.; and for linking with the revolutionary militants of the workers’ movement.

The museum of Silkeborg in Jutland [in Demark], which has found itself already to be the principal museum of modern art in all the Scandinavian countries, has just founded a Situationist Library. This library is itself subdivided into a pre-situationist section, bringing together all the supporting materials on the avant-garde movements since 1945, which held some role in the preparation of the situationist movement; a situationist section—properly so called—composing all the publications of the S.I.; a historical section destined to receive works on the S.I. and which, in fact, for now, accommodates only anti-situationist propaganda which has started to appear here and there. Finally—and this is probably its most interesting initiative—this library opened a section of imitations where will be kept all works imitating the achievements of any of our friends whose strange role in contemporary art is clearly not readily acknowledged, precisely because of membership in the S.I. The available diagrams indicate with scientific certainty the release dates of the [original] model and of its after-effects, which have often been almost immediate. Thus very far from the miserable discussions between “avant-gardists”, in which the situationists have never wanted to participate, the library of Silkeborg will objectively supply a yardstick of the cultural avant-garde. We do not doubt that, in the coming years, many specialist historians from Europe and America, and ultimately from Asia and Africa, will make the journey to Silkeborg with the sole end of completing and checking their research at this “Pavilion of Breteuil” of a new genre.

And we hope that the intelligent plan, elaborated by the museum of Silkeborg, to complete this library with a cinematographic annex, in which copies of any relevant film will be deposited, soon finds all the material means for its realisation.

At the beginning of September [1960], the S.I. received the request from the German group Radama to collectively join us by sending one or more representatives to the Conference in London, which was to meet on the 24th of this month. After hearing a report on this question, asked for from the German section, the S.I. concluded that it was not acceptable to recognise in Germany a second situationist formation independent from its first section, with a program more or less different and unknown; and this group unilaterally decided that these differences were small enough in order to join the S.I., but great enough to remain organised as a distinct group on the national level. This group was thus told that it would not be invited to the conference; and that its members could eventually join the S.I. only by means of individual membership to our German section. With the exception of one of them, who in no way may be considered because of his previous personal positions.3

Informed of the arrest of Alexander Trocchi in New York—considered a gangster simply because the police found him carrying three kinds of narcotics—the London Conference immediately adopted on the 27th September [1960] a resolution in his favour, which was read the following day before a public meeting at the Institute of Contemporary Art.

In execution of the mandate given to them by the Conference, three situationists signed a tract distributed on the 7th October: Hands of Alexander Trocchi.4 This text, moderate enough to be signed by those people capable of defending the freedom of artists—in the absence of more—is indeed deliberately placed on merely artistic grounds, in order to serve in this specific legal case. And it notes that this artistic status cannot be denied Alexander Trocchi “for the sole reason that he represents a new type of artist,” like all the Situationists. Besides them, this appeal has already brought together 81 names of artists, writers or critics of many countries (Great Britain, Germany, France, Holland, Belgium, Sweden, Israel, Denmark, Canada and the Unites States). So far only two individuals have dared to say they judge him as too compromised. Many people, who have still not communicated their response, will certainly have the opportunity of making it known before too long. We will publish here shortly the results of this affair, as well as all the details and useful commentaries on the positions taken by all sorts.

Interrogated on the 21st of November, in Paris, by the judicial police, for his participation in the “Declaration of the 121”, Debord responded that he immediately signed [as soon as] it had been given to him, which it turns out was not before the 29th of September, therefore on the day following the publication of the ordnances by which the Gaullist government, excessively increasing the legal sanctions incurred, challenged those who condemned it to dare to speak. Because no one had furnished him with the opportunity, he had not participated in the publication or distribution of this text. However, as the current statement seemed to be trying to isolate a small number of signatories more responsible than the others, he was obliged to add to his testimony that, due to the sole fact of having signed the aforementioned Declaration, he assumed complete responsibility for its publication and distribution, “equal to that of any one of its signatories, regardless of the personal responsibility that he wants to acknowledge”.5

The Central Council of the S.I., whose form and composition was decided by the London Conference, held its first session in Belgium, near Brussels, between the 4th and 6th of November.6 The Council deliberated on the undertaking of a campaign in favour of Alexander Trocchi; the conditions of the activity of Situationists in Germany (the beginning of a repression in favour of moral order which had already succeeded in condemning the student Döhl for blasphemous writing) and France; our relations with revolutionary political tendencies; the preparations for our intervention against U.N.E.S.C.O. (the publication of a questionnaire to serve in the recruitment of new members); and the publication in 1961 of a Situationist journal in English: The Situationist Times.

The Council made several important decisions concerning the organization, legal and practical, of our projected construction in urbanism. It also studied some forms of control, by the Situationists, of the atmosphere and events in isolated micro-societies.

Finally, the Council has decided to take advantage, without delay, of progress made by the S.I. and the support that it has begun to gain, to make an example of the most representative tendencies of the pseudo-leftist and conformist intelligentsia who have painstakingly organised so far the silence around us; and whose resignation in all fields begins to appear before the eyes of informed people: [i.e.,] the French journal Arguments. The Council has decided that all people who collaborate with the journal Arguments starting from January 1st, 1961, cannot be admitted under any circumstances, now or in the future, among the Situationists. The announcement of this boycott draws its force from the importance that we know the S.I. secures at least in the culture of the years ahead. Interested parties can bet, on the contrary, on the dubious company it will attract.

Specifically, this Edgar Morin, director of Arguments, begins to perceive that he is the butt of public contempt (which the Situationists come to officially affirm has been expressed spontaneously by many people solicited to participate in the current issue of Arguments; but discretely, which risks harming the soundness of the boycott which we imposed). After trying to meet with several Situationists—who refused without comment, or responded that he was much too late—[Morin] works to spread a smoke screen over his case. While he is obviously completely condemned for the pitiful evolution of the ex-revolutionary journal which he directs; for his complicity with the Royalist and anti-Semite Georges Mathieu (see the stupid issue no. 19 on “Art in question”); and for his crude sabotage of the movement of signatures which concerns the “Declaration of the 121” fought at this time with the great resources of the Gaullist power (cf. his article in the Observateur on the 29th September); the Morin in question spreads the rumour—always by word of mouth—that Situationists everywhere have accused him of having plagiarised an experimental film made by one of them in 1959, and only shown in France, in another film which he worked on this year.7 This rumour is absolutely false; and all the more so as anyone in the S.I., where one is habituated enough to being copied on a number of available details, has never found [it] useful to make declarations about it, even on the most striking of occasions. A Situationist (Asger Jorn) simply formulated one time the suspicion of imitation in this instance, speaking to a third person who had inaccurately warned him of the cinematographic occupations of the shady Morin. The hypothesis of Jorn’s is amply explained by what he knows of the bad faith and the impoverished hostility of this character. Besides, if Morin had to make a film, given his artistic imbecility, it would have been necessary that he copied someone, consciously or not. But this year, no problem: it was Jean Rouch who made the film.[8] 8 And Morin, obviously a specialist of distraction, has only spoken of this [in order] to use the only talent that everyone is forced to recognize in him.

Translated from the French by Anthony Hayes, with help from NOT BORED!, October 2012. A section of this Situationist News, specifically the section on the exclusion of Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio and Giors Melanotte and the resignation of Constant Nieuwenhuis, was previously translated by Tom McDonough and published in the situationists and the city, Verso 2009, pp. 137-38. Text from https://thesinisterquarter.wordpress.com/2012/10/02/situationist-news-december-1960/

  • 1Notebook for a Journey to be Invented.
  • 2Pierre Canjuers was the pseudonym of Daniel Blanchard, member of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group.
  • 3It is clear that the person referred to here, the ‘one of them, who in no way may be considered because of his previous personal positions’, is Erwin Eisch. Erwin Eisch, along with Gretel Stadler and Max Strack set up the Radama group in Germany in 1960. Eisch had been a founding member of the SPUR group in 1957. According to Raspaud’s and Voyer’s 1972 book, l’internationale situationniste: chronologie, bibliographie, protagonistes (avec un index des noms insultés), Eisch was excluded from the SI in February 1962 along with other members of SPUR. However this is false. In a letter to Heimred Prem of the SPUR group, Guy Debord wrote: ‘I understand that [Erwin] Eisch is no longer with the Spur group. At this moment, you are the only representatives of the SI in Germany and, if Eisch has been separated from you, he can no longer be counted as a situationist; and the SI is no longer interested in him.’ (Letter from Guy Debord to Heimrad Prem, 26 July 1960). Just over two weeks later, in a letter to the SPUR group, Guy Debord wrote further on Eisch: ‘It is good that [Erwin] Eisch is no longer with you because, if he is now a slightly modernist version of old monuments to dead heroes, he doesn’t deal a blow to cultural conformism: conformism deals a blow to the avant-garde that takes Eisch into its camp. The dominant conformism of today no longer believes in the Hitlerian style of art. It annexes Eisch, who immediately sells off the subversive reputation that he has obtained by participating in our scandals’ (Letter from Guy Debord to Hans-Peter Zimmer and the Spur Group, 8 August 1960). Debord’s criticism of Eisch was elaborated further in an article against so-called ‘neo’ avant-gardists in the August 1961 issue of the SI’s journal. The article, Once Again, on Decomposition, briefly described a stunt carried out by the Radama group without mentioning either the group’s name or its central figure (i.e. Eisch): ‘In Munich, in January [1961], a group of painters inspired by Max Strack arranged simultaneously for the biography, as sentimental as could be wished, and the exhibition of the complete oeuvre of Bolus Krim, a young Abstract Expressionist painter prematurely deceased — and just as imaginary. Television and the press, including almost all the German weeklies, expressed their enthusiasm for so representative a genius, until the hoax was proclaimed, leading some to call for legal proceedings against the tricksters.’ Clearly Eisch is beyond the pale. However the article is far more interesting for its elaboration of the theory of ‘cultural decomposition.’ The Radama group’s stunt is used to illustrate the SI’s criticism of the pseudo nature of the so-called ‘neo’ Dadaists and avant-gardists of the 1950s and 60s: ‘The truth is that even when they exhibit a certain sense of humour, all these inventors get quite excited, with an air of discovering the destruction of art, the reduction of a whole culture to onomatopoeia and silence like an unknown phenomenon, a new idea, and which was only waiting for them to come along. They all dig up corpses to kill them again, in a cultural no-man’s-land beyond which they can imagine nothing. Yet they are precisely the artists of today, though without seeing how. They truly express our time of obsolete ideas solemnly proclaimed to be new, the time of planned incoherence, isolation and deafness assured by the means of mass communication, higher forms of illiteracy taught in the university, scientifically guaranteed lies, and overwhelming technical power at the disposal of ruling mental incompetence.’
  • 4This title is in English in the original.
  • 5For more on the SI’s relations with the “Declaration of the 121,” see also the article The Minute of Truth in the same issue.
  • 6For more on the new Central Council see the SI’s The Fourth SI Conference in London in the same issue.
  • 7The reference to the film made by a Situationist in 1959 is Debord’s Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps, first shown on the 31st of December, 1959.
  • 8The film is Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a summer), filmed by Morin, Rouch and others in the summer of 1960, first shown in October 1961.

Comments

Fozzie

2 years 5 months ago

Submitted by Fozzie on January 25, 2023

exclusions of Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio and Giors Melanotte (pseudonym of Giorgio Gallizio - son of Giuseppe).

Being in the Situationist International with your Dad is pretty wild.

Steven.

2 years 5 months ago

Submitted by Steven. on January 26, 2023

Ha so I guess even the SI had its nepo babies

situationist cartoon

From Internationale Situationniste #5 (December 1960).

Submitted by Fozzie on January 26, 2023

Translator's note: 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! Draft 0.2 (revised 5 August 2013)

Germany

“The members of the Munich group (“Spur”) follow the current of the Situationist International (leader: A. Jorn) … While Courageous in words, their progress is slowed, handicapped by their cumbersome mentality. Desires; ability : what a contrast! ”

Vernissage, October 1960.

“But what do these young Samsons intend to take the place of the corrupt order they wish to tear down? Here they look to the Situationists, a movement to which they belong. They cite the manifesto of May 17, 1960 … This is evidently some form of international group, which held a Congress (naturally an international one) in 1959. So, what is it?

“Artists,” the manifesto says, “have been completely separated from society, just as they are separated from each other by competition.” Well said! And here, our Situationists have discovered the origin of the greatest ills. In it’s place, Guy Debord and his friends imagine the creation of a “situationist culture,” which would require a “general participation” of everyone. In place of preserved objects, art would be “in community with the directly lived moment” – a universal and anonymous creation. This would imply, we suspect, “a revolution of behaviour” … There are actually many signs of growing dissatisfaction, a “crisis of culture”.

But the goals of these rebels are not so different from those of others. Before declaring the monochrome to be an unproductive polemic – are they not themselves polemicists? – the partisans of “Spur” should study the theatre of Gelsenkirchen, and the manifestos of Yves Klein. The “gouvernement de la sensibilité” is not as far away as they think from their own “situationist culture.” Only it was devised with much more precision. ”

John Anthony Thwaites, “Furious Pioneers”
(Deutsche Zeitung, 23-9-60).

“To break the impasse, this young group sees only one alternative: to renounce painting as an individualist art in favour of it’s use in a new “situationist” setting. What a monstrous word! Such manifestos are interesting as symptoms of anxiety and discomfort, they can also contain elements of the truth, but the authors are so attached to their ideas and slogans that the truth escapes them. ”

Fritz Nemitz
(Die Kultur, October 1960).

France

“In addition to the achievements of their “critical” aesthetic, the protagonists of this movement have considered in their theory a third horizon, in which painting seeks to transcend itself – where it acknowledges that it is outdated and and should be replaced by a universal, more concrete art. Doesn’t the development of technology, in effect, create new structural possibilities, not simply imaged, but practically realisable in the form of new situations? Their direct relationship with action shows that the old, seemingly lost, sense of immediacy is still there in spirit.”

François Choay.
(Arguments, No. 19, October 1960).

“Cultural research (into material and artistic forms, philosophical mechanisms and scientific truths about man and nature) involves a long and patient effort, and any break with this concept can only signal a return to barbarism …

“However, some intellectuals who are unable to integrate their vague and distorted vision – contradicted by experience – into culture, prefer to reject the culture itself rather than review their concepts or review themselves … The Situationists, who claim (in the name of working towards the society of the future) to break with the elements of culture, go so far as to reject them in order to substitute brutally “vitalist” values. Values which are sub-cultural, not even Marxist, but worse, troglodyte.

“I say worse, because here we go beyond the basest Marxism to approach outright fascism – the reaction (repeated under various pretexts) that we have known ever since Caliph Omar and the total destruction of the Library of Alexandria, right up to cultural destuction of Goering. Intending to increase its power in society, the Situationist International, like other “neo” proletarian or nationalist groups can try at times to stifle (from the outside) the natural growth of the culture, but in the end the research of those who respect knowledge will reject and punish these ignorant reactionaries, as it has rejected and punished others in the past.

“And when I consider how many offences there have been over the years as striking as Nazism, Communism or, on a smaller scale, the expression of the Situationists – which have unnecessarily destroyed so much energy – I understand why some want me to commit myself to applying some of my resources to reveal these deceptions. ”

Poésie Nouvelle, Special Issue on the SI (N° 13, October 1960).
Found in Paris, 13, rue de Mulhouse.

“Megalomaniac egotism, in the relationships between artists. leads to a thirst to overtake all others while taking care not to push yourself too hard.

As I have written and said.”

Robert Estivals, “Letter to Debord on the consequences
of megalomania …” (Grammes, No. 5).

Canada

“Well, No! I refuse to assume that there is deep thinking behind hollow words and the use of expressions without knowledge of their exact meaning … It is really necessary [to stand up when someone] kills the French language as blithely and with such assurance.

It will nevertheless one day end, with these pseudo-intellectuals of a false avant-garde who are still to show ”their wee-wee”. When one embarks on a Critique for a Construction of Situation, one is in danger of going too far, especially with a helmsman like Patrick Straram who publishes texts rejected elsewhere without asking if his little writings were rejected not because of their courage, but simply because they are insignificant and pitiful.”

Jean-Guy Pilon (Liberté 60, n° 9-10, été 1960).

“I stumble over a vocabulary at the same time scatty and already sclerotic, which still fails in any renewal of the commonplace. I note, once again, this more or less conscious desire for the intellectual safety of another scholastic system – which has the same freshness and spontaneity of terminology and context as medieval thought. ”

Clément Lockquell (Le Devoir de Montréal, 16-7-60).

“I cannot say how disappointed I was. The tone of it, the words used, call for an entire scenario to be reinvented. And this Situationist International, which calls itself an “International”… Life is too cruel for us to take it seriously. Surrealism was true, Situationism remains a construction of some cultivated minds … But we must speak clearly. Henault, Miron, Portugais, Lapointe, Dubé speak clearly. But they don’t seem to be Situationists and are in appendices to Patrick Straram’s book. We learn to separate our own personal and sexual problems from those of other people. To prefer the people … say it all, but speak clearly. Only then will we invent the scenario in which others are able to live. Our children for example.”

Jacques Godbout (Liberté 60, n° 9-10).

Translated by Ian Thompson (July 2013). From https://isinenglish.com/2013/07/13/430/

Comments

A black and white photo of Trocchi and the text of the resolution

From Internationale Situationniste #5 (December 1960).

Submitted by Fozzie on January 19, 2023

The delegates to the fourth conference of the Situationist International, being informed of the arrest in the United States of their friend Alexander Trocchi, and of his charge of use of, and traffic in drugs, declare that the Situationist International retains full confidence in Alexander Trocchi.

The conference DECLARES that Trocchi could not have, in any case, traffic in drugs; this is clearly a police provocation by which the situationists will not allow themselves to be intimidated;

AFFIRMS that drug taking is without importance;

APPOINTS Asger Jorn, Jacqueline de Jong and Guy Debord to take immediate action on behalf of Alexander Trocchi and to report upon such action to the Situationist International at the earliest moment;

CALLS in particular upon the cultural authorities of Britain and on all British intellectuals who value liberty to demand the setting free of Alexander Trocchi, who is beyond all doubt England's most intelligent creative artist today.

London, 27th September 1960

Libcom note: This appeared in English in the original.

Comments

The SI outside the British Sailors Society in 1960

From International Situationniste #5 (December 1960).

Submitted by libcom on September 8, 2005

The 4th conference of the Situationist International was held in London, at a secret address in the East End, 24-28 September 1960, seventeen months after the Munich Conference (April 1959). The situationists assembled in London were: Debord, Jacqueline de Jong, Jorn, Kotányi, Katja Lindell, Jörgen Nash, Prem, Sturm, Maurice Wyckaert and H.P. Zimmer. In fact, to ensure that the proceedings were kept well away from any contact with London journalists or artistic circles, the conference took place at the British Sailors Society hall in Limehouse, "an area famous for its criminals" (Spur #2).

The first session began on 25 September with a debate on the adoption of an order of the day on seventeen integral points, the discussion of three of which was postponed and rescheduled for a later SI debate. Asger Jorn acts as this session's chairman, a function he performs for the remainder of the conference.

The conference then hears a report by Attila Kotányi; it lasts a only few minutes but is followed by two days of discussion. For Kotányi, the SI is characterized primarily by the appropriation of resources for contructing fields of encounter. Commenting on the definitions he has proposed, he shows that the philosophical concept of dialogue and the encounter as alienation and tragedy, as attempted communication filtered negatively through its means, is an insufficient critique because "we know that, for very different reasons, these encounters don't produce themselves." The role of the void, of lost time, in possible displacements can be calculated statistically.

The lack of encounters is expressible by a concrete figure, which could characterize the historical state of the world . . . Following this analysis, our activity must undertake a practical critique of the reasons why there are no encounters (independent of any "progress" of the means of communication, for example); create bases (situationist "castles") representing an accumulation of the elements of the encounter and the dérive: more concretely, buildings of our own; and facilitate communication — permanent or otherwise — between these bases. This is the minimum requirement for the construction of situations.

Kotànyi proposes that this plan be considered within definite limits, and thus the limits of time: a planning of the time necessary for the installation of this basic network that subordinates other situationist instruments, including the devices of its propaganda and its publications.


"We are in on the greatest secret of all. We should give word to Professor Oglianof to avoid any panic."

The discussion of these perspectives leads to posing the question: “To what extent is the SI a political movement?” Various responses state that the SI is political, but not in the ordinary sense. The discussion becomes somewhat confused. Debord proposes, in order to clearly bring out the opinion of the Conference, that each person respond in writing to a questionnaire asking if he considers that there are “forces in the society that the SI can count on? What forces? In what conditions?” This questionnaire is agreed upon and filled out. The first responses express the view that the purpose of the SI is to establish a program of overall liberation and to act in accord with other forces on a social scale. (Kotányi: “To rely on what we call free.” Jorn: “We are against specialization and rationalization, but not against them as means. . . . Movements of social groups are determined by the character of their desires. We can accept other social movements only to the extent that they are moving in our direction. We are the new revolution . . . we should act with other organizations that seek the same path.”) The session is then adjourned.

At the beginning of the second session, on September 26, Heimrad Prem reads a declaration of the German section in response to the questionnaire. This very long declaration attacks the tendency in the responses read the day before to count on the existence of a revolutionary proletariat, for the signers strongly doubt the revolutionary capacities of the workers against the bureaucratic institutions that have dominated their movement. The German section considers that the SI should prepare to realize its program on its own by mobilizing the avant-garde artists, who are placed by the present society in intolerable conditions and can count only on themselves to take over the weapons of conditioning. Debord responds with a sharp critique of these positions.

An evening session returns to the examination of the German declaration. Nash speaks against it by affirming the SI's capacity to act immediately when it comes to social and political organizations. He recommends systematically organizing infiltration by clandestine situationist elements into such groups wherever it would be useful. Nash's proposal is approved in principle by everyone, with a few circumstantial reservations. The debate on the German positions, however, does not end there, returning to its nucleus: the hypothesis of the satisfied worker. Kotányi reminds the German delegates that even if since 1945 they have seen apparently passive and satisfied workers in Germany and legal strikes organized with music to divert union members, in other advanced capitalist countries “wildcat” strikes have multiplied. He adds that in his opinion they vastly underestimate the German workers themselves. Jorn responds to Prem, who has made a distinction between spiritual and material questions, that this distinction to be done away with, that it is necessary "for material values to regain a 'spiritual' importance, and for the value of spiritual capacities to be increased only through their materialization; in other words, it is necessary for the world to become artistic in the sense defined by the SI." In order to simplify the discussion, which is becoming obscure, and complicated further by certain translations (the dominant language at the conference is German), Jacqueline de Jong requests that every participant declare whether or not they approve of Jorn's statement. All are in favor of it. Debord proposes that the majority openly declare that it rejects the German theses. It is agreed that the two tendencies separately decide on their positions. The German minority withdraws to an adjoining room to deliberate. When they return Zimmer announces, in the name of his group, that they retract the preceding declaration, not because they think it unimportant, but in order not to impede present situationist activity. He concludes:

We declare that we are in complete agreement with all the acts already done by the SI, with or without us, and with those that will be done in the foreseeable future. We are also in agreement with all the ideas published by the SI. We consider the question debated today as secondary in relation to the SI’s overall development, and propose to reserve further discussion of it for the future.

Everyone agrees to this. Kotányi and Debord, however, ask that it be noted in the minutes that they do not consider that the question discussed today is secondary. The German situationists agree to delete their reference to it as such. The session is adjourned, very late at night.


While the conference proceeds... "Come in 3-12, do you read me? Come in 3-12" ... "Hey! Pay Attention!"

The fourth session, on the 27th, adopts a resolution on the imprisonment of Alexander Trocchi; and decides on what attitude to take the following night toward the Institute of Contemporary Arts, where Wyckaert is to make a public declaration in the Conference's name. Everyone is of the opinion that this circle of modernist aesthetes should be treated with contempt. With regard to the Manifesto of 17 May, approved by all, Jorn stresses that for us, "the liquidation of the world of privation, in all its forms" means that the end of privation also involves the freedom to deprive oneself, to refuse every obligatory comfort, no matter what; failing which, the disappearance of privation will introduce a new alienation.

The Conference decides to re-organize the SI by instituting a Central Council that will meet in different European cities at six to eight week intervals. Any member of the SI can participate in the affairs of this Council, which must communicate related information and decisions made to everyone immediately after each meeting; but the essential feature of this institution is that a majority of its members — named by each Conference — may make decisions on behalf of the entire organization. The federative concept of an SI founded on national autonomy, established by the influence of the Italian section at the time of the group's founding in Cosio d'Arroscia, is thus abandoned. The clarity of discussions on the SI's direction within such an organism seems preferable to the arbitrariness of an unchecked de facto centralism — inevitable in such a geographically widespread movement — as it leads to real collective action. Every year, the SI Conference, which remains the movement's highest authority, must gather all situationists together and, insofar as this is not realizable in practice, it is decided that, as soon as possible, those absent should either submit a precise mandate to the conference in writing, or nominate another situationist to represent them by proxy. Theoretical debates will usually be dealt with at the Conference, while the Council's primary role should be to ensure the development of the SI's powers. Between Conferences, however, the Central Council does have the right to admit a new section into the SI, and in this case, can invite a delegate of this section to become a Council member.

The first Council, chosen by the London Conference, is composed of members of the old Editorial Committee of the SI bulletin, plus Nash, unanimously named to represent the Scandinavian countries, and Kotányi, invited to occupy the place left vacant by the resignation of Constant.

The session concludes with the choice of where to hold the next conference. Several proposals are turned down, with the vote settled as between Berlin and Gotëborg, in Sweden. Gotëborg is the favorite.
On 28 September, the fifth session adopts a Declaration on Insanity, presented by the German section, which asserts:

As long as society as a whole is insane . . . we will by all means oppose the definition of insanity and the consequences that it may entail for members of the SI. With modern psychiatry's criteria for reason and madness being based, in the final analysis, on social success, we refuse absolutely the definition of insanity when it comes to any modern artist.

The conference adopts a resolution transferring the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism to Brussels, with Attila Kotányi named as director.

Kotányi then declares that he will concern himself with the legislative control of urbanism: "All that is currently built is built not on the ground, but on the law," and failing that, never progresses beyond the stage of maquettes. Jorn talks about establishing a new geometry, for there is an obvious relationship between Euclidian geometry and current legislation. The session ends with a few practical decisions, notably concerning the takeover of UNESCO.

At the Institute of Contemporary Arts the same evening, Maurice Wyckaert closed the conference by reading an official declaration which was, in this instance, not followed by a discussion. As Jorn pointed out to the audience, "the discussion lasted four days; everything is now clear and we are all agreed." Furthermore, the first translation made by the ICA for the evening was found to be so bad, its meaning altered so much that the situationists refused to take the floor until a completely satisfactory translation had been provided. As the SI occupied the place with enough force, and as time was visibly on their side, the ICA's officials immediately set about the task, taking around two hours. The audience began to lose its patience, especially during the last hour, but very few people left in the course of this long wait; far more walked out during Wyckaert's excellent discourse. This was because the text had finally been very well translated.

Edited from translations by Ken Knabb and Reuben Keehan. From: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/london.html

Attachments

Comments

Fozzie

2 years 5 months ago

Submitted by Fozzie on January 19, 2023

“Instead of beginning with the usual compliments, Wyckaert scolded the ICA for using the word ‘Situationism’ in its Bulletin. ‘Situationism’, Wyckaert explained, ‘doesn’t exist. There is no doctrine of this name.’ He went on to tell the audience, ‘If you’ve now understood that there is no such thing as ‘Situationism’ you’ve not wasted your evening.’

“After a tribute to Alexander Trocchi, who had recently been arrested for drug trafficking in the United States, Wyckaert launched into a criticism of UNESCO. We were told that UNESCO had failed in its cultural mission. Therefore the Situationist International would seize the UNESCO building by ‘the hammer blow of a putsch’. This remark was greeted with a few polite murmurs of approval.

“Wyckaert ended as he had begun, with a gibe at the ICA. ‘The Situationists, whose judges you perhaps imagine yourselves to be, will one day judge you. We are waiting for you at the turning.’ There was a moment’s silence before people realized that the speaker had finished.

The first and only question came from a man who asked ‘Can you explain what exactly Situationism is all about?’

Wyckaert gave the questioner a severe look. Guy Debord stood up and said in French ‘We’re not here to answer cuntish questions’. At this he and the other Situationists walked out.”

Steven.

2 years 5 months ago

Submitted by Steven. on January 20, 2023

Where is that account from Fozzie? I had heard of that comment by Debord but wasn't sure of the context.
I'm trying to get my head around the sequence of events. So did they have a conference in East London, but close it out with a public meeting at the ICA?
Or did they crash an event being hosted at the ICA already?

Fozzie

2 years 5 months ago

Submitted by Fozzie on January 20, 2023

It's apparently from "Asger Jorn - The Crucial Years 1954-1964" (Lund Humphries, 1977). Stewart Home quotes from it in The Assault on Culture.

Yeah I think the Conference was followed by an ICA event - which must have been preplanned because there was a programme and an audience?

A very short text from Internationale Situationniste #5 (December 1960).

Submitted by Fozzie on January 20, 2023

I should point out that what I'm about to read has already largely been discussed within the SI, and therefore that it has lost a good deal of its interest. Please excuse me for this. I'll confine myself to three proposals for "situating" the Situationist International itself within all other artistic and political problems.

Fundamentally, I ask that we consider:

a) the SI as a materially equipped encounter (which is also a passion and a denunciation), with the accent on "materially equipped";

b) that the preparatory stage for basic equipment (a stage that could be described as pre-situationist or pre-artistic, etc.) is controlled by capitalist automatism;

c) that this basic equipment is the implementation of situationist possibility.

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

Comments

A short text from Internationale Situationniste #5 (December 1960).

Author
Submitted by Fozzie on January 20, 2023

From what I've heard so far, I get the impression that a certain pessimism exists in the SI, and this pessimism is expressed quite strongly in the German section's declaration. Nevertheless, our Scandinavian expriments show that with an explosive force and a genuine theory of action, small groups can do far more than could be imagined in England, Germany or France. I've been collaborating with workers' cultural organizations for several years. The working class in the Scandinavian countries has achieved a notable degree of economic well-being. But they obviously don't know what cultural goal this economic well-being might serve, as this raises the question of the very meaning of life. Meanwhile, the workers consume the culture cooked up by capitalism, because it is the only culture around. Despite an awareness that this is only the product of cultural capitalism, the Left in modern democracy has a great deal of interest in organizing the distribution of this product; and naturally, has nothing to gain from real creation.

Just as the communists have organized shock troops simply to develop the possibilities of cultural consumption, it would be possible for the SI to form groups small in size but equipped with great force of penetration, to bring about possibilities for creation.

I myself was an executive in the metallurgists' union for three years. Two years ago, I assisted in a major congress of all Scandinavian union organizations. Someone at this congress pointed out that the strike fund had not been touched for ten years due to permanent full employment and a lack of strikes. Sweden had even imported 60,000 foreign workers. This fund was worth three million deutschmarks, and no-one had any idea what to do with the money. This was assembly's biggest problem.

The SI is the first organization with whom the groups I mentioned are able to collaborate in order to subvert all this. The good old system of infiltration needs to be put to use: there is no better means. I propose that we have secret members, ready to work illegally in various kinds of organizations: in cultural ministries, in UNESCO, governments, unions, newspapers, radio, television, and wherever else it's necessary.

Secrecy would rapidly give these agents far greater freedom of action than if they were to be known as official members of the SI. These methods, which, among other things, are adapted from certain anarcho-syndicalist experiments, would be very effective.

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

Comments

A brief resolution handing control of the Bureau to Attila Kotányi after the exclusion of most of the Dutch Section of the SI.

From Internationale Situationniste #5 (December 1960).

Submitted by Fozzie on January 20, 2023

The 4th Conference notes that the "bureau for investigation for a unitary urbanism," opened in 1959 by the SI in Amsterdam, can no longer be maintained, the situationists who were in charge of it having had to be dismissed for engaging in reactionary activities radically opposed to the SI;

agrees to nominate other situationists to ensure the development of the research work and application of UU.

The Conference decides that the SI delegates A. Kotányi to the direction of his bureau of unitary urbanism, taking responsibility for it;

settles on Brussels as the location of the bureau's headquarters.

London, 28 September 1960.

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

Comments

Text of an address given by Maurice Wyckaert to an audience at the ICA in London. From Internationale Situationniste #5 (December 1960).

Submitted by Fozzie on January 20, 2023

Ladies and Gentlemen,

In an error relating to the terms of acceptance that we had communicated to them, the ICA has announced a declaration by the "International Situationism" movement.

There is no such thing as situationism. No doctrine by that name. It is a practical experiment that we call situationist — a practical experiment organized within a disciplined international movement. If you have now understood that there is no such thing as situationism, then already you have not wasted your evening. And in that case, if you understand something more, then you will leave here with a little extra.

First of all, consider that none of the works we are presently capable of producing have reached a situationist stage. We propose only that we will soon realize — collectively — the first pre-situationist ensembles. You could consider the situationist movement as a new passion with material means at its disposal. We are the new revolution. With every revolutionary of the past abandoned or led astray [détourned] by others; to whom can the task belong, if not us?

We are not interested in an artistic use for language when there are more profound artistic problems. We are interested, above all, in actions. If the chatter were to cease, the result would be at the very least the construction of cities of passion. We are capable of creating ambiances, of liberating human behaviour from boredom.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

From 24 September until today, the Fourth Conference of the Situationist International has gathered the representatives of our Belgian, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian and Swedish sections to Limehouse, in the room of the British Sailors Society. We regret that the British section has been prevented from being represented by the scandalous arrest of Alexander Trocchi in the United States.

I now come to the reading of the manifesto submitted to the Conference of the Situationist International, which was adopted unanimously.

(The manifesto that follows appeared in the preceding number of this bulletin.)

See also, in Situationist News, the Resolution of the London Conference on the imprisonment of Alexander Trocchi.

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

Comments

A photo of Jorn in woodland is obscured by "Lettrism is dead long live Lettrism" printed repeatedly in blue and red lettering

Originally published in Internationale Situationniste #5 (December 1960).

Submitted by Fozzie on January 21, 2023

Translated by Fabian Tompsett and then published by the London Psychogeographical Association, 1993. PDF version below published by Unpopular Books, 1994.

Contents

Attachments

Comments

From Internationale Situationniste #5 (December 1960).

Submitted by Fozzie on January 23, 2023

Some people would never be considered, were it not that some excellent adversaries had mentioned them. There is no greater vengeance than oblivion, as it buries such people in the dust of their nothingness.
— Baltazar Gracian, L'homme de cour

I have never considered the Situationist International as one of those intellectual errors that only needs to be left to crumble to dust, scattering its corpses. I have always had a horror of those exploiters of other people's discoveries, whose only justification is the synthesis they achieve. I have reason to consider the situationists as sub-Marxists from the twentieth zone, full of troglodyte anti-cultural formulations. There is an ex-painter of the Cobra-movement, who has principles which have come to nothing [It's me, Asger Jorn, that he's talking about].

He only produces abstract lyricism of the fourth zone or the fifth order. It was only in 1948, after Bjerke Petersen inspired the formation of Cobra with the support of Richard Mortensen, Ejler Bille and Egill Jacobsen following the war, that he showed himself in a coherent fashion. Even his support in his own country remains without real importance (there are some artists who, if they aren't noticed at the international level, go off and knock out some forged creations in the national framework). I advise him to stick to painting, not because I value his pictures, but because I have read his 'philosophical' works. Abstract art, above all that of a manufacturer prefaced by Jacques Prévert, the Paul Géraldy of surrealism, must be sold well and impassion all the dressmakers. My cultural conception and my creation make me rigorous in my writings. I already have enough difficulties from being solely responsible for my own writings, whence there are no false phrases or judgments to be retracted.

For all the reasons which he so exposes, I understand perfectly why the lettrist Lemaître has left it to a scribe to take the trouble to fill 136 pages of his review Poésie Nouvelle #13 with closely set little characters in a study on the Situationist International.

The enormous extent of the work is its only exceptional character, which is easily explained. As I think I have shown in my study on value, an endeavor of invention and understanding cannot be paid by the hour, and in consequence cannot be objectively measured with money. The habits of industrial production have clearly penetrated certain strata across the frontier of intellectual life, and for example, journalism is routinely paid by the line. But it is obvious that the interest of these types of workers is to increase the speed and the quantity of production to the detriment of the quality. Above all this can be seen in the poverty of reportage, as this must be assembled off the clock. And such a way of carrying out work implies an easily overstretched inferior intelligence of the financial backers, who are satisfied with such standards. Lemaître has been forced to commit such rashness thanks to his stated 'strategic reasons' which nevertheless remain obscure. If he says he 'avoided the idea of expounding in the SI' himself, he had better squarely let the matter drop or give the work over to a man of culture. Because Lemaître, as an entrepreneur, is completely responsible for the work of his pieceworkers.

In Internationale Situationniste #4 1 , I unveiled the system, the ideological grammar of Lemaître, by clarifying that it was a subjective outlook of positions established in relation to Lemaître himself, rather than an objective system. Lemaître admits his ignorance and his lack of scientific creativity (p. 74). How could he then take my statement as an insult? It is indisputable that my critique of the Marxist concept of value is strictly scientific, and it is, moreover, the first complete critique which has been made of it. Lemaître calls it 'sub-sub-sub-marxism'. And why not? It is nevertheless necessary to note that Lemaître has recognized and evaluated the scientific characteristics in the experimental work of the SI, as he has been able to deal with this subject for 136 pages without mentioning a single name of any of the participants of this experiment. This is pure objectivity. Lemaître has played on the law of large numbers. He attributes many quotes without distinction to someone he calls 'the situationist.' These were taken from the writings of ten of our comrades (the collective declarations of the SI are not an issue here: this figure applies only to those texts which are found to be signed individually by their authors).

Lemaître has fallen into the trap between the absolute and the measurement system of classical Euclidean geometry, as Marxism has done. He pushes it only as far as unintentional jokes, such as wanting to distinguish the graduations of eternity. He pretends (p. 56) to be capable of ensuring a 'more eternal' victory than anyone else.

Elsewhere, it is very funny to read Lemaître. The post-Marxist character inspired by the organization of the workers struggling to improve their economic situation is clearly visible as the basis of the erotological practice that Lemaître has pointed out in many large books. The effort so presented to organize a union of gigolos, systematizing their struggle for an increase in their wages and markedly improving their technique in satisfying even the most dramatic passions of their clients, is an honest reformist enterprise, the day to day defense of actual employees within the existing economic framework. Lemaître has recently admitted that this education would be impotent at the situationist stage of miracle-working, but doesn't know what to conclude from this intuition. If he made the effort, man could be naturally seen as the producer, and woman as the consumer in the erotic process as long as their relationship had no consequences. And if the number of boys born dropped considerably in relation to the number of girls, this could open perspectives which would merit economic considerations. But it is impossible to consider youth as being more a producer than a consumer, and completely against the interest of youth to diminish their consumption at the cultural level, by means of the reduction of school leaving age proposed by Lemaître, by which they would be thrown into production more quickly, even if this would be in the interest of the industry. Marx's struggle in this realm will always have a passionate value, and our goal is to confirm the right, not merely for youth, but for every individual, to realize themselves according to their free desires in autonomous creation and consumption. The focus of such a development could right away be UNESCO, from the moment when the SI takes command of it; new types of popular university, broken away from the passive consumption of the old culture; lastly, utopian educational centers which through the relation of leisure to certain arrangements of social spaces, they must come to be more completely free of the dominant daily life, and at the same time functioning as bridgeheads for an invasion of this daily life, instead of pretending to be separated from it.

An excellent book could be made out of Lemaître's economic theory seen as a literary work like a Rabelaisian farce, with the revolt of youth taken as a caricature of the revolutionary and socialist thought of the nineteenth century. But from the moment when Lemaître shows that he takes it seriously, he is a demagogue. One of the classic gimmicks of demagogues is to mobilize the people against dangers which have become inoffensive. It has been the fashion to shout wrongly about fascism since the war, when new socio-cultural conditions are being prepared, and when the new ideological dangers appear inoffensive: and leading to moral rearmament by all the variants of neo-religious fanaticism. Far from 'misrecognizing the power of his method', as Lemaître says, I have recognized them, I denounce them, and I declare war on them.

I prefer a contrary method. And the sole consideration I can give to Lemaître, to his scribbler, to those who could adhere to their system of thought, or just as likely to take it up and use it without them, it is to quote the phrases to which I am absolutely opposed. In Poésie Nouvelle #13:

My level of merit based on the works or actions which improve the human condition place in their lower ranks the current provisional practices. I believe that at the daily level the 'non-being' formulated by certain existentialist philosophers is true: we are only a mass of waste material having some possibility of acquired and limited choices. But what distinguishes my system is that, for me, the only liberty, which is minimal, resides in the minuscule invention or discovery of that rare being which is known as the 'innovator', in the wake of whose revelations that the other human beings can only follow, as they have until then followed the 'lesser good', the inferior. (p.116).

Rightly or wrongly, I have always believed afresh in the power to sometimes use the energies of my fellows better then they themselves. (p. 44).

They must trust and follow me, instead of always staying behind. (p. 29).

The religious Jews can pretend that no-one has gone further than them, as the Messiah has not arrived. The Christians have reason to state that they have not been outclassed as their fellows have not been saved from their misery, and as they have been helped to the resurrection of the dead... At this general level, I give reason to these groups, who defend certain essential values and that I hope to honestly supersede by offering them what they want: the messiah, human safety, the resurrection of the dead, gnosis. (p. 28).

The situationists, like the sub-troglodytes that they are, no longer want to conserve anything... they not only reject the future of cultural disciplines, but also the past and the present, in the name of a pseudo-utopian, outdated, spineless, infantile bluff... Finally our ignorant reactionaries will be rejected and punished by the research of disciplines of knowledge, just as they have rejected and punished others in the past. (p. 63).

I believe that these extracts from Lemaître's Mein Kampf suffice to show his main tendency towards 'degenerate art.' As for the threats, those that go so far as to make use of them are not always equipped with the capacity of the most extensive sanctions. And we are not in any way frightened by constructing the 'provisional' life, because Lemaître has let us know (p. 123) that he has "a great horror of his living person". Well, that's his problem! He also said that he preferred Malraux to the situationists (but will this complement be paid back?) Anyway, I would let him get on with Malraux. For nothing.

Translated by Fabian Tompsett. Text from: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/open1.html

Comments

From Internationale Situationniste #5 (December 1960).

Submitted by Fozzie on January 23, 2023

I am sad, but in spite of all my efforts, M. Mesens doesn't want to publish PIN. Even when I said to him that we didn't want any money, he laughed and said that if he wanted to publish it, we would have to give him money, but that he had no intentions of doing so. He had read it attentively but he didn't like it. He said that it would have been more topical twenty five years ago, but that now we would not be greeted with comprehension...
There is another thing: there are some imitators, for example, the lettrists in Paris who copy the Ursonate that Hausmann and I did, and we weren't even mentioned, we who had done it twenty five years before them, and with better reasons.
— Kurt Schwitters, Letter of 29-3-47 quoted in Courrier Dada.

What weapons does Lemaître want to use? Here, he falls for the psychiatric theory of a little Swiss man called Karl Jaspers, who from his perspective attains a 'stature' equal to that of Moses and of Plato (p. 66 & p. 80). From Lemaître's perspective, this Jaspers has become enormous, because he is closer to him in time and ideas. The enormity of Jaspers, who has the merit of being considered as one of the most famous imbeciles of our century, is to have postulated with all the authority of a non-scientific psychiatrist, that all individuals who are not an imbecile like him are mentally ill, and by this fact a public danger that society should be able to allow to be locked up and nursed. Lemaître has amplified this idea to a world dimension; and according to him the therapy would be (quote: "...only to have proposed an integral therapy capable of curing the permanent illness of youth and world history." p. 55).

What is this permanent illness of the history of the world? During the phase of youth, each individual or group possesses a fantastic will, in relation to minimum capacities and non-existent consciousness. The adult age possesses a real power stronger than their will, which is subject to the routine of actions. The fatigue of old age is compensated for by experience, the consciousness which dominates power and will. By proposing Gnosis for the salvation of youth, Lemaître only proposes a process of rapid aging, he even proposes that the youth should engage their wills as quickly as possible in social power, prisoner of existing establishment.

Lemaître precisely reproaches the situationists for not following the rules of his game: "So many mythic and mystifying formulas, which confound their classification and their integration into the domain of knowledge, also hinder the establishment of necessary historic relations between superseded-superseding and the superseding-superseded." In effect, unswervingly convinced of his linear succession, of his little hierarchy etc., blind to everything else, Lemaître cries that the situationists have not superseded him, and are to be placed much lower down than him. Well then? My friend the Danish poet Jens August Schade told me one day: "You can fall so low that the fall becomes uplifting." There is nothing mystifying in our behavior. I have never had any desire to supersede you, Lemaître and company. We are coming across each other: that's all. And we are not going to continue with the same trajectory that we approached by, without this encounter having had the slightest importance.

The Leninist example of the troglodytes was equally badly chosen. The conflict between Lenin and the Russian futurists is only one example in a general crisis and a subversion of the revolution to which Lenin had contributed with his very compact and superficial attack against leftism considered as 'an infantile disease' rather than as an illness of infancy, of hope. Anyhow, I am old enough to remember the epoch when Lenin himself was considered as a troglodyte by the whole world. One day, I shall probably be used, when I am dead as an anti-troglodyte against someone.

Lemaître is infatuated with the idea that time could abolish unfashionable cultural references which he has found, or had his specialist scribe pick up in the public libraries. But as anyone knows, like living reality, culture is what is left when all that has been understood has been forgotten. Nothing is worse than stupidity combined with a never failing memory. This is without wanting to discuss the weak quality, the holes and the bluffs in the digest of encyclopedism of Lemaître's brain trust.

Lemaître seems to disdain the experimental value that we have recognized in the lettrist movement around 1950, in two or three sectors of culture. He says that the experimental aspect of lettrism had been real but negligible in comparison to its essential value: a system of creation. Thus he impudently spits on his only asset, because we consider, as history will consider with us, that all that he calls his 'creation' is absolutely empty and has no future. Because Lemaître believes that it is his solipsistic dream of creation, which must be recognized as the sole historic value, he is astonished that, for example we don't recognize the importance of lettrist poetry. This poetry has no importance as an artistic creation, even as a function of the 'creative', arbitrary and untransferable systematization of Lemaître. As much as the whole of the lettrist movement has for a time played a role in the real avant-garde of a given epoch, onomatopoeic poetry, which was its first manifestation, came twenty five years after Schwitters, and clearly was in no way experimental.

In other respects there was nothing unique about the lettrists except in Paris. However, Lemaître is so geographically bound that, without smiling, he measures the comparative influences of the SI and groupuscules which appeared for six months on the Left Bank, and which are still only known about by him; he judges them according to articles whose dedication has generally been solicited by the groups themselves or "posters plastered all round Paris in their name" (p. 41). This Lemaître allows concessions to everyone for making known the discoveries which, as has been seen, all the mystifiers, Christian or not, have on sale. He pretends that he had plenty of time to understand, and does not ask about the reason for this total incomprehension, for this refusal of the whole world in relation to his wonderful creations. It is fifteen years since lettrism arose, it has chosen no enemies, but wants to convert the whole world. And without slackening, it has presented the (sub-Cartesian) demonstration of its dogmas throughout twenty books. However it has remained very poorly known about. And, to take his examples, Lemaître doesn't want it recognized that fifteen years after their appearance, surrealism or symbolism had already been largely imposed on culture. In epochs much less greedy than our own, these movements appeared, a novelty in all domains, and then the cultural ideologies, much less decomposed than those of today, fought them in the name of the conservation of the order of the past. Hence Max Bense, the German equivalent of this anecdote of systematic, paradialectic, and deadly boring 'lettrist thought'. They are equally typical of this epoch. What do you want? They are of great use as classifiers of values. But of values without actuality. In terms of Americanized culture, these are the gadgets of the Ideal Home exhibition of the spirit.

Translated by Fabian Tompsett. Text from https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/open2.html

Comments

From Internationale Situationniste #5 (December 1960).

Submitted by Fozzie on January 23, 2023

It takes less time to create a material which is deficient, much longer to form a personality. And if a single error has been made in the production of the material, it can be repaired, if necessary by destroying the useless machine and so going through profits and losses. A man, once formed, is not destroyed; for forty years he is ready to perform the activity for which he has been trained...
— Alfred Sauvy, From Malthus to Mao Tse-Tung

The Chinese perspective is not Chinese culture. But it is a valuable and important outlook. At any moment, real living humanity covers a little less than two centuries. The oldest are about a hundred years old, and some among the new born will be destined to live as long in the future. There is a perpetual tension between these two temporal extremes of humanity. The cycle of this wheel of life, this eternal return is a permanent revolution upon which thousands of reflections have been made since the Sumerians, the Buddhists, Plato, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and so on. Zoroastrianism is the outcome of this train of thought, with the idea of a single oriented rotation of history from a unique beginning up to a definitive and irreversible end. This dualist outlook and unilateral orientation was transmitted to Judaism, Christianity and Islam; at the same time it passed to Mithraism, manicheeism and gnosticism. Following Lemaître's Gnostic confession, it is clear that he is not capable of understanding the dialectic dynamism of Buddhism, but that he follows dualism; and that his appeal to youth is simply the classical and traditional subversion of minors. Regretfully, I believe that I have detected the possibility of an unpublished system which is relatively creative in the sense that the application of Chinese perspective to the dimension of time in the west would produce results which could not be predicted. This makes Lemaître's system even simpler. It is no more than neo-Sorelianism. I have looked all over the place. Through the frequent use of Lenin as a witness to his arguments, and the loan of the origin of these perspectives from Fichte, instead acknowledging Sorel as the inventor of them, it is shown that Lemaître has drawn deeply from Sorel — elsewhere he admits to having read him — but with no intention of publicly acknowledging this. The Chinese perspective of Lemaître is just as impoverished as Sorelian ideology, whose fate is well known.

Sorel's artfulness lay in having studied the formula of ascendant Christianity, and having transported the belief in the zero point of the future (the end of the world and the opening towards an unknown paradise) to a purely technical system. Thus the Christian end of the world can be replaced by anything: the general strike, the socialist revolution, or to be more up-to-date, the man who presses the button of atomic missiles. All those who don't fit in with this perspective are equally assured of punishment, by using the key formula of all the historic events of our century: the accusation of treachery (to what? the system). In La Roue de la Fortune, I set myself against the mythological exactitude of Benjamin Péret, who is shown so high in Lemaître's estimation. This was because for me all art is an infinite multitude of mythic creations, and because I oppose free creativity to a return to the belief in a single imposed myth, or systems of myths. Here, I oppose the idea of multiple paradises to that cherished by Lemaître: a unique paradise, and ideological carcass once more exhumed. I don't think that Péret's attitude on this subject has ever approached such stupidity as that of Lemaître, but I saw the peril to come; and Péret can no longer protest when Lemaître, who stupidly insulted him in 1952 for 'lack of creation', now depends on him.

In any case, no-one can pay a greater compliment to the situationist movement than this confirmation by Lemaître: "I don't know anyone who believes in the 'situationist group'. The situationists themselves are not situationists as they have written many times. To speak as a whole which doesn't exist is to invite the accusation of having invented it." But our sole goal is precisely to invent it. We have invented everything so far, and there is still nearly everything left for us to invent: our terrain is so rich that it scarcely exists.

What we are going to invent is situationist activity itself. And also its definition. Having awkwardly let slip a number of propositions, proposals and appeals in his pamphlet on perfectly unreal footing, Lemaître pretends: "The situationists and my group could perhaps reach a spiritual understanding on the terrain of the 'situation', however much my critics adhere to my ethical conception of the Creator of elements — superior to the productive constructor of moments of life — and to the vision of integral cultural situations, the outcome of the Creative — and not simply ludic." I have already shown that we have goals completely opposed to his. All of Lemaître's options are rejected.

In a note (p. 80) where he points out to us the importance of Einstein, Lemaître has the audacity to add that "time is a notion intrinsic to the situation". We, however, to the extent that we have advanced in the study of given situationists, we find that the question is posed of inventing a situology, a situography and perhaps even a situometry beyond existing topological knowledge.

Lemaître is amazed that there is a Scandinavian culture distinct from the classical west. Scandinavian culture is above all the culture of the forgotten, the forgotten culture and without history, uninterrupted since the stone age, older and more immobile even than Chinese culture. With such a weighty heritage of oblivion, what could I cite from my ancestors.

I am a man without merit. At the same time, I am wicked enough. Journalists and other professional thugs at the service of existing order call us a 'beat generation'. They are astonished to discover that their knockbacks, their distrust, their absolute refusal to allow us even the chance to eat as badly as an unemployed unskilled worker, that all this has hardened us to the point that we refuse to give these bruisers big kisses the moment when they find us interesting. I remember the time of the Cobra movement, when C.O. Götz stated that our German comrades had to live on a tenth the keep of any prisoner of the Federal Republic. I know the more than shameful conditions in which the lettrists had to live in order to realize the remarkable works of their creative period. And so it continues. A German artist, whose country will not hesitate to claim the highest glory, has for two years had no other home than the empty railway cars at the station. When I discovered the systematic structures of the situationist tendency, I myself had understood that here was a method which exploited in secret by us could give us a great direct social power, and which would allow us the luxury of truly avenging the insults. I did not hesitate to explain this view to Guy Debord, who completely refused to take it into consideration, which obliged me to make my remarks public. He then told me that it was necessary to leave such methods to people like Pauwels or Bergier, and the mystical old women who are encaptured by minor occult insights. Everyone dreams of marketing its echoes, as Gurdijieff did to his well-to-do disciples. After some reflection, I knew that I would arrive at exactly the same attitude, which is the same vein as all my behavior up till now; anyway it is the reason for our collaboration in the SI.

But, "my hesitation could be conceived as the idea of surrendering the secret of secrets, the creation of creation, to the incoherent mob" Lemaître writes (p. 7), which all the more defends his right to the secret, that his 'creative' nothingness is a matter of a secret of organization. He justifies himself by the examples of atomic and other secrets. In fact, secret methods transform art into craftsmanship, by the exclusive techniques to reproduce to standards which come latter on. Lemaître is conscious partisan of this survival of the artisan confraternity. One is accepted by producing an acceptable masterpiece. Thus Lemaître retains a weakness for Debord's first film, simply because he has not understood it. He simply places it icily "amongst the ten best works in the history of cinema". The italics are his (p. 25).

Lemaître also reproaches me for having declared that he is finished. He claims that he is alive. That's true; and I didn't say he was dead. I said that he was in a coma (of his system). Which will probably only last as long as he does. The patient appropriation of the secrets of the master - particularly when dealing with a mastership arbitrarily decreed by an individual - clearly guarantees that a very particular commodity can be produced to these standards. But there is no guarantee that this production will be valorized by some desire.

Like Lemaître, I think that Wassily Kandinsky is the man "who produced and defined the abstract" (p. 111). But I don't agree with him that he was an "artistic innovator", nor that I am an abstract painter. I have never made any but anti-abstract paintings following the current of Hans Arp and Max Ernst, followed by Mondrian and Marcel Duchamp. Kandinsky, in Von Punkt über Linie zur Fleche, had aligned modern art according to the perspective of Euclidean geometry, whereas the innovators mentioned above moved towards an inverse geometry, aiming towards a polydimensional cosmos at the surface, just as the line and the point. The technique of dripping painting showed the absurdity of Kandinsky's attitude. If you work very close to the canvas, the flow of colors makes surfaces, blotches. But if you arrange things once again at a distance, the color is divided into little splashes, which only make points. This is exactly like elements in perspective. They start as masses and disappear over the horizon as points. Kandinsky started at the horizon, in the abstract to arrive where? Me, I started in the immediate present, to arrive where?

Translated by Fabian Tompsett. From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/open3.html

Comments

From Internationale Situationniste #5 (December 1960).

Submitted by Fozzie on January 23, 2023

The thoughts and observations about it are entirely new; the citations have not been made before; the subject is of extreme importance and has been treated with infinite arrangement and clarity. It has cost me a great deal of time, and I pray that you will accept it and consider it as the greatest effort of my genius.
— Jonathan Swift, Irrefutable Essay on the Faculties of the Soul

If, as Lemaître says, time was an extraneous notion to the situation, situology will be as much a study of the unique identical form, as morphology. But it could rightly be said that situology is a morphology of time, since everyone is agreed that topology is defined as the continuity which is the non-division in extension (space) and non-interruption in duration. The morphological side of situology is included in this definition: that which concerns the intrinsic properties of figures without any relation to their environment.

The exclusion of singularities and interruptions, the constancy of intensity and the unique feeling of the propagation of the processes, which defines a situation, also excludes the division in several times, which Lemaître pretends are possible. But the confusion of ideas by an unlettered person like Lemaître is much more pardonable than that which prevails amongst professional topologists; and which obliges us to distance ourselves from the purely topological terrain to invent a more elementary situology. This confusion is introduced precisely in the formula of orientability which, in reality, is only adaptation to the dimension of time. E.M. Patterson explains that

"the idea of orientability derives from the physical idea that a surface could have one or two sides. Let us suppose that around each point of a surface — with the exception of the points at the edge (boundary), if there are any — a little closed curve is drawn in a defined sense, having been attached to this point. At this moment, the surface is called orientable if it is possible to choose the sense of the curves, of the manner to which it would be the same for all the points sufficiently close to each other. If not the surface is called non-orientable. All surfaces with only one side are non-orientable."

This mixture of geometry and physics is quite out of order. It is easy to prove that a sphere only has one surface, and likewise a ring. That a cone possesses two surfaces and a cylinder three, etc. But logically a surface can only have one side.

Anyway, a surface with two sides is not topological, because there is a rupture in continuity. But the reason for which we are put on the false scent of the double surface with two sides is clear: it's because that's what allows the linkage of topology with the general tendency of geometry: the search for equalities, or equivalencies. Two figures are explained as being topologically equivalent, or homeomorphs, if each can be transformed into the other by a continuous deformation. This is to say that there is a single figure in transformation: situology is the transformative morphology of the unique.

The gravest error which was introduced by adapting the classic perspective of geometry to topology, is the adaptation to classic distinctions of topology of surfaces and the topology of volumes. This is impossible and ridiculous if elementaries of situology are understood, because in topology there is a precise equivalence between a point, a line, a surface and a volume whereas in geometry there is an absolute distinction. This confession is clearly reflected in the Moebius strip, which is said to possess "two surfaces without homeomorphy" or to represent "surfaces with a single side" without a back or front, without an inside or outside. This phenomenon can even lead people to imagine that the Moebius strip only possesses a single dimension, which is completely absurd, because a Moebius strip cannot be made with a piece of string, even less with a line. What is most interesting about the Moebius strip is exactly the relationship between the two lines of the parallel edges.

It is possible to study geometric equivalencies, congruencies and likenesses of a Moebius strip, if a particular fact is taken into account: the length of a Moebius could be infinite compared to this width. It's up to the mathematicians to construct and calculate the Moebius strip at its minimal limit. Once constructed, it would be found that we are dealing with an object where the line which marks the width of the strip at a point taken by chance, makes a perfect right angle with same line drawn on the opposite part of the strip, however these two lines are parallel, if the strip is smoothed into a cylinder. The same line which at one point represents the horizontal at another point represents a vertical. There are thus three spatial dimensions, apart from the space if the strip is flattened. Hence the strangeness of the Moebius strip. Two Moebius strips of this type can thus always be put into likeness, and with the same width of strip, put into congruence.

It seems that no-one has yet remarked on the strange behavior of all topological forms and figures in their relationship with the system of spatial co-ordinates (vertical, horizontal, depth) in which they play, making them be born and disappear, and transforming one into the other. For Euclidean geometry, the system of co-ordinates is a given basis. For situology, no, as it creates and disposes of the co-ordinates at will. Thus Euclidean geometry has a duty to go beyond all situological considerations to take as a point of reference the system of co-ordinates at right angles which is the schema of the law of least effort. René Huygues shows, in his work Art and Man, that it is with the development of metallurgy, after the agrarian epoch, that the division is produced between the two styles of Hallstadt and La Tene, which is none other than the division between geometric and situlogic thought. Through the Dorians geometric thought was implanted in Greece, giving birth to rationalist thought. The contrary tendency wound up in Ireland and Scandinavia.

Walter Lietzman notes, in his work Anschauliche Topology:

"In art, for example in the age of the Vikings, knotwork was used as ornamentation with pleasure. I have before me a photo of the knot gardens of Shakespeare at Stratford, in which the arrangement of flowers in the form of knots is shown… What does Shakespeare see in these knots? I'm not able to say. Perhaps it's a matter of some error or more a deliberate confusion with the theme of the labyrinth. The question is raised twice with him: In Midsummer Night's Dream (act II, scene 1), and in The Tempest (act III, scene 3)."

There is no possible mistake. James Joyce in Finnegans Wake, by pronouncing the absurd phrase "No sturm, no drang", had overcome the ancient conflict between classicism and romanticism and opened a ski-slope towards the reconciliation of passion and logic. What is needed today is a thought, a philosophy and an art which conforms to what is projected by topology, but this is only realizable on condition that this branch of modern science is returned to its original course: that of "the situ analysis" or situology. Hans Findeisen, in his Shamanentum, indicated that the origins of shamanism, which still survives amongst the Lapps, are to be found in the cave paintings of the ice age, and it is enough that the ornamentation which characterizes the Lapp presence is simple knotwork. The knowledge of secret topologies has always been indicated by the presence of signs of knots, strings, knotwork, mazes etc. And in a curious way since antiquity the weavers has transmitted a revolutionary teaching in forms which are more or less bizarre, mystifying and subverted. A history too well known to have been studied seriously. The perversion in that should be noticed rather than the reverse.

The relation that the writings of Max Brod established between Kafka and the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe is as profound as the relationship between Shakespeare and Hamlet: and their presence at Prague which, since the time of La Tene radiated topological thought, is as natural as the astonishing results that Kepler could extract from the calculations of Brahe, by adapting them to the methods of geometry and classical mathematics, which was impossible for Tycho Brahe himself. This shows once more that topology remains the source of geometry, and that the contrary process is impossible. This indicates the impossibility of explaining the philosophy of Kierkegaard as a consequence of the philosophy of Hegel. The influence of Scandinavian thought in a European culture is incoherent and without permanent results, like a true thought of the absurd. That there has always been a Scandinavian philosophical tradition, which structures the tendency of Ole Roemer, H.C. Oersted, Carl von Linné etc., completely distinct from English pragmatism, German idealism and French rationalism is a fact which can only be astonishing in that it has always been kept secret. With the Scandinavians themselves ignoring the base logic of this profound and hidden coherence, it is as much ignored by others. I have the greatest mistrust of all the ideas on the benefits of learning. However in the actual situation in Europe it seems to me that an ignorance of this subject presents a danger. Thus I consider that the fact that Swedenborg and Novalis has been mine engineers is more important than the chance postulates of such as Jaspers which allowed the label of mad schizophrenics to be stuck on their backs. This is not because this is a fact which could be established in a scientific manner, but because it is a basic skill of topological thought, like that of weavers, and this fact could lead us to the precious observations for the founding of situology.

But all this is only presented as a possible technique subordinated to the work of the SI, the allies and enemies of which can easily be seen. The situationists reject with the greatest of hostility the proposal arising in Bergier and Pauwel's book, The Dawn of Magic, which asks for help in setting up a proposed institute to research occult techniques; and the formation of controlling secret society reserved for those today who are in a position to manipulate the various conditions of their contemporaries. We should not in any case collaborate with such a project, and we have no desire to help it financially.

"From all evidence, equality is the basis of geometric measurement" as Gaston Bachelard said in Le Nouvel Esprit Scientifique. And he informs us:

When Poincaré had shown the logical equivalence of various geometries, he stated that the geometry of Euclid would always be the most useful, and that in case of conflict between this geometry and physical experience, it was always preferable to change physical theory than change the elementary geometry. Thus Gauss had pretended to experiment astronomically with a theorem of non-Euclidean geometry: He wondered if a triangle located in the stars, and hence of enormous surface, would show the shrinking of surface indicated by the geometry of Lobatchowski. Poincaré did not recognize the crucial character of such an experience.

The point of departure of situography, or of plastic geometry, must be Situ analysis developed by Poincaré, and pushed in an egalitarian direction under the name topology. But all talk of equalities is openly excluded, if there aren't at least two elements to equalize. Thus the equivalence teaches us nothing about the unique or the polyvalence of the unique, which is in reality the essential domain of situ analysis, or topology. Our goal is to set a plastic and elementary geometry against egalitarian and Euclidean geometry, and with the help of both to go towards a geometry of variables, playful and differential geometry. The first situationist contact with this problem is seen in Galton's apparatus that experimentally produced Gauss's curve (see the figure in the first issue of Internationale Situationniste [in The Situationists and Automation]). And even if my intuitive fashion of dealing with geometry is completely anti-orthodox, I believe that a road has been opened, a bridge thrown across the abyss which separates Poincaré and Gauss as far as the possibility of combining geometry with physics without renouncing the autonomy of the one from the other.

All the axioms are cut offs against the non-desired possibilities, and by this fact contains a voluntary illogical decision. The illogic which interests us at the base of Euclidean geometry is played between the following axes: things which are superimposed upon each other are equal; the sum is greater than the part. This absurdity is seen, for example, the moment we start to apply the definition of a line as length without breadth.

If two lines are superimposed, one equals the other. This must result in either two parallel lines (which shows that the equality is not perfect and absolute, or that the superimposition is neither) or the union of the lines in a single line. But if this line is longer than a single line, or if it has acquired width, the lines would not be equal. But if the lines are absolutely equal, the whole is not bigger than the part. This is an indisputable logic, but if it is true, we are in an absurdity because geometric measurement is precisely based on the axiom that the whole is greater than the part. The idea that two equal lengths are identical is found in geometric measurement. But two things can never be identical, because then we would say they were the same thing. If a murderer must be identified to a judge, it isn't enough that this is an individual who looks exactly like the person who committed the crime. The identical will not do in these circumstances. It is certain that there are no equalities, no repetitions, as in the case of the Konigsberg bridges. In geometry, an identity of length and position excludes all quantitative consideration. But how is it possible through superimposition to reduce the infinite number of lines of equal length to one line, which is no bigger than any single line of these; in such a case where it is unthinkable to divide a line in two, are both equal to the divided line?

If a line is moved from its position, at the same time it remains in its position, a surface has been created rather than two lines. The superimposition, which shows that the two lines are equal, cannot be practiced without the duality disappearing: otherwise they could not be equalized. A single line is equal to nothing. This proves that there is no reality in the absolute idealism of Euclid's formula that a line has no thickness. The proof by superimposition is impossible, even if the process is modernized by employing the formula of congruence, or an identity of form, but still excepting spatial position.

We can reduce a thousand points to a single point by superimposition, and this point is equal to one of the thousand points. But a point cannot be multiplied and left at the same place, and displaced at the same time. This would be a line. As for volume, these can only be superimposed in the imagination. It could only be achieved with two phantom volumes without real volumes. This abstract character is at once the strength and weakness of Euclidean geometry. The slightest abstraction in topology is only a weakness.

A thousand times zero is only zero, and nothing can be abstracted from zero. Euclidean geometry is used in this irreversible and unilateral sense: it's oriented. And all the geometries, apart from situography, are the same as it. Orientation is a linear concept, and a vector is also called a half-vector, because it also signifies the distance covered, and the sense in which this has been chosen, is called its positive sense. The zero point, chosen at some point on the line is fixed as a point of commencement. An oriented straight line is thus not a line in itself, but the combination of a line and a point. An oriented plane is a plane in which is chosen a sense of rotation called direction, and this plane is also linked to a point, the center of rotation, which could allow the establishment of an axis of rotation at right angles to the plane of rotation.

Space is oriented as there is a sense of rotation associated around each axis of space, called the direct sense of space. This installation allows everything that can be called measurement. But of what does measure consist? This is the most curious thing about this business. All the measures of equal units whether of length, of size, height, mass time or whatever unit derived from these basic notions, consists of their indication by on a half-line, spatial demi-dimension divided into equal intervals oriented from a point of origin towards infinity. This half-line does not need to be straight, but could be inscribe on the circumference of a circle. If the extension makes several revolutions these become the distances of a greater linear or circular extension. Here is the principle to which all possible measure arrives in the final analysis. Any measure cannot explain whatever may be outside of this limit of a development along a demi-line.

Euclidean and analytical geometry were developed within its classical discourse, itself following the orientation of a demi-line. Starting with a point without spatial dimension, this is moved forward and so traces a line. The line is moved forward in a direction perpendicular to its extension to produce a surface, with which the same process is used to create a volume. But this oriented movement, which from a point produces a line, a surface, a volume, this movement in itself does not enter into geometric considerations in its relations with spatial dimension. The inconsistency is evident. The act of superimposition is also impossible without movement, but from the moment when all the necessary movements to establish classical geometry are put on trial, purely spatial phenomena can no longer be spoken of, and nevertheless movement is there from the beginning. We can wonder whether time has only a single dimension, or whether in the future we might not be obliged to apply to time at least three dimensions to be able to arrive at more homogenous explanations of what has happened. That remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: time cannot be reduced to a demi-dimension or to an oriented length with a measuring instrument. We thus also reach another question as to whether what we know as 'time' in its scientific definition, as a measure of duration, and the form under which time enters relativity theory, isn't simply the notion of orientation or a demi-line.

Oriented geometry can, thanks to its orientation, ignore the notions of time inherent to its system. But, in order to take consciousness of the role of time and of its real role in relation to the three spatial dimensions, we are obliged to abandon the path of orientation to demi-line, and to found a unitary homeomorphism.

When we want to use the expression dimension, we are immediately faced with the problem of its exact interpretation and definition. A dimension can be defined in a logical fashion as an extension without beginning or end, neither sense nor orientation, an infinity, and it's just the same with the infinity in the dimension of time. This is eternity. The extension of one of the three spatial dimensions represents a surface, an extension without beginning or end. If the system of linear measurement can only measure the demi-line, the system of measurement from two co-ordinates at right angles can only give a measure of space for figures drawn in a quarter of a surface, and the information of 3D measurements are even poorer as they are drawn within an eighth of a sphere from the angle of measure of 90° of three oriented co-ordinates in the same direction. To avoid this perpetual reduction of knowledge, we shall proceed in the inverse sense.

For the witness of a crime, identification is to define the suspect as the possible unique. But homeomorphism poses us various problems. It could easily be viewed as follows: now it is no longer a matter of identifying the assassin, but the poor victim that the brute has voluntarily ridden over several times with their motor car. They have an aspect, which differs in a tragic way from the fellow that was known during their life. Everything is there, but crudely rearranged. They are not the same, yet it is still them. Even in their decomposition they can be identified. Without doubt. It is the field of homeomorphism, the variability within unity.

Here the field of situological experience is divided into two opposed tendencies, the ludic tendency and the analytical tendency. The tendency of art, spinn and the game, and that of science and its techniques. The creation of variables within a unity, and the search for unity amongst the variations. It can be clearly seen that our assassin has chosen the first way, and that the identifiers must take up the second, which limits the domain to the analysis of sites, or topology. Situology, in its development, gives a decisive push to the two tendencies. For example, take the network represented by Galton's apparatus. As a pinball machine, it can be found in most of Paris bistros; and as the possibility of calculated variability, it is the model of all the telephone networks.

But this is the creative side, which precedes the analytic side in general and elementary situology: the situationists are the crushers of all existing conditions. Thus we are going to start our demonstration by returning to the method of our criminal. But to avoid making this affair a bloody drama, we shall dive head long into a perfectly imaginary and abstract world, like Euclid.

We start by lending an object a perfect homeomorphism, an absolute and practically nonexistent quality, like the absence of spatial extension that Euclid gives to his point. We give absolute plasticity to a perfectly spherical ball with a precise diameter. It can be deformed in any way without being broken or punctured. Our goal is clear before this object of perfect three-dimensional symmetry. We are going to completely flatten it to transform it into a surface with two dimensions and to find the key to their homeomorphic equivalence. We are going to reduce the height of this sphere to zero in ten equal stages, and calculate the level of increase of the two corresponding dimensions to the registered reductions of the third progressively as the ball is transformed more and more into a surface. The last number can be deduced from the preceding nine. It is evident that we don't end up at infinity, as the same process with a ball five times as large must give a surface at least five times as big, and two infinities with a difference of measurable dimensions is beyond logic (except for Lemaître when he speaks of eternity). The practical work of calculation linked to this experiment, we shall leave to the mathematicians - if they have nothing better to do.

We haven't finished. We choose a diagonal in this immense pancake without thickness, and start to lengthen the surface in exactly the same way as in the previous experiment, to end up with a line without thickness, making the calculations in a similar fashion. Thus we have the homeomorphic equivalence expressed as numbers between an object in three, two and one dimension, and the whole world can start to protest. The most intelligent will be patient, saying that Euclid started with a point. How is this immense line reduced to a single point? I can only return to the sphere. If the situology was a uniquely spatial and positional phenomenon this will be true.

Einstein has explained that if a line can reach the speed of light, it will contract until it disappears completely as regards the length along the direction of the trip. However a clock would stop all together at that speed. This is what we are going to do. The whole matter is settled in this way. The only minor inconvenience of this spectacular process is invisible: I cannot regain possession of my point, which flies off across the universe. If I could transform this movement across space into rotation in place, I would have more or less mastered my point.

Einstein declared the "space and time conceived separately have become empty shadows, and only the combination of both expresses reality". It is from this observation that I'm going to clarify the Euclidean point, which possesses no dimensions and, as it is within space, before however representing any other dimension, at least represents the dimension of time introduced into space. And it is all the more impossible to fix a point without duration in space. Without duration there is no position.

But in order that this point can possess the quality of time, it must possess the quality of movement, and as the geometric point cannot be displaced in space without making a line, this movement must be rotational, or spinning around itself. Although this movement must be continued, it does not however have an axis nor spatial direction; and what's more vortex cannot occupy the least space. If this definition of the point is richer and more positive than that of Euclid, it does not seem to be less abstract. But since I have learnt that there is a Greek geometer, Héron, who inspired Gauss with a definition of the straight line as a line which turns around itself as an axis without the displacement of any points which compose it; and that plenty of people agree that this is the only positive thing which has ever been said on the subject of the straight line, I feel I'm on the right track.

But an axis can only have a rotation in a sense. It is necessary to stop it to spin it in the contrary sense. However a point in rotation, by a continuous change of its axis of rotation, could be led to a rotation in the contrary sense, whatever the sense. In this way the straight line can be explained thus: If two points rotating at random are connected, they are obliged to spin in the same sense and with the same speed, the faster being braked and the slower accelerated.

All the points of a line acquire a presence in the spatial dimension equivalent to their loss of freedom of movement, which has become oriented in space.

If we want to stay with this oriented and positive definition of the line on our backs, a plastic definition is needed. To understand this, it is necessary to remind ourselves that plastic geometry does not place the accent on the infinite character of dimensions, but on their character of a presence in general space and time, which could be finite or infinite, but which are primarily in relation with all the objects whose extension is wanted to be studied. Each volume, each surface, each segment of line or piece of time makes a part, or is extracted from the general mass of universal space and time. In the analysis, for example, of a linear segment in the egalitarian geometry of Euclid, abstractions of an 'infinite' character are made of the line. A piece is cut away by forgetting the rest. In unitary geometry, this is not possible. A line is not an interrupted series of points, because the points have lost something in order to be able to establish a line. In a segment of a line, there are only two points which could be observed, the two points at each end of the line. But how is it explained that on a line segment there are two rather than a single zero point? The only possible explanation is that a line segment with two zero points is composed of two demi-lines superimposed, with the zero points crossed, going in opposite directions. A line segment is thus a line to double distances, there and back, and of a length double the distance between the two polarized ends or in counterpoint. This is a basis for plastic or dialectic geometry. From this outlook, each determined volume is a volume within general volume, or universal space, fragmented by a surface: just as each surface is a fragment of a surface distinguished by some lines; and each linear section is a linear segment determined by its duration.

The specific surface which determines a volume, the voluminous surface is termed the vessel, form etc. And as a function of separation between two volumes it possesses the character of an opposition between the inside and outside; similarly the separation of a surface by a line opposes before and after, and so also the point on a line distinguishes the positive and negative sense of distance. These signs thus only make sense as the relation between two-dimensional systems, in the same combination of co-ordinates. The problem becomes more complex when we start to play with several co-ordinate systems in relation with each other such that it could be termed projective geometry, of which the best known example is central perspective.

In order better to understand not only the system of projections, but also the system of objectification in general it is necessary to see how the co-ordinate systems unfold and which is the initial primary system. The primary system of all observation is the system of co-ordinates inherent to the observer themselves, their subjective co-ordinates. Ordinarily this elementary requisite for observation is ignored. The co-ordinates of the individual are known as front, behind, above, below, left and right; and they play an enormous role for orientation, not only in science, but of a primordial way in ethics, the social orientation where the individual is drawn to the left and then the right, toppling forwards, always forward thanks to progress, pushed from behind and pressed towards the ascent and the higher pathways, to finally be carried underground. The direction to the right is the direction of least resistance, of the right line, the direction said to be just or rational; and opposed to it, the left is by nature the anarchic direction of the game, of the spinn or of the greatest effort. But each time that the political left becomes the direction of a development of justice, following the path of least resistance, this opposition lacks tension. The trajectory of descent is delineated by the path of least resistance. So, from our outlook of oppositions, the left direction of the left, that of games, must represent the ascent. This is what I have tried to prove with the reversal of dialectics. In the Scandinavian languages the word droite (German recht, English right) mean ascension (högre) towards the heights, which symbolizes the left elsewhere. The confusion in social orientation in Europe and in its vocabulary gains from being so rich and contradictory in this respect. These are purely objective observations, without any pragmatic consequence, but which have had an influence even on the most elementary religious conceptions (heaven - fire).

In reality the metric graduations of a co-ordinate system allow the establishment of a network of parallel lines of co-ordination at equal intervals. The zero point and the positive directions can be chosen and changed in the system as it is desired thanks to this squaring up. It is the same thing for the line and for the system of three co-ordinates.

When the system of co-ordinates of an observed object is displaced in relation to the basic system of co-ordination for observation and measure, this sometimes necessitates projection. The projective geometry thus shows the rules of the relations between two or several systems of co-ordination, as if there were two or several spaces. In this way, the same space can be multiplied into several by projection. But this is only justified through the time dimension.

However, positive geometry, which works with the demi-line, the quarter surface and the eighth of volume, allows another purely spatial game. The right angle formed by two negative demi-lines of a co-ordination in two dimensions can be displaced and put in opposition to the positive angle, thus establishing, for example, a square. This operation explains how the square could find its explanation in the relationship between the circumference and the diagonal of a circle, even though the circle cannot be defined as a derivative of the square. This definition of the square by juxtaposition joins our dialectic definition of the line, and shows how situology is more immediate than geometry, which always runs into the problem of squaring the circle.

Here we have roughly sketched out some consequences of the disorder, which situology could introduce to geometric thought, but it is evident to those who know this material, that the consequences will not be any the less as regards our physical and mechanical conceptions. It has already been understood by Einstein's definition that the notion we have of light doesn't lend itself to any spatial dimension. However it would be wrong to consider light as being immaterial. Even the old mystical notion of the four elements could be reconsidered. We know that they don't exist as absolute phenomena, but it is however strange that modern science has refused to consider a distinction of matter as pronounced as that between solid, liquid, gaseous objects and light. When an ice cube suddenly melts and stretches on the surface of a table, it can be concluded that the liquid state represents the loss of one of the spatial dimensions, replaced by the liberation of discharge; that the liquid is a matter of two spatial dimensions. And the constant of tensions of surface tension seems to be as important in physics as the constant of the speed of light. The logical conclusion this gives rise to, is that gases have only one dimension, compensated for by the play of their movement. And for an example of something, which has even less dimensions, think of Maurice Lemaître and his friends.

Translated by Fabian Tompsett. From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/open4.html

Comments

art is dead book cover

Comments on Curt Schweicher's book "Art Is Dead, Long Live Art". From Internationale Situationniste #5 (December 1960).

Author
Submitted by Fozzie on January 26, 2023

The bankruptcy of the art in power becomes more evident day by day, even in the eyes of those who are its most notable connoisseurs. And, in their despair, they confound the bankruptcy of this art, in which they participate, with the metaphysical bankruptcy of all artistic practice. Thus they distort the meaning of modern experiments, which are still to be made; or which have barely begun in secret. Moreover, these connoisseurs patently bear most of the responsibility for this forced secrecy.

For example, Charles Estienne,1 when he abandoned all of the bluff of his modern art, tried to save some things from the shipwreck by laying hands on “Tachism”.2 Naturally, he was familiar with all the full-time scholars of distorted modernisation. But all of them have hidden the fact that true Tachism had already been done to death, and [even] before the invention of that label. Those who had founded the Tachist practice were already dead, and their imitators were already in the display cases. And, of course—even before one admits Wols and Pollock there—in all the museums of modern art.3

The recent critique of Curt Schweicher is fortunately more radical: he abandons even Tachism.4 There are many good things in his book Art is Dead, Long Live Art (in particular, see the 4th point of his theses), which approach Situationist positions.5 Unfortunately, all the rest is very confused. Curt Schweicher does not understand the role of the negative, which he repudiates in modern art. He does not understand the profound simplicity of all the problems that he falsely considers complex and he does not understand any better the new totality, the superior complexity which develops itself from the awareness of this simplicity—[that is to say] of the crisis of modern art. When Schweicher unilaterally condemns the illustrations that he presents to us, which are the images accidentally obtained in the wastes produced by the work of the machinist [du travail machinist], he neglects the evident fact that such objects only become artistic at the conclusion of the actual experience realised beforehand by the artists who engage in the destruction of the image. And the choice that he makes among the objects is first of all determined by his personal taste, his particular way of understanding a certain stage achieved artistically—in this case, his taste goes as far as the caricature of the average informal painting.6

The fundamental error of Schweicher resides in his belief that too many means have been invested in modern art—when in fact there are far too few.

An enormous number of pseudo-modern artists artificially invest—in order to build-up speed as artists—the resources that they draw from their bourgeois occupations (they are firstly, lawyers, publicity agents, police officers). This process forms a special economic milieu, which finds expression in a new conformism: precisely the non-aesthetic academicism that Schweicher rightly denounces. The confusion of Curt Schweicher’s ideas only reflects the real confusion of his milieu. One believes here, in a spirit of competitive free enterprise, that it is better to help a great number of “avant-garde currents”, [that are] different in their objectives—exactly like the idiots who buy-up the maximum [number] of tickets to be sure of winning the lottery. And yet, in a given moment, there exists only one possible direction for creating other artistic conditions. Moreover there are good, simple criteria for recognising, among them all, the tendency that goes in this direction: it is sole one that cannot be bought.

People sufficiently informed—even if they do not readily speak of it—already know very well that it is at present the Situationist International.

Lothar FISCHER, Heimrad PREM,

Helmut STURM, Hans-Peter ZIMMER.

This article was published as the editorial in the 2nd number of the German Situationist journal Spur, in response to the book by Curt Schweicher, Die Kunst ist tot, es lebe die Kunst [Art is dead, long live Art].7

Translated from the French by Anthony Hayes, July 2013. Thanks to NOT BORED! for help with the translation. From https://thesinisterquarter.wordpress.com/2013/07/16/response-to-schweicher/

  • 1Charles Estienne was an art critic who was associated with Tachism and Art Informel—see footnote 2.
  • 2Tachism: Also known as ‘Lyrical Abstraction’, is considered by contemporary art criticism as a European variant or version of ‘Abstract Expressionism’ in the late 1940s and 50s. In essence an art movement that formally deployed mostly painterly methods of abstraction already developed by earlier avant-garde artists. The term was coined in the early 1950s and popularized by Michel Tapié in his 1952 book Un Art autre (note that Tapié was particularly loathed by the Situationist International as an advocate of the merely formal modernist style that had come to dominate so-called artistic avant-gardism in the 1950s). The term is derived from the French word for stain, splot or blot (tache). Tachism is often considered as a subset of ‘Art Informel’ by art critics, but also confusedly as an equivalent descriptive term.
  • 3Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze, better known as ‘Wols’, was a photographer and painter associated with what would become known as Tachism before his death in 1951. Jackson Pollock was perhaps the most well-known painter to be associated with ‘abstract expressionism’ in the United States.
  • 4Curt Schweicher, German art critic and historian.
  • 5Curt Schweicher, Die Kunst ist tot, es lebe die Kunst [Art is dead, long live Art]; published 1960. Possibly an earlier edition was published in 1953.
  • 6‘Art informel’ is one of the terms used for those associated with mostly painterly abstraction in Europe in the late 1940s and 50s. Also see footnote 2.
  • 7Presumably the original was in German. It is unclear who translated it into French.

Comments

cover of IS #6

central bulletin published by the sections of the situationist international

August 1961

Director: G.-E. Debord

Mail: 32, rue de la Montagne-Geneviève, Paris 5e

This bulletin is edited by the Central Council of the SI: Debord, Kotányi, Nash, Sturm.

All texts published in Internationale Situationniste may be freely reproduced, translated or adapted, even without indication of origin.

Submitted by libcom on September 8, 2005

A critique of revolutionary organisations and the role of the 'militant'.

Submitted by libcom on September 8, 2005

If it seems somewhat ridiculous to talk of revolution, this is obviously because the organized revolutionary movement has long since disappeared from the modern countries where the possibilities of a decisive social transformation are concentrated. But all the alternatives are even more ridiculous, since they imply accepting the existing order in one way or another. If the word "revolutionary" has been neutralized to the point of being used in advertising to describe the slightest change in an ever-changing commodity production, this is because the possibilities of a central desirable change are no longer expressed anywhere. Today the revolutionary project stands accused before the tribunal of history -- accused of having failed, of having simply engendered a new form of alienation. This amounts to recognizing that the ruling society has proved capable of defending itself, on all levels of reality, much better than revolutionaries expected. Not that it has become more tolerable. The point is simply that revolution has to be reinvented.

This poses a number of problems that will have to be theoretically and practically overcome in the next few years. We can briefly mention a few points that it is urgent to understand and resolve.

Of the tendencies toward regroupment that have appeared over the last few years among various minorities of the workers movement in Europe, only the most radical current is worth preserving: that centered on the program of workers councils. Nor should we overlook the fact that a number of confusionist elements are seeking to insinuate themselves into this debate (see the recent accord among "leftist" philosophico-sociological journals of different countries).

The greatest difficulty confronting groups that seek to create a new type of revolutionary organization is that of establishing new types of human relationships within the organization itself. The forces of the society exert an omnipresent pressure against such an effort. But unless this is accomplished, by methods yet to be experimented with, we will never be able to escape from specialized politics. The demand for participation on the part of everyone often degenerates into a mere abstract ideal, when in fact it is an absolute practical necessity for a really new organization and for the organization of a really new society. Even if militants are no longer mere underlings carrying out the decisions made by masters of the organization, they still risk being reduced to the role of spectators of those among them who are the most qualified in politics conceived as a specialization; and in this way the passivity relation of the old world is reproduced.

People's creativity and participation can only be awakened by a collective project explicitly concerned with all aspects of lived experience. The only way to "arouse the masses" is to expose the appalling contrast between the potential constructions of life and the present poverty of life. Without a critique of everyday life, a revolutionary organization is a separated milieu, as conventional and ultimately as passive as those holiday camps that are the specialized terrain of modern leisure. Sociologists, such as Henri Raymond in his study of Palinuro, have shown how in such places the spectacular mechanism recreates, on the level of play, the dominant relations of the society as a whole. But then they go on naïvely to commend the "multiplicity of human contacts," for example, without seeing that the mere quantitative increase of these contacts leaves them just as insipid and inauthentic as they are everywhere else. Even in the most libertarian and antihierarchical revolutionary group, communication between people is in no way guaranteed by a shared political program. The sociologists naturally support efforts to reform everyday life, to organize compensation for it in vacation time. But the revolutionary project cannot accept the traditional notion of play, of a game limited in space, in time and in qualitative depth. The revolutionary game -- the creation of life -- is opposed to all memories of past games. To provide a three-week break from the kind of life led during forty-nine weeks of work, the holiday villages of Club Med draw on a shoddy Polynesian ideology -- a bit like the French Revolution presenting itself in the guise of republican Rome, or like the revolutionaries of today who define themselves principally in accordance with how well they fit the Bolshevik or some other style of militant role. The revolution of everyday life cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future.

The experience of the empty leisure produced by modern capitalism has provided a critical correction to the Marxian notion of the extension of leisure time: It is now clear that full freedom of time requires first of all a transformation of work and the appropriation of this work in view of goals, and under conditions, that are utterly different from those of the forced labor that has prevailed until now (see the activity of the groups that publish Socialisme ou Barbarie in France, Solidarity in England1 and Alternative in Belgium). But those who put all the stress on the necessity of changing work itself, of rationalizing it and of interesting people in it, and who pay no attention to the free content of life (i.e. the development of a materially equipped creative power beyond the traditional categories of work time and rest-and-recreation time) run the risk of providing an ideological cover for a harmonization of the present production system in the direction of greater efficiency and profitability without at all having called in question the experience of this production or the necessity of this kind of life. The free construction of the entire space-time of individual life is a demand that will have to be defended against all sorts of dreams of harmony in the minds of aspiring managers of social reorganization.

The different moments of situationist activity until now can only be understood in the perspective of a reappearance of revolution, a revolution that will be social as well as cultural and whose field of action will right from the start have to be broader than during any of its previous endeavors. The SI does not want to recruit disciples or partisans, but to bring together people capable of applying themselves to this task in the years to come, by every means and without worrying about labels. This means that we must reject not only the vestiges of specialized artistic activity, but also those of specialized politics; and particularly the post-Christian masochism characteristic of so many intellectuals in this area. We don't claim to be developing a new revolutionary program all by ourselves. We say that this program in the process of formation will one day practically oppose the ruling reality, and that we will participate in that opposition. Whatever may become of us individually, the new revolutionary movement will not be formed without taking into account what we have sought together; which could be summed up as the passage from the old theory of limited permanent revolution to a theory of generalized permanent revolution.

SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL (1961)

Translated by Ken Knabb (slightly modified from the version entitled "Instructions for Taking Up Arms" in the Situationist International Anthology).

  • 1TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: A later issue of Internationale Situationniste has the following note on Solidarity: "The majority of the British Solidarity group that is apparently demanding this boycott of the situationists are very combative revolutionary workers. We feel confident in stating that its shop-steward members have not yet read the SI, certainly not in French. But they have an ideological shield, their specialist of nonauthority, Dr. C. Pallis, a well-educated man who has been aware of the SI for years and who has been in a position to assure them of its utter unimportance. His activity in England has instead been to translate and comment on the texts of Cardan [Cornelius Castoriadis], the thinker who presided over the collapse of Socialisme ou Barbarie in France. Pallis knows quite well that we have for a long time pointed out Cardan's undeniable regression toward revolutionary nothingness, his swallowing of every sort of academic fashion and his ending up becoming indistinguishable from an ordinary sociologist. But Pallis has brought Cardan's thought to England like the light that arrives on Earth from stars that have already long burned out -- by presenting his least decomposed texts, written years before, and never mentioning the author's subsequent regression. It is thus easy to see why he would like to prevent this type of encounter." (Internationale Situationniste #11, p. 64)

Comments

banzaijoe

12 years 11 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by banzaijoe on July 26, 2012

thumbs up. The link between theory and practice is something that the occupy movement is missing. The reason being is they have no theory i e vision of a new world. That aside they have no relevance to the day to day survival issues faced by the working class.

One tool Im using to point this out to them is a blog. come and lend a hand lets have a laugh or two making fun of the liberals

Confusion To Our Enemies;

Mike
admin: spam link removed

The town of Mourenx

Editorial Note, from International Situationniste #6 (August 1961).

Submitted by Fozzie on January 24, 2023


The town of Mourenx. The 12,000 inhabitants are housed in horizontal blocks if they are married, tower blocks if they are single. To the right of the image extends the small neighorhood for middle management, consisting of identical residences sharde equally by two families. Beyond, in the neighborhood for upper management, another type of single-family residence has been created. The management who really control the work done at Lacq live in Pau, Toulouse and Paris.

The situationists have always said that "unitary urbanism is not a doctrine of urbanism but a critique of urbanism" (Internationale Situationniste 3 1 ). The project of a more modern, more progressive urbanism, conceived as a corrective to the present urbanist specialization, is as false as, for example, in the revolutionary project, the overestimation of the moment for seizing power, which is a specialist's idea that immediately involves forgetting, indeed repressing, all the revolutionary tasks posed, at each and every moment, by the whole inseperable combination of human activites. Until it merges with a general revolutionary praxis, urbanism is necessarily the first enemy of all possibilities for human life in our time. It is one of those fragments of social power that claim to represent a coherent whole, and which tend to impose themselves as a total explanation and organization, while doing nothing except to mask the real social totality that has produced them and which they preserve.

By accepting this specialization of urbanism, one puts oneself at the service of the prevailing social and urbanist lie of the State, in order to carry out one of the many possible "practical" urbanisms. But the only practical urbanism for us, the one we call unitary urbanism, is thereby abandoned, since it requires the creation of quite different conditions of life.

Over the past six or eight months, we have seen a number of moves, chiefly among West German architects and capitalists, to launch a "unitary urbanism" immediately, at least in the Ruhr. Some poorly informed entrepeneurs, carried away by thoughts of success, saw fit to announce, in February, the imminent opening of a Unitary Urbanism laboratory in Essen (as a conversion of the Van de Loo art gallery). They published a disgruntled denial only when faced with our threat to reveal publicly the watered-down nature of the plan. The former situationist Constant, whose Dutch collaborators had been excluded from the S.I. for having agreed to build a church, now himself shows factory models in his catalogue published in March by the Municipal Museum in Bochum. This shrewd operator frankly offers himself, along with two or three plagiarized and misconstrued Situationist ideas, as public relations for the integration of the masses into capitalist technological civilization, and reproaches the S.I. for having abandoned his whole program for overturning the urban milieu, he himself being the only one still concerned with it. Under such conditions, yes! Moreover, one might do well to recall that in April 1959 this same group of former members of the Dutch section of the S.I. was firmly opposed to the S.I. adopting an "Appeal to Revolutionary Artists and Intellectuals," and stated: "For us, these perspectives do not depend on a revolutionary overthrow of present-day society, for which the conditions are lacking" (for this debate, see Internationale Situationniste 3, pp. 23 and 24 2 ). They have thus continued logically on their path. What is more curious is that there should be people who still try to seduce a few Situationists in order to involve them in this kind of enterprise. Are they betting on the taste for glory or the lure of gain? On April 15, Attila Kotányi replied to a letter from the director of the Bochum museum proposing a collaboration with the Bureau d'Urbanisme Unitaire in Brussels: "If you have some knowledge of the original, we do not think you can confuse our critical view with the apologetic view hidden behind a copy with the same label." And he cut off any further discussion.

It is not easy to know the Situationist theses on unitary urbanism in their original version. In June, our German comrades published a special issue of their journal (Spur, no. 5), bringing together texts on unitary urbanism over several years in the S.I. or the trends leading to its formation. Many of these texts were unpublished or had appeared in now accessible publications, and none of them had ever been published in German. The measures taken in Germany against the Situationists to prevent the appearance of these texts, or at least to have them altered, were immmediately apparent: from a forced delay of three weeks for the whole edition at the printers to loud threats of prosecution for immorality, pornography, blasphemy, and incitement to riot. The German Situationists have obviously weathered these various attempts at intimidation, and today the managers of respectable unitary urbanism in the Ruhr should begin to wonder if this label is a profitable way to launch their operation.

Confrontation with the whole of present-day society is the sole criterion for a genuine liberation in the field of urban architecture, and the same goes for any other aspect of humanity. Otherwise, "improvement" or "progress" will always be designed to lubricate the system and perfect the conditioning that we must overturn, in urbanism and everywhere else. Henri Lefebvre, in the Revue française de sociologie (no. 3, July-September 1961), criticizes a number of inadequacies in the plan that a team of architects and sociologists have just published in Zurich, Die neue Stadt, eine Studie für das Fürttal. But it seems to us that this criticism does not go far enough, precisely because it does not clearly challenge the actual role of this team of specialists in a social framework whose absurd imperatives it accepts without discussion. This means that Lefebvre's article still valorizes too many works that certainly have their utility and their merits, but in a perspective radically inimical to ours. The title of this article, "Experimental Utopia: For a New Urbanism," already contains the whole ambiguity. For the method of experimental utopia, if it is truly to correspond to its project, must obviously embrace the whole, and carrying it out would lead not to a "new urbanism" but to a new way of life, a new revolutionary praxis. It is also the lack of a connection between the project for an ardent overthrow of architecture and other forms of conditioning, and its rejection in terms of the whole society, that constitutes the weakness of Feuerstein's theses, published in the same issue of the journal of the German section of the S.I., despite the interest of several points, in particular his notion of erratic block, "representing chance and also the smallest organization of objects comprised by an event." Feuerstein's ideas, which follow the S.I. line on "accidental architecture," can only be understood in all their consequences, and carried out precisely by overcoming the separate problem of architecture and the solutions that would be reserved for it in the abstract.

Henceforth the crisis of urbanism is all the more concretely a social and political one, even though today no force born of traditional politics is any longer capable of dealing with it. Medico-sociological banalities on the "pathology of housing projects," the emotional isolation of people who must live in them, or the development of certain extreme reactions of denial, chiefly in young people, simply betray the fact that modern capitalism, the bureaucratic consumer society, is here and there beginning to shape its own environment. This society, with its new towns, is building the sites that accurately represent it, combining the conditions most suitable for its proper functioning, while at the same time translating into spatial terms, in the clear language of the organization of everyday life, its fundamental principle of alienation and constraint. It is likewise here that the new aspects of its crisis will be manifested with the greatest clarity.


Relief representation of the elliptical modular function

In April, a Paris exhibition of urbanism entitled "Tomorrow Paris" offered in reality a defense of large housing complexes, those already built or planned for the far outskirts of the city. The future of Paris would all lie outside of Paris. The first part of this didactic presentation sought to convince the public (mainly working people) that decisive statistics had shown Paris to be more unhealthy and unlivable than any other known capital. They would thus do well to transport themselves elsewhere, and indeed the happy solution was thereupon offered, failing only to mention the now necessary price for the construction of these regroupment zones: for instance, how many years of outright economic slavery the purchase of an apartment in these complexes entails, and what a lifetime of urban seclusion this acquired ownership will come to represent.

Still, the very necessity for this faked propaganda, the need to present this explanation to the interested parties after the administration had quite made up its mind, reveals an initial resistance by the masses. This resistance will need to be sustained and clarified by a revolutionary organization truly determined to know and combat all the conditions of modern capitalsim. Sociological surveys, whose most stultifying defect is to present options only between the dismal variations of what already exists, indicate that 75 percent of the inhabitants of large housing projects dream of owning a house with a garden.

It is this mystic image of ownership, in the old-fashioned sense, that led Renault workers, for example, to buy the small houses that dropped in their laps in June, in a whole quarter of Clamart. It is not by returning to the archaic ideology of a discarded stage of capitalism that the living conditions of a society now becoming totalitarian can ever be truly replaced, rather by freeing an instinct for construction presently repressed in everyone: a liberation that cannot go forward without the other elements in the conquest of an authentic life.
Debates in progressive inquiries today, on politics as well as art or urbanism, lag considerably behind the reality taking shape in all industrialized countries, namely, concentration-camp organization of life.

The degree of conditioning imposed on working people in a suburb like Sarcelles, or still more clearly in a place like Mourenx (a company town in the petrochemical complex of Lacq), prefigures the conditions with which the revolutionary movement will everywhere have to struggle if it is to re-establish itself on a level with the real crises, the real demands of our time. In Brasilia, functional architecture reveals itself to be, when fully developed, the architecture of functionaries, the instrument and microcosm of the bureaucratic Weltanschauung. One can already see that wherever bureaucratic capitalism has already planned and built its environment, the conditioning has been so perfected, the individual's margin of choice reduced to so little, that a practice as essential for it as advertising, which corresponds to a more anarchic stage of competition, tends to disappear in most of its forms and props. You might think that urbanism is capable of merging all former forms of advertising into a single advertisement for itself. The rest will be gotten for nothing. It is also likely that, under these conditions, the political propaganda that has been so strong in the first half of the twentieth century will almost totally disappear, to be replaced by an instinctive aversion for all political issues. Just as the revolutionary movement will have to shift the problem far away from the old field of politics scorned by everyone, the powers that be will rely more on the simple organization of the spectacle of objects of consumption, which will only have consumable value illusorily to the extent to which they will first of all have been objects of spectacle. In Sarcelles or Mourenx, the showrooms of this new world are already being put to the test — atomized to the limit around each television screen, but at the same time extended to cover the whole town.


Decor and its usage. Four historians and many hundreds of millions, it is said, have been employed this year to reconstruct part of the town of Alexandira on a moor in England. It was all for Elizabeth Taylor to play Cleopatra in. The actress falling ill, the film could not be shot, nor the terrain put to further use. Finally Alexandria was delivered to the flames.

If unitary urbanism designates, as we would like it to, a useful hypothesis that would allow present humanity to construct life freely, beginning with its urban environment, it is absolutely pointless to enter into discussion with those who would ask us to what extent it is feasible, concrete, practical, or carved in stone, for the simple reason that nowhere does there exist any theory or practice concerning the creation of cities, or the kind of behaviour that relates to it. No one "does urbanism," in the sense of constructing the milieu required by this doctrine. Nothing exists but a collection of techniques for integrating people (techniques that effectively resolve conflicts while creating others, at present less known but more serious). These techniques are wielded innocently by imbeciles or deliberately by the police. And all the discourses on urbanism are lies, just as obviously as the space organized by urbanism is the very space of the social lie and of fortified exploitation.

Those who discourse on the powers of urbanism seek to make people forget that all they are doing is the urbanism of power. Urbanists, who present themselves as the educators of the population, have had to be educated themselves — by this world of alienation that they reproduce and perfect as best they can.
The notion of a center of attraction in the chatter of urbanists is quite the opposite of the reality, exactly as the sociological notion of participation turns out to be. The fact is that there are disciplines that come to terms with a society where participation can only be oriented toward "something in which it is impossible to participate" (point 2 of the Programme Elémentaire) — a society that must impose the need for unappealing objects, and would be unable to tolerate any form of genuine attraction. To understand what sociology never understands, one need only envisage in terms of aggressivity what for sociology is neutral.

The "foundations" in preparation for an experimental life, of which the S.I. program of unitary urbanism speaks, are at the same time the places, the permanent elements of a new kind of revolutionary organization that we believe to be inscribed in the order of the day for the historical period we are entering. These foundations, when they come to exist, cannot be anything but subversive. And the future revolutionary organization will not be able to rely on instruments less complete.

Consumerism and its presentation as spectacle

"But of course. . . they're drinking Cidre Doux"

Within the current framework of consumerist propaganda, the fundamental mystification of advertizing is to associate ideas of fulfillment with objects (televisions, or garden furniture, or automobiles, etc.) and furthermore by destroying the natural link these objects may have with other objects, so as to have them above all become a material environment with "status."

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

Attachments

Comments

A text on artists real and imagined. From Internationale Situationniste #6 (August 1961).

Submitted by Fozzie on January 27, 2023

How goes cultural production? All our calculations are confirmed when one compares the phenomena of the last twelve months with the analysis of decomposition published a few years ago by the S.I (c.f. "Absence and Its Costumers,"1 in Internationale Situationniste 2, December 1958). In Mexico, last year, Max Aub writes a thick book on the life of an imaginary cubist painter, Campalans, while demonstrating how well-founded his praises are with the help of paintings whose importance is immediately established. In Munich, in January, a group of painters inspired by Max Strack arranges simultaneously for the biography, as sentimental as could be wished, and the exhibition of the complete oeuvre of Bolus Krim, a young Abstract Expressionist painter prematurely deceased — and just as imaginary. Television and the press, including almost all the German weeklies, express their enthusiasm for so representative a genius, until the hoax is proclaimed, leading some to call for legal proceedings against the tricksters. "I though I had seen everything," the dance critic for Paris-Presse writes in November 1960, concerning Bout de la Nuit by the German Harry Kramer, "ballets without subject and ballets without costumes, others without sets, finally others without music, and even ballets simultaneously devoid of all these elements. Well, I was wrong. Last night the unheard-of, the unexpected, the unimaginable: a ballet without choreography. I mean it: without the slightest attempt at choreography, a motionless ballet." And the Evening Standard, of September 28 of the same year, reveals to the world one Jerry Brown, painter from Toronto, who means to demonstrate in both theory and practice "that in reality there is no difference between art and excrement." In Paris, this spring, a new gallery, founded on this Torontological aesthetic, exhibits the rubbish assembled by nine "new realist" artists, determined to redo Dada, but at "40° above," and who have nevertheless made the mistake of being too legibly introduced and justified by a sententious critic several degrees below, since he has found nothing better than to have them "consider the World as a Painting," calling even more upon sociology "to aid consciousness and chance," in order stupidly to rediscover "emotion, sentiment, and finally, once more, poetry." Indeed. Niki de Saint-Phalle fortunately goes further, with her target-paintings painted with a carbine. In the courtyard of the Louvre, a Russian disciple of Gallizio executes, last January, a roll of painting seventy meters long, capable of being sold by the piece. But he spices things up by taking lessons from Mathieu, since he does it in only twenty-five minutes and with his feet.

Antonioni, whose recent mode has been confirmed, explains in October 1960 in the journal Cinéma 60:

"In recent years, we have examined and studied the emotions as much as possible, to the point of exhaustion. That is all we've been able to do. . . But we have not been able to find anything new, nor even glimpse a solution to this problem. . . First of all, I'd say that one starts with a negative fact: the exhaustion of current techniques and means."

Do they look for other cultural means, new forms of participation? Since March, special posters have been put up along the platforms of the New York subway for the sole purpose of being spray-painted by vandals. Moreover, the electronic gang, at least after this summer, will offer us, for the "Forme et Lumière" spectacle in Liège, a spatio-dynamic tower fifty-two meters high by the usual Nicolas Schoeffer, who this time will have at his disposal seventy "light brewers" to project abstract frescoes in color on a giant screen 1,500 square meters in size, with musical accompaniment. Will this splendid effort be integrated, as he hopes, "with the life of the city"? To find out, we will have to wait for the next strike movement in Belgium, since the last time the workers has a chance to express themselves in Liège, on January 6, the Schoeffer Tower did not yet exist, and they had to vent their fury on the headquarters of the newspaper La Meuse.

Tinguely, more inspired, has unveiled, in full operation in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a machine skillfully programmed to destroy itself. But it has been left to an American, Richard Grosser, to perfect, already several years ago, the prototype of a "useless machine," rigorously designed to serve no purpose whatsoever. "Built of aluminium, small in size, it includes neon lighting that goes on and off by chance." Grosser has sold more than five hundred of them, including one, it is said, to John Foster Dulles.

The truth is that even when they exhibit a certain sense of humor, all these inventors get quite excited, with an air of discovering the destruction of art, the reduction of a whole culture to onomatopoeia and silence like an unknown phenomenon, a new idea, and which was only waiting for them to come along. They all dig up corpses to kill them again, in a cultural no-man's-land beyond which they can imagine nothing. Yet they are precisely the artists of today, though without seeing how. They truly express our time of obsolete ideas solemnly proclaimed to be new, this time of planned incoherence, of isolation and deafness assured by the means of mass communication, of higher forms of illiteracy taught in the university, of scientifically guaranteed lies, and of overwhelming technical power at the disposal of ruling mental incompetence. The incomprehensible history that they incomprehensibly translate is indeed this planetary spectacle, as ludicrous as it is bloody, and whose program, in a crowded six months, has included: Kennedy hurling his cops into Cuba to find out whether the armed populace would spontaneously take their side; French shock troops embarking on a putsch and collapsing under the blow of a televised speech; de Gaulle resorting to gunboat diplomacy to reopen an African port to European influence; and Khrushchev coolly announcing that in another nineteen years communism will have essentially been achieved.

All this old stuff is of a piece, and all these mockeries cannot be overcome by a return to this or that form of "seriousness" or noble harmony of the past. This society is on its way to becoming, at all levels, more and more painfully ridiculous, until the time comes for its complete revolutionary reconstruction.

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

Comments

Black and white photo of a French youth gang in leather jackets

The SI on youth gangs, from Internationale Situationniste #6 (August 1961).

Submitted by Fozzie on January 27, 2023

The youth crisis is becoming a topic of concern for the authorities of all modern countries, leading even the most gullible of dupes to cast doubt upon the prospects the assimilation of humans into the society of consumption. The extreme case of the appearance of teenage gangs in high-rise housing estates is easily verifiable, especially in relatively late developing countries like France and Italy, where access to less noticeable conditions of life under modern capitalism turns out to be experienced clearly as soon as it is exacerbated by the particular factor of the new types of housing. The gangs are formed in the wastelands, the vanishing point of the "planned environment," which can be considered as a basic representation, at a primitive stage of destitution, of these empty zones of occupation that our program of unitary urbanism designates with a détournement of the idea of "black holes" from physics.

More profoundly, and even apart from the extreme phenomena of these gangs, we are witnessing this society's total failure to supervise its young. And despite the fortunate collapse of domestic supervision and the previously acceptable reasons to live, as well as the disappearance of the minimum common conventions between people — and more importantly between generations — older generations continue to buy into the fragmentary of illusions of the past; they are especially hypnotized by the routine of work, accepted "responsibilities," and habits that come down to the habit of having nothing more to expect from life. In contrast to the gangs of wayward children of the Russian civil war that were formed out of famine and the physical destruction of their parents, today's gangs could be considered as products both of a new kind of peacetime dislocation of families and of the heightened status of consumption. Meanwhile, following in the footsteps of traditional political groups, political supervision is reduced to virtually nothing. A document on youth, drawn up this year for a PSU Student Conference, observed that in France

"the era when youth movements functioned as effective examples to the mass of youth is well past; less than 10% of youths participate in these movements, and of this 10%, the majority consists of members of more or less openly religious organizations."

Indeed, it is naturally the weakest part of youth that continues to submit to the most retrograde conformisms — also the most coherent — that sustain the maximum of recruitment possibilities for educators of every stripe. Thus, in England, the success of the snobbery of "Young Conservative" clubs has troubled Labour Party bureaucrats, who now go to great lengths to organize balls on the same model, with added Labour chic. It only goes to show that the great artillery of strictly cultural supervision has fizzled out: an era when the constant augmentation of schooling causes the majority of youth to accede to some dose of culture is also an era when this culture no longer believes in itself; it no longer fools or interests anyone.

The society of free time and consumption is lived as a society of empty time, as consumption of emptiness. The violence that it produces, leading police in numerous American cities to institute curfews for under eighteens, puts the use of life so radically into question that it can only be recognized, defended or saved by a revolutionary movement explicitly bringing about a program of demands that relate to this use of life in all its aspects.


"I need to find someone to talk to. What happened to everyone I knew? I have so much to ask them!"

It's going to become more and more difficult to hide the redoubtable reality of youth behind the pathetic teams of professional actors who, under the names "beatniks", "angry young men" and — even more watered down — "nouvelle vague," represent the expurgated parody of this crisis on the cultural stage. The fact that something which was a feature of the "avant-garde" for a mere ten years can now be seen everywhere is a major embarrassment to the good people of Saint-Germain-des-Prés (who, as anti-artists risking recuperation into culture, are nowhere near divorced enough from traditional artistic bohemianism). On 14 May, Le Journal du Dimanche tolled the death knell of provincial French honesty, recounting the fortuitous meeting between two people "transporting a heavy case containing several dozen bottles of stolen fine wines in the dead of night" and a police patrol in Melun: "the two thieves confessed that the wine was in fact to be consumed at a large 'party' in the usually unoccupied apartment of one of their grandmothers. They added that these surprise parties were attended exclusively by 15 to 18 year old boys and girls in various states of undress. These gatherings were so licentious that eight young men and women from the Melun region who had participated in one had been arrested for offense to good taste, as well as for theft and complicity. Three youths, a boy of 15, and a boy and girl each aged 17, have been incarcerated. The other five were released on probation."

It goes without saying that the situationists support the absolute refusal of the extremely limited range of lawful activities. The SI is heavily based on extensive experiments within the empty spaces of everyday life and the search for a supersession. It will not stray from this line, and any official success (in the broadest sense of the word: any success within the dominant cultural mechanisms) that might be met by either its theses or its members should therefore be considered extremely suspect. With the systems of information and punishment entirely in the hands of our enemies, very few details of the repression of real life's clandestinity (known as "scandal" in current conditions) ever see the light of day. Despite the complete policing of the air-conditioned emptiness, the SI intends to confront this world with more violent and more complete scandals from the position of clandestine freedom that asserts itself everywhere before the pompous social face of dead time. We know the possibilities. Order reigns and does not govern.

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

Attachments

Comments

Basic Program of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism

Submitted by libcom on September 8, 2005

1. NOTHINGNESS OF URBANISM AND NOTHINGNESS OF THE SPECTACLE

Urbanism1 doesn't exist; it is only an "ideology" in Marx's sense of the word. Architecture does really exist, like Coca-Cola: though coated with ideology, it is a real production, falsely satisfying a falsified need. Urbanism is comparable to the advertising about Coca-Cola -- pure spectacular ideology. Modern capitalism, which organizes the reduction of all social life to a spectacle, is incapable of presenting any spectacle other than that of our own alienation. Its urbanistic dream is its masterpiece.

2. CITY PLANNING AS CONDITIONING AND FALSE PARTICIPATION

The development of the urban milieu is the capitalist domestication of space. It represents the choice of one particular materialization, to the exclusion of other possibilities. Like aesthetics, whose course of decomposition it is going to follow, it can be considered as a rather neglected branch of criminology. What characterizes it at the "city planning" level -- as opposed to its merely architectural level -- is its insistence on popular consent, on individual integration into its bureaucratic production of conditioning.

All this is imposed by means of a blackmail of utility, which hides the fact that this architecture and this conditioning are really useful only in reinforcing reification. Modern capitalism dissuades people from making any criticism of architecture with the simple argument that they need a roof over their heads, just as television is accepted on the grounds that they need information and entertainment. They are made to overlook the obvious fact that this information, this entertainment and this kind of dwelling place are not made for them, but without them and against them.

The whole of urban planning can be understood only as a society's field of publicity-propaganda, i.e. as the organization of participation in something in which it is impossible to participate.

3. TRAFFIC CIRCULATION, SUPREME STAGE OF URBAN PLANNING

Traffic circulation is the organization of universal isolation. As such, it constitutes the major problem of modern cities. It is the opposite of encounter, it absorbs the energies that could otherwise be devoted to encounters or to any sort of participation. Spectacles compensate for the participation that is no longer possible. Within this spectacular society one's status is determined by one's residence and mobility (personal vehicles). You don't live somewhere in the city, you live somewhere in the hierarchy. At the summit of this hierarchy the ranks can be ascertained by the degree of mobility. Power is objectively expressed in the necessity of being present each day at more and more places (business dinners, etc.) further and further removed from each other. A VIP could be defined as someone who has appeared in three different capitals in the course of a single day.

4. DISTANCIATION FROM THE URBAN SPECTACLE

The spectacle system that is in the process of integrating the population manifests itself both as organization of cities and as permanent information network. It is a solid framework designed to secure the existing conditions of life. Our first task is to enable people to stop identifying with their surroundings and with model patterns of behavior. This is inseparable from making possible free mutual recognition in a few initial zones set apart for human activity. People will still be obliged for a long time to accept the era of reified cities. But the attitude with which they accept it can be changed immediately. We must encourage their skepticism toward those spacious and brightly colored kindergartens, the new dormitory cities of both East and West. Only a mass awakening will pose the question of a conscious construction of the urban environment.

5. AN INDIVISIBLE FREEDOM

The main achievement of contemporary city planning is to have made people blind to the possibility of what we call unitary urbanism, namely a living critique of this manipulation of cities and their inhabitants, a critique fueled by all the tensions of everyday life. A living critique means setting up bases for an experimental life where people can come together to create their own lives on terrains equipped to their ends. Such bases cannot be reservations for "leisure" activities separated from the society. No spatio-temporal zone is completely separable. The whole society exerts continual pressure even on its present vacation "reservations." Situationist bases will exert pressure in the opposite direction, acting as bridgeheads for an invasion of everyday life as a whole. Unitary urbanism is the contrary of a specialized activity; to accept a separate urbanistic domain is already to accept the whole urbanistic lie and the falsehood permeating the whole of life.

Urbanism promises happiness. It shall be judged accordingly. The coordination of artistic and scientific means of denunciation must lead to a complete denunciation of existing conditioning.

6. THE LANDING

All space is already occupied by the enemy, which has even reshaped its basic laws, its geometry, to its own purposes. Authentic urbanism will appear when the absence of this occupation is created in certain zones. What we call construction starts there. It can be clarified by the positive void concept developed by modern physics. Materializing freedom means beginning by appropriating a few patches of the surface of a domesticated planet.

7. THE ILLUMINATION OF DÉTOURNEMENT

The basic practice of the theory of unitary urbanism will be the transcription of the whole theoretical lie of urbanism, detourned for the purpose of de-alienation. We have to constantly defend ourselves from the poetry of the bards of conditioning -- to jam their messages, to turn their rhythms inside out.

8. CONDITIONS OF DIALOGUE

Functional means practical. The only thing that is really practical is the resolution of our fundamental problem: our self-realization (our escape from the system of isolation). This and nothing else is useful and utilitarian. Everything else is nothing but by-products of the practical, mystifications of the practical.

9. RAW MATERIAL AND TRANSFORMATION

The situationist destruction of present conditioning is already at the same time the construction of situations. It is the liberation of the inexhaustible energies trapped within a petrified daily life. With the advent of unitary urbanism, present city planning (that geology of lies) will be replaced by a technique for defending the permanently threatened conditions of freedom, and individuals -- who do not yet exist as such -- will begin freely constructing their own history.

10. END OF THE PREHISTORY OF CONDITIONING

We are not contending that people must return to some stage previous to the era of conditioning, but rather that they must go beyond it. We have invented the architecture and the urbanism that cannot be realized without the revolution of everyday life -- without the appropriation of conditioning by everyone, its endless enrichment and fulfillment.

ATTILA KOTÁNYI, RAOUL VANEIGEM (1961)

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

  • 1Translator's note: The French word urbanisme usually means "city planning," but it also refers to the general policy and ideology of urban development.

Comments

Perspectives for Conscious Changes in Everyday Life

Author
Submitted by libcom on September 8, 2005

To study everyday life would be a completely absurd undertaking, unable even to grasp anything of its object, if this study was not expressly for the purpose of transforming everyday life.

The lecture (a speaker's exposition of certain intellectual considerations to an audience), being an extremely commonplace form of human relations in a rather large sector of society, is itself part of the everyday life that must be criticized.

Sociologists, for example, are only too inclined to exclude from everyday life things that happen to them every day, and to transfer them to separate and supposedly superior spheres. In this way habit in all its forms -- beginning with the habit of handling a few professional concepts (concepts produced by the division of labour) -- masks reality behind privileged conventions.

It is thus desirable to demonstrate, by a slight alteration of the usual procedures, that everyday life is right here. These words are being communicated by way of a tape recorder, not, of course, in order to illustrate the integration of technology into this everyday life on the margin of the technological world, but in order to take the simplest opportunity to break with the appearance of pseudocollaboration, of artificial dialogue, between the "in person" lecturer and his spectators. This slight discomforting break with accustomed routine may serve to bring directly into the field of questioning of everyday life (a questioning otherwise completely abstract) the conference itself, as well as any number of other forms of using time or objects, forms that are considered "normal" and not even noticed, and which ultimately condition us. With such a detail, as with everyday life as a whole, alteration is always the necessary and sufficient condition for experimentally bringing into clear view the object of our study, which would otherwise remain uncertain -- an object which is itself less to be studied than to be changed.

I have just said that the reality of an observable entity designated by the term "everyday life" stands a good chance of remaining hypothetical for many people. Indeed, the most striking feature of the present "Group for Research on Everyday Life" is obviously not the fact that it has not yet discovered anything, but the fact that the very existence of everyday life has been disputed from its very inception, and increasingly so with each new session of this conference. Most of the talks we have heard so far have been by people who are not at all convinced that everyday life exists, since they haven't encountered it anywhere. A group for research on everyday life with this attitude is comparable in every way to an expedition in search of the Yeti, which might similarly come to the conclusion that its quarry was merely a popular hoax.

To be sure, everyone agrees that certain gestures repeated every day, such as opening doors or filling glasses, are quite real; but these gestures are at such a trivial level of reality that it is rightly objected that they are not of sufficient interest to justify a new specialized branch of sociological research. A number of sociologists seem disinclined to recognize any aspects of everyday life beyond these trivialities. They thus accept the definition of it proposed by Henri Lefebvre -- "whatever remains after one has eliminated all specialized activities" -- but draw a different conclusion: that everyday life is nothing. The majority of sociologists -- and we know how much they are in their element in specialized activities, in which they generally have the blindest faith! -- recognize specialized activities everywhere and everyday life nowhere. Everyday life is always elsewhere. Among others, somewhere in the nonsociologistic classes of the population. Someone said here that it would be interesting to study the workers as guinea pigs who have probably been infected with this virus of everyday life because they, having no access to specialized activities, have no life except everyday life. This condescending manner of investigating the common people in search of an exotic primitivism of everyday life -- and above all this ingenuously avowed self-satisfaction, this naïve pride in participating in a culture whose glaring bankruptcy no one can dream of denying, and this radical inability to understand the world that produces this culture -- all this never ceases to astonish.

This attitude clearly reveals a desire to hide behind a development of thought based on the separation of artificial, fragmentary domains so as to reject the useless, vulgar and disturbing concept of "everyday life." Such a concept covers an uncatalogued and unclassified residue of reality, a residue some people don't want to face because it at the same time represents the standpoint of the totality and thus implies the necessity of a holistic political judgment. Certain intellectuals seem to flatter themselves with an illusory personal participation in the dominant sector of society through their possession of one or more cultural specializations, though those specializations have put them in the best position to see that this whole dominant culture is moth-eaten. But whatever one's opinion of the coherence of this culture or of the interest of one or another of its fragments, the particular alienation it has imposed on these intellectuals is to make them imagine, from their lofty sociological position, that they are quite outside the everyday life of the common people, or to give them an exaggerated idea of their sociopolitical rank, as if their lives were not as fundamentally impoverished as everyone else's.

Specialized activities certainly exist; they are even put to certain general uses which should be recognized in a demystified manner. Everyday life is not everything -- although its overlapping with specialized activities is such that in a sense we are never outside of everyday life. But to use a somewhat simplistic spatial image, we still have to place everyday life at the center of everything. Every project begins from it and every accomplishment returns to it to acquire its real significance. Everyday life is the measure of all things: of the (non)fulfilment of human relations; of the use of lived time; of artistic experimentation; and of revolutionary politics.

It is not enough to recall that the old stereotypical image of the detached scientific observer is fallacious in any case. It must be stressed that disinterested observation is even less possible here than anywhere else. What makes for the difficulty of even recognizing a terrain of everyday life is not only the fact that it has already become the ostensible meeting ground of an empirical sociology and a conceptual elaboration, but also the fact that it presently happens to be the stake in any revolutionary renewal of culture and politics.

To fail to criticize everyday life means accepting the prolongation of the present thoroughly rotten forms of culture and politics, forms whose extreme crisis is expressed in increasingly widespread political apathy and neoilliteracy, especially in the most modern countries. On the other hand, a radical critique in acts of prevailing everyday life could lead to a supersession of culture and politics in the traditional sense, that is, to a higher level of intervention in life.

"But," you may ask, "how does it happen that the importance of this everyday life, which according to you is the only real life, is so completely and directly underrated by people who, after all, have no direct interest in doing so -- many of whom are even far from being opposed to some kind of renewal of the revolutionary movement?"

I think this happens because everyday life is organized within the limits of a scandalous poverty, and above all because there is nothing accidental about this poverty of everyday life: it is a poverty that is constantly imposed by the coercion and violence of a society divided into classes, a poverty historically organized in line with the evolving requirements of exploitation.

The use of everyday life, in the sense of a consumption of lived time, is governed by the reign of scarcity: scarcity of free time and scarcity of possible uses of this free time.

Just as the accelerated history of our time is the history of accumulation and industrialization, so the backwardness and conservative tendencies of everyday life are products of the laws and interests that have presided over this industrialization. Everyday life has until now resisted the historical. This represents first of all a verdict against the historical insofar as it has been the heritage and project of an exploitive society.

The extreme poverty of conscious organization and creativity in everyday life reflects the fundamental necessity for unconsciousness and mystification in a society of exploitation and alienation.

Henri Lefebvre has extended the idea of uneven development so as to characterize everyday life as a lagging sector, out of joint with the historical but not completely cut off from it. I think that one could go so far as to term this level of everyday life a colonized sector. We know that underdevelopment and colonization are interrelated at the level of global economy. Everything suggests that the same thing applies at the level of socioeconomic structure, at the level of praxis.

Everyday life, policed and mystified by every means, is a sort of reservation for the good natives who keep modern society running without understanding it -- this society with its rapid growth of technological powers and the forced expansion of its market. History (the transformation of reality) cannot presently be used in everyday life because the people who live that everyday life are the product of a history over which they have no control. It is of course they themselves who make this history, but they do not make it freely or consciously.

Modern society is viewed through specialized fragments that are virtually incommunicable; and so everyday life, where all questions are liable to be posed in a unitary manner, is naturally the domain of ignorance.

Through its industrial production this society has emptied the gestures of work of all meaning. And no model of human behaviour has retained any real relevance in everyday life.

This society tends to atomize people into isolated consumers and to prohibit communication. Everyday life is thus private life, the realm of separation and spectacle.

It is thus also the sphere of the specialists' resignation and failure. It is the reason, for example, that one of the rare individuals capable of understanding the latest scientific conception of the universe will make a fool of himself by earnestly pondering Alain Robbe-Grillet's aesthetic theories or by sending petitions to the President in the hope of convincing him to change his policies. It is the sphere of personal disarmament, of an avowed incapability of living.

Thus the underdevelopment of everyday life cannot be characterized solely by its relative inability to put various technologies to good use. This inability is only one consequence (though an important one) of everyday alienation as a whole, which could be defined as the inability to invent a technique for the liberation of everyday experience.

Many techniques do, in fact, more or less markedly alter certain aspects of everyday life -- not only housework, as has already been mentioned here, but also telephones, television, music on long-playing records, mass air travel, etc. These developments arise anarchically, by chance, without anyone having foreseen their interrelations or consequences. But there is no denying that, on the whole, this introduction of technology into everyday life ultimately takes place within the framework of modern bureaucratized capitalism and tends to reduce people's independence and creativity. The new prefabricated cities clearly exemplify the totalitarian tendency of modern capitalism's organization of life: the isolated inhabitants (generally isolated within the framework of the family cell) see their lives reduced to the pure triviality of the repetitive combined with the obligatory consumption of an equally repetitive spectacle.

One can thus conclude that if people censor the question of their own everyday life, it is both because they are aware of its unbearable misery and because sooner or later they sense -- whether they admit it or not -- that all the real possibilities, all the desires that have been frustrated by the functioning of social life, are focused there, and not at all in the various specialized activities and distractions. Awareness of the profound richness and energy abandoned in everyday life is inseparable from awareness of the poverty of the dominant organization of this life. The awareness of this untapped richness leads to the contrasting definition of everyday life as poverty and as prison; which in turn leads to the repression of the whole problem.

In these conditions, repressing the political question posed by the poverty of everyday life means repressing the most profound demands bearing on the possible richness of this life -- demands that can lead to nothing less than a reinvention of revolution. Of course an evasion of politics at this level is in no way incompatible with being active in the Parti Socialiste Unifié, for example, or with reading Humanité [French Communist Party newspaper] with confidence.

Everything really depends on the level at which this problem is posed: How is our life? In what ways are we satisfied with it? In what ways are we dissatisfied with it? Without for a moment letting ourselves be intimidated by the various advertisements designed to persuade us that we can be happy because of the existence of God or Colgate toothpaste or the National Center for Scientific Research.

It seems to me that the phrase "critique of everyday life" could and should also be understood in this reverse sense: as everyday life's sovereign critique of everything that is external or irrelevant to itself.

The question of the use of technological means, in everyday life and elsewhere, is a political question. Out of all the potential technical means, those that actually get implemented are selected in accordance with the goal of maintaining the rule of a particular class. When one imagines a future such as that presented in science-fiction, in which interstellar adventures coexist with a terrestrial everyday life kept in the same old material poverty and archaic morality, this implies precisely that there is still a class of specialized rulers maintaining the proletarian masses of the factories and offices in their service; and that the interstellar adventures are nothing but the particular enterprise chosen by those rulers, the way they have found to develop their irrational economy, the pinnacle of specialized activity.

Someone posed the question, "What is private life [vie privée] deprived [privée] of?" Quite simply of life itself, which is cruelly absent. People are as deprived as possible of communication and of self-fulfillment; deprived of the opportunity to personally make their own history. Positive responses to this question about the nature of the privation can thus only take the form of projects of enrichment; the project of developing a style of life different from the present one (if the present way of life can even be said to have a "style"). Or to put it another way, if we regard everyday life as the frontier between the dominated and the undominated sectors of life, and thus as the terrain of chance and uncertainty, it would be necessary to replace the present ghetto with a constantly moving frontier; to work ceaselessly toward the organization of new chances.

The question of intensity of experience is posed today -- with drug use, for example -- in the only terms in which the society of alienation is capable of posing any question: namely, in terms of false recognition of a falsified project, in terms of fixation and attachment. It should also be noted how much the image of love elaborated and propagated in this society has in common with drugs. A passion is first of all presented as a denial of all other passions; then it is frustrated, and finally reappears only in the compensations of the reigning spectacle. La Rochefoucauld wrote: "What often prevents us from abandoning ourselves to a single vice is that we have several." This can be taken as a very positive observation if we ignore its moralistic presuppositions and put it back on its feet as the basis of a program for the realization of human capacities.

All these questions are now relevant because our time is clearly dominated by the emergence of the project borne by the working class -- the abolition of every class society and the inauguration of human history -- and is thus also dominated by the fierce resistance to this project and by the distortions and failures it has encountered up till now.

The present crisis of everyday life takes its place among the new forms of the crisis of capitalism, forms that remain unnoticed by those who cling to classical calculations of the dates of the next cyclical crises of the economy.

The disappearance in developed capitalism of all the old values and of all the frames of reference of past communication; and the impossibility of replacing them by any others before having rationally dominated, within everyday life and everywhere else, the new industrial forces that escape us more and more -- these facts give rise not only to the virtually official dissatisfaction of our time, a dissatisfaction particularly acute among young people, but also to the self-negating tendency of art. Artistic activity had always been alone in expressing the clandestine problems of everyday life, albeit in a veiled, deformed, and partially illusory manner. Modern art now provides us with undeniable evidence of the destruction of all artistic expression.

If we consider the whole extent of the crisis of contemporary society, I don't think it is possible still to regard leisure activities as a negation of the everyday. It has been recognized here that it is necessary to study "wasted time." But let us look at the recent evolution of this notion of wasted time. For classical capitalism, wasted time was time that was not devoted to production, accumulation, saving. The secular morality taught in bourgeois schools has instilled this rule of life. But it so happens that by an unexpected turn of events modern capitalism needs to increase consumption and "raise the standard of living" (bearing in mind that that expression is completely meaningless). Since at the same time production conditions, compartmentalized and clocked to the extreme, have become indefensible, the new morality already being conveyed in advertising, propaganda and all the forms of the dominant spectacle now frankly admits that wasted time is the time spent at work, the only purpose of which is earn enough to enable one to buy rest, consumption and entertainments -- a daily passivity manufactured and controlled by capitalism.

If we now consider the artificiality of the consumer needs prefabricated and ceaselessly stimulated by modern industry -- if we recognize the emptiness of leisure activities and the impossibility of rest -- we can pose the question more realistically: What would not be wasted time? Or to put it another way, the development of a society of abundance should lead to an abundance of what?

This can obviously serve as a touchstone in many regards. When, for example, in one of those papers where the flabby thinking of "leftist intellectuals" is displayed (France-Observateur) one reads a title like "The Little Car Out To Conquer Socialism" heading an article that explains that nowadays the Russians are beginning to pursue an American-style private consumption of goods, beginning naturally with cars, one cannot help thinking that one need not have mastered all of Hegel and Marx to realize that a socialism that gives way in the face of an invasion of the market by small cars is in no way the socialism for which the workers movement fought. The bureaucratic rulers of Russia must be opposed not in terms of their tactics or their dogmatism, but more fundamentally: because the meaning of people's lives has not really changed. And this is not some obscure, inevitable fate of an everyday life supposedly doomed to remain reactionary. It is a fate imposed on everyday life from the outside by the reactionary sphere of specialized rulers, regardless of the label under which they plan and regulate poverty in all its aspects.

The present depoliticization of many former leftist militants, their withdrawal from one type of alienation to plunge into another, that of private life, represents not so much a return to privacy, a flight from "historical responsibility," but rather a withdrawal from the specialized political sector that is always manipulated by others -- a sector where the only responsibility they ever took was that of leaving all responsibility to uncontrolled leaders; a sector where the communist project was sidetracked and betrayed. Just as one cannot simplistically oppose private life to public life without asking: what private life? what public life? (for private life contains the factors of its negation and supersession, just as collective revolutionary action harboured the factors of its degeneration), so it would be a mistake to assess the alienation of individuals within revolutionary politics when it is really a matter of the alienation of revolutionary politics itself. The problem of alienation should be tackled dialectically, so as to draw attention to the constantly recurring possibilities of alienation arising within the very struggle against alienation; but we should stress that this applies to the highest level of research (to the philosophy of alienation as a whole, for example) and not to the level of Stalinism, the explanation of which is unfortunately more gross.

Capitalist civilization has not yet been superseded anywhere, but it continues to produce its own enemies everywhere. The next rise of the revolutionary movement, radicalized by the lessons of past defeats and with a program enriched in proportion to the practical potentials of modern society (potentials that already constitute the material basis that was lacked by the "utopian" currents of socialism) -- this next attempt at a total contestation of capitalism will know how to invent and propose a different use of everyday life, and will immediately base itself on new everyday practices and on new types of human relationships (being no longer unaware that any conserving, within the revolutionary movement, of the relations prevailing in the existing society imperceptibly leads to a reconstitution of one or another variant of that society).

Just as the bourgeoisie, in its ascendant phase, had to ruthlessly liquidate everything that transcended earthly life (heaven, eternity), so the revolutionary proletariat -- which can never, without ceasing to be revolutionary, recognize itself in any past or any models -- will have to renounce everything that transcends everyday life. Or rather, everything that claims to transcend it: the spectacle, "historical" acts or pronouncements, the "greatness" of leaders, the mystery of specializations, the "immortality" of art and its supposed importance outside of life. In other words, it must renounce all the by-products of eternity that have survived as weapons of the world of the rulers.

The revolution in everyday life, breaking its present resistance to the historical (and to every kind of change), will create the conditions in which the present dominates the past and the creative aspects of life always predominate over the repetitive ones. We must therefore expect that the side of everyday life expressed by the concepts of ambiguity (misunderstandings, compromises, misuses) will decline considerably in importance in favour of their opposites: conscious choices and gambles.

The present artistic calling in question of language -- appearing at the same time as that metalanguage of machines which is nothing other than the bureaucratized language of the bureaucracy in power -- will then be superseded by higher forms of communication. The present notion of a decipherable social text will lead to new methods of writing this social text, in the direction my situationist comrades are presently seeking with unitary urbanism and some preliminary ventures in experimental behaviour. The central aim of an entirely reconverted and redirected industrial production will be the organization of new configurations of everyday life, the free creation of events.

The critique and perpetual re-creation of the totality of everyday life, before being carried out naturally by everyone, must be undertaken within the present conditions of oppression, in order to destroy those conditions.

An avant-garde cultural movement, even one with revolutionary sympathies, cannot accomplish this. Neither can a revolutionary party on the traditional model, even if it accords a large place to criticism of culture (understanding by that term the entirety of artistic and conceptual means through which a society explains itself to itself and shows itself goals of life). This culture and this politics are both worn out and it is not without reason that most people take no interest in them. The revolutionary transformation of everyday life -- which is not reserved for some vague future but is placed immediately before us by the development of capitalism and its unbearable demands (the only alternative being the reinforcement of the modern slavery) -- this transformation will mark the end of all unilateral artistic expression stocked in the form of commodities, at the same time as the end of all specialized politics.

This is going to be the task of a new type of revolutionary organization, from its inception.

GUY DEBORD

This talk was presented by tape recording 17 May 1961 at a conference of the Group for Research on Everyday Life convened in Paris by Henri Lefebvre.

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

Comments

Supr 4: Die Verfolgung der kunstler

A short text from Internationale Situationniste #6 (August 1961).

Author
Submitted by Fozzie on January 31, 2023

Individually, the artists of the modern era who do not simply reproduce the permissible mystifications have all clearly been more or less rejected to the fringes of social life. This is because they are obliged to pose — even through illusory or fragmentary means — the question of the meaning of this life: the question of its use; while it remains without meaning, it has no lawful use outside of passive consumption. By its very nature, then, it signals the wretched conditions of an uninhabitable world. And their personal exclusion from the world — by the comfortable or attractive separation of tragic elimination — is produced naturally, so to speak.

On the contrary, avant-garde groups — or individuals among them — who formulate a definitive program for changing all of these conditions come up against a consciously organized social repression. The forms of this repression have changed a lot since, say, forty years ago, with the development of society itself and that of its enemies.

In the Europe of the 1920's, fingers were pointed at whatever scandalized the permissible social and cultural values; the avant-garde was considered accursed. In the society that has developed since the second world war, there are no longer any values whatsoever, and as a result the accusation of not respecting a particular convention can no longer find an audience among the backwards sectors of the public, and remains attached to a rather outmoded system of coherent conventions (much like Christian conception). For those who carry on the project of creating new values, the controllers of culture and information no longer stir up scandal: they tend to be the unshakable organizers of silence.

These new conditions of struggle initially postpone the work of a new revolutionary avant-garde; hindering its formation and then slowing its development. But they also have a very positive sign: modern culture is empty; no solid force can be opposed to the decisions of this avant-garde, from the minute it is successful in making it known as such. The sole task of this avant-garde must be to impose a day of reckoning before it compromises its discipline and its program. This is exactly what the Situationist International intends to do.

This declaration was published in February 1961 in issue 4 of Spur, organ of the German section of the SI.

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

Comments

Colin Wilson on some grass reading a book

A short text with two quotes slagging off "angry young man" Colin Wilson from Internationale Situationniste #6 (August 1961).

Submitted by Fozzie on January 31, 2023

The most hotly rebels are also the most willingly spectacular, "the rebels we love to hate." And they're just about useless. After three or four years of all this, you'd have to be pretty dishonest to act as if the evidence of their conformity disappointed you, especially if you'd been smart enough never to have presented them to the public as genuine innovators. Once again, the dominant culture toys with its central contradiction: its simultaneous need for and terror of the novelty that is its death.

The reckless youth of these furious Englishmen was short-lived. . . . The "angry young men" movement rattled the window-panes of the bourgeoisie and filled hearts with hope. It was going to achieve something. Osborne has made it — and he's already settling in. Around 1956-57, word began to spread about these young writers who loudly proclaimed their refusal of every conformity, protesting against the inhuman living conditions forced upon modern man. . . . The group, however, was disparate, the common denominator "angry young men" corresponding more to a journalistic tendency than to a common program. . . . It certainly wasn't sufficient: today, the group no longer seems to have any significance, nor even an existence. The individual talents have extricated themselves from it. . . . Colin Wilson, the self-taught simpleton, has lapsed into a hazy mysticism, and so on. But they've been perfectly integrated into the literary society of their country.
— R. Kanters, L'Express (13 July 1961)

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. . . . 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.
— Editorial Note,
Internationale Situationniste #1 (June 1958)

Translated by Reuben Keehan. From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/is6.html

Comments

pataphysical squiggles

From Internationale Situationniste #6 (August 1961).

Author
Submitted by Fozzie on February 1, 2023

The history of religion seems to be made up of three stages — so-called materialist or natural religion, which reached its maturity in the bronze age; metaphysical religion, beginning with Zoroastrianism and developing through Judaism, Christianity and Islam to the Reformation of the 16th century; and finally, Jarry's ideology from the turn of the century, which has ended up laying the foundations of a new religion, a third kind of religion that could very well become the most widespread in the world by the 22nd century: pataphysical religion.

Until recently, the pataphysical enterprise has been attributed no religious significance, quite simply because outside the tiny circle of believers who publish the long running private newsletter Cahiers du Collège de Pataphysique, pataphysics has had no significance at all.

The honor of having introduced pataphysics to the world goes to the Americans, with the publication of a special issue of Evergreen Review that lets the great pataphysical satraps speak for themselves. While word "religion" is obviously never openly mentioned in this issue, the enormous success that it has enjoyed for the past year with the American intelligentsia as brought about a period of objective analysis of this new phenomenon, and it won't be long before they realize what's really at stake.

Natural religion was a spiritual confirmation of material life. Metaphysical religion represented the establishment of an ever-widening opposition between material life and spiritual life. The various degrees of this polarization were represented by various metaphysical beliefs, and were intensified and made all the more backward by an attachment natural rites and cults that were more or less successfully transformed into metaphysical rites, cults and myths. The absurdity of this cultural mythology's persistence at a time when scientific metaphysics have already triumphed was demonstrated clearly by Kierkegaard's choice of confirming Christianity: one must believe in absurdity. The next question was: why? And the obvious response was that secular political and social authorities need to maintain a spiritual justification for their power. This, of course, is a purely material, antimetaphysical argument from a time when the radical critique of all traditional mythologies was beginning.


Prehistoric designs for the Brueil Abbey at the College of Pataphysics. The extravagence and subtlety of the method can be measured by comparing it with Zackarie le Rouzic's "Corpus of Serious Signs of the Megalithic Monuments of Morbihan," which presented a sober and schematic version of the same designs that could be understood without the assistance of the imagination.

All sides, however, are calling for a new mythology capable of responding to the new social conditions. It is up this old sidetrack that surrealism, existentialism, and also lettrism have disappeared. The classical lettrists who persevered with this effort have gone even further — further backwards — by carefully assembling all the elements that have actually grown incompatible with a modern and universal belief: the revival of the idea of the messiah, and even of the resurrection of the dead; everything that guarantees the didactic character of belief. Now that politicians possess the means to bring about the end of the world in an instant, anything that has to do with last judgment has become governmental, perfectly secularized. Metaphysical opposition to the physical world has been permanently defeated. The fight has ended in a knockout.

The only winner in this debate is the scientific criterion of truth. A religion can no longer be considered as the truth if it conflicts with what is known as scientific truth; and a religion that does not represent the truth is not a religion. This is the conflict that is about to be overcome by pataphysical religion, which has placed one of most fundamental concepts of modern science at the level of the absolute: the idea that equivalents are constant.

Suitable ground for the theory of equivalents was already prepared with Christianity's introduction of the idea that all men are equal before God. But it was only with the development of science and industry that the principle was imposed in every area of life, culminating, with scientific socialism, in the social equivalence of all individuals.

The fact that the principle of equivalence could not longer be restricted to the spiritual world gave rise to the project of scientific surrealism, already sketched out in the theories of Alfred Jarry. To the Kierkegaardian concept of absurdity, all that was added was the priciple of the equivalence of absurdities (the equivalence of gods among themselves; and among gods, men and objects). Thus, the future religion was founded, the religion that cannot be beaten on its own ground: the pataphysical religion that encompasses all possible and impossible religions of the past, present and future indifferently.

If it were possible for this religion to go into the world completely unnoticed, if pataphysical beliefs were anonymously taught and never criticized, a seemingly irresolvable paradox would not be presented: the problem of pataphysical authority, the consecration of the inconsecrable (that is to say its appearance in social life in the same role as earlier religions). Indeed, this particular religion cannot become a social authority without becoming antipataphysical at the same time, and everything that seeks social recognition finds itself surrounded by this singular fact of social authority. Thus, pataphysical religion could very well be the unconscious victim of its own superiority over every common metaphysical religion, as there is certainly no possible reconciliation between superiority and equivalence.

To its credit, pataphysics has confirmed that there is no metaphysical justification for forcing everyone to believe in the same absurdity. The possibilities of art and the absurd are many. The logical conclusion to this principle could be an anarchist thesis: to each his own absurdity. The opposite is expressed by the legal power that forces every member of society to submit completely to the political absurdity of the State.

But it should be said that the acceptance of a pataphysical authority, such as the one currently being instituted, becomes a demagogic new weapon against the spirit of pataphysics. It is the pataphysical program itself that prevents the existence of a pataphysical program, making a Pataphysical Church impossible.

The impossibility of creating a pataphysical situation in social life also prevents the creation of a social situation in the name of pataphysics. The reasons have already been given. Equivalence is the complete elimination of any notion of situation, of event.

At this time, when pataphysics is, on the outside, very much placed in a certain cultural position, the inevitable consequences of this basic definition necessarily lead to the creation of a schism within the followers of pataphysics between pure anti-situationists and those who, on the pataphysical basis of equivalences, are all the same in favor the development of those organized absurdities known as games.

The game is the opening of pataphysics onto the world, and the realization of such games is the creation of situations. There is therefore a crisis caused by the crucial problem encountered by every adept of pataphysics: whether they should apply the situological method of becoming socially active, or flatly refuse to act in any situation whatsoever. It is in this instance that pataphysics well and truly becomes the religion most perfectly suited to the modern society of the spectacle: a religion of passivity, of pure absence.

There is also another problem that is no less serious, which demands a choice from the organization of the anti-organizers, the Situationist International. The SI is capable of completely adapting the pataphysical principle as antimetaphysical method: this occurs directly in the establishment of new games. The absurdity of superiority and absurd superiority are the very key to play, and authority is its essential object. By using the principle of equivalents as its point of departure, the game is free: the situation can completely construct itself, in a pure appearance of superiority and authority. But if, on the contrary, a metaphysical basis is chosen, whatever it may be, situology will automatically fall to the level of an authoritarily directed method of popular distraction, a reprise of the old formula of slavery: bread and circuses.

After a long period of maturation in largely ignored circles, the basic elements of a new game are now appearing. Whether these elements are complementary or hostile, only time will tell.

SI note

Shortly after his resignation from the SI, Asger Jorn committed himself, with this text and several other interventions, to making the situationists aware of the religious leanings of pataphysical ideology, propagated massively in the United States since the conversion of the editors of Evergreen Review.

Pataphysical ideology, which depends on a few aging participants in various activities in modern art, is itself the product of the aging of this "modern art" of the first half of the century. It preserves cold principles in a joke that is static and uncreative in the extreme. It accepts the world and thus follows the lead of all other religious cliques. "The pataphysician," declares B. Vian over the radio (cf. Dossier no. 12 du Collège), "if he truly has no reason to be moral, has none not to be. That is why he remains the only one with the power to be honest, without the decay of conformists."

It goes to show that the possibilities of the conjunction envisaged by Jorn can only be considered within his perspective of a schism, an apostasy of the least ecclesiastical pataphysicians. The SI believes that any religion is as risible as another; and guarantees a hostility to all religiouns, even science fiction.

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

Attachments

Comments

marville-078-paris-commune.jpg

From Internationale Situationniste #6 (August 1961).

Submitted by Fozzie on February 1, 2023

An expert — Chombart de Lauwe — has argued on the basis of precise experiments that the programs proposed by the planners can sometimes create feelings of discontent and revolt, which could have been partly avoided if we had a more profound knowledge of real behaviour, and above all of the motivations for this behaviour.

The grandeur and servitude of urbanism! Having suspiciously and with insistence sniffed out the urban planner, we are obliged to turn away from a lack of breeding and crudeness such as this. There's no question here of incriminating the popular verdict. The people have already declared themselves, with the same incongruity: 'you architect!' has always been, in Belgium, strong language. But since this particular expert sides today with popular opinion and applies himself, too, to sniffing out the planner, there we are, saved! And so the urbanist is officially convicted of inciting discontent and revolt, of 'almost' being the main provocateur in inciting them. We must hope for a swift reaction from the authorities; it would be unthinkable that hotbeds of revolt be openly stirred up by the very same people whose task it is to put them out. There is, here, a crime against social peace which only a council of war can settle. Will we see justice administered within its own ranks? Not unless the expert was only a wily urbanist after all.

If the planner cannot know the behavioural motivations of those he wishes to house in a way that best suits their nervous equilibrium, then urbanism might as well be integrated right now within criminological research (to deflect the actions of provocateurs — see above — and permit each person to keep his place within the hierarchy); in this case, then the science of criminal repression loses its raison d'être and changes its social rationale: urbanism will suffice to maintain the established order without recourse to the tastelessness of machine guns. Man assimilated to concrete, what a dream or what a blessed nightmare for the technocrats, were they to lose it, what still remains of their Higher Nervous activity and be preserved in the power and the hardness of concrete.

If the Nazis had known the contemporary urbanists they would have transformed the concentrations camps into H.L.M.s [Habitations à loyers modérés: rent-controlled apartment blocks]. But that solution appears too brutal to M. Chombart de Lauwe. The ideal urbanism ought to motivate everyone, without discontent or revolt, toward the final solution of the human question.

Urbanism is the most perfect and concrete realization of a nightmare. A nightmare, according to the Littré, is 'a state of acute anxiety that culminates in a startling awakening.' An awakening from what? Who has force fed us to the point of somnolence? It would be as to execute Eichmann as to hang the urbanists. This is to blame the targets when you find yourself on a rifle-range!

Planning is the big word, the biggest of the lot, some say. The specialists talk of economic planning, and planned urbanism, then they give a knowing wink, and, providing the performance is well rendered, all the world applauds. The high point of the spectacle is the planning of happiness. The manager is already leading his enquiry; precise experiments establish the density of tele-spectators; it is a matter of arranging the territory around them, building for them without distracting them from the preoccupations which nourish them through the eyes and the ears. This means assuring to all a peaceable existence and an equilibrium, with the prudent foresight of the pirate in the comic-strip who says: 'Dead men tell no tales.' Urbanism and information are complementary in capitalist and 'anti-capitalist' societies; they organize silence.


A euphorimeter

Habitation is the 'drink Coca-Cola' of urbanism. The necessity of drinking is replaced by Coca-Cola. To inhabit is to be at home everywhere, says Kiesler, but such a prophetic truth grabs nobody by the throat: it is a scarf against the increasing cold, even if it evokes a noose. We are inhabited; it is from this point that one should begin.

As public relations, the ideal urbanism is the conflict-free projection in space of the social hierarchy. Roadways, lawns, natural flowers and artificial forests lubricate the gears of subjection, render it lovable. In an Yves Touraine novel the State even offers an electronic masturbator to retired workers; economy and happiness both profit here.

A certain urbanism of prestige is necessary, claims Chombart de Lauwe. The spectacle he offers us makes Haussmann, the man who couldn't conceive of prestige of prestige outside of a rifle-range, seem positively quaint. This time it is a matter of scenically organizing the spectacle around everyday life, to let each person live within the bounds which correspond to the role capitalist society imposes on him, to further isolate him by educating him like a blindman to illusively recognize himself in a materialization of his own alienation.

The capitalist education of space is nothing other than education in a space where one loses one's shadow, where one ends up getting lost by dint of seeking to find oneself in what one is not. What a fine example of tenacity for all those teachers and other licensed organizers of influence.

The layout of a town, its streets, walls and neighbourhoods, form so many signs of a strange conditioning. What sign is recognizable there that could be ours? A few graffiti, words of refusal or unusual gestures inscribed in haste, whose interest does not register with learned positions, if not on the walls of Pompeii, a fossil city. But our cities are more fossilized still. We wish to live in countries of knowledge, among signs as alive as the friends we see every day. The revolution will also be the perpetual creation of signs which belong to all.

There is an incredible leadenness in everything related to urbanism. The word 'to construct' sinks straight to the bottom in a water where other possible words stay afloat. Wherever bureaucratic civilization has spread, the anarchy of individual contruction has been officially consecrated and taken over by the competent organs of power, in such a way that the instinct for construction extirpated like a vice and hardly survives except among children and primitives (irresponsible people, in administrative terminology). And among all those who, for want of changing their own lives, spend them all demolishing and rebuilding their hovels.

Urbanism is the art of reassuring, which it knows how to practise in its purest form: the ultimate courtesy of a power on the point of assuring total control of our minds.


Maximum and normal work surfaces in the horizontal plane

God and the City: Urbanism is the only abstract and non-existent force that can claim to exceed God in the post of porter left vacant by his death. With its ubiquity, its immense goodness, and, perhaps someday, its sovereign power, urbanism (or its project) would indeed have what it takes to frighten the Church, if ever there was the slightest doubt concerning the orthodoxy of power. But not to worry: the Church was 'urbanism' long before power; what has it to fear from a lay St Augustine?

There is something admirable to have coexist in the word 'habitation' some thousands of souls from whom even the hope of a last judgement is taken away. In this sense, the admirable caps the inhumane.

To industialize private life: 'Make your life a business,' such will be the new slogan. To suggest to each person that he organize his environment as a small factory to be run as a miniature enterprise, with its substitutes for machines, its top-quality products, its fixed capital of walls and furnishing, is not the best way for conveying the concerns of those gentlemen who possess a factory for real, a big one, which itself must also produce?

To make the horizon uniform: walls and artificial corners of vegetation assign new limits to the dream and to thought, since to know where it ends is, despite everything, to poeticize the desert.

The new towns will obliterate all trace of the battles traditional towns fought against the people they wanted to oppress. To root out from memory the truth that all quotidian life has its history and, through the myth of participation, to question the irreducible character of the lived, it is in these terms that the urbanists might express the objectives they pursue, if they deigned to set aside for a moment the spirit of seriousness which clouds their thinking. When the spirit of seriousness disappears the sky brightens, everything becomes clearer, or almost; thus, as the humorists well know, to destroy your adversary with H bombs is to condemn yourself to die a long, drawn-out death. How much longer must we make fun of the urbanists before they recognize in their premeditated acts of aggression against us that they are premeditating the plan of their own suicide?

Cemeteries are the most natural green areas, the only ones to be integrated harmoniously in the limits of future cities, as the lost paradises. Prime costs must cease to obstruct the desire to build, so claims the leftist builder. Let him lose no sleep, for this will be soon, when the desire to build will have disappeared.

France has been developing processes that turn construction into a Meccano game (J.-E. Havel). Even in the best case, a self-service is only ever a place where one serves, in the sense that a fork serves to eat.

In mixing Machiavellianism and reinforced concrete, urbanism has a clear conscience. We enter the reign of police niceties. To enslave with dignity.

Building with confidence: the reality of bay-windows cannot hide the fictive communication, the ambience of public places denounces the despair and isolation of private consciousness, the busy filling up of space is measured in dead time.

Project for a realistic urbanism: replace Piranesi's stairs with lifts, transform tombs into apartment houses, line sewers with trees, turn trash-cans into living rooms, pile up the shanties and design all your cities like museums; make use of everything, even of nothing.

Alienation is within reach: urbanism makes alienation tactile. The starving proletariat experienced alienation as a brutal suffering. We will live it in a blind suffering of things. Gropingly feeling different.

Honest and clear-sighted urbanists have the courage of their stylites. Must we make our lives a desert to legitimate their aspirations?

The keepers of philosophical faith discovered the existence of a working class some twenty years ago. At a time when sociologists are joining forces to decree that the working class no longer exists, they, the urbanists, have waited for neither philosophers nor sociologists to invent the inhabitant. Theirs will be the glory to have been among the first to discern the new dimensions of the proletariat. Their definition was all the more precise and concrete since they were able, through training and flexible methods, to guide towards a less brutal yet radical proletarianization of virtually the whole of society.


"Sure we know what guns are for. . . . Where can you house us?" "Come with me!"

A warning to the builders of ruins: the urbanists will be succeeded by the last troglodytes of shanty-towns and slums. They will know how to build. The privileged folk of the dormitory-towns will be only able to destroy. A lot may expected from such a revolutionary encounter.

The sacred, by devaluing itself, becomes mystery: urbanism is the Great Architect's final fall from grace.

Behind the infatuation with technology hides a revealed truth, indisputable as such: the need of 'habitation.' The down-and-out know very well what the real nature of such a truth is. He better than anyone gauges, among the trashcans where an interdiction on dwelling obliges him to live, how much building his life and building his home are indistinguishable on the only plane of truth there is, the practical one. But the exile in which our policed world maintains him renders his experience so derisory and difficult that the licensed builder would find in this a pretext for justifying himself — supposing, absurdly, that power were to cease safeguarding his existence.

It appears that the working class no longer exists. Today, many ex-proletarians can have access to the comfort formerly reserved for a minority: so goes the familiar tune. But isn't it rather an increasing quantity of comfort which gives them an itch to make demands? And so a certain organization of comfort, it seems, proletarianizes, as by contagion, all those it contaminates through the power of things. Now, the power of things is exercised through the intervention of the ruling administrators, priests of an abstract order whose only privilege will sooner or later be to reign summarily over an administrative center surrounded by ghettos. The last survivor will die of boredom, just as a spider dies of starvation in the middle of its web.

We have to build fast, there are so many people to house, say the humanists of reinforced concrete. We have to dig trenches without delay, say the generals, there's the fatherland to save. Isn't it a bit unfair to laud the first and laugh at the second? In the era of missiles and conditioning the jest of the generals is at least a jest in good taste. But to erect trenches in the air under the same pretext!

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

Attachments

Comments

a blurry black and white photo which came with the original article

The usual updates, from Internationale Situationniste #6 (August 1961), including the exclusion of Maurice Wyckaert and resignation of Asger Jorn.

Submitted by Fozzie on February 2, 2023

At the beginning of an article published last winter in the review Dissent (volume VIII, number 1), Edwin M. Schur observed with a touch of melancholy:

Regular drug users are inceasingly becoming avant-garde heroes and modern scapegoats at the same time. Jack Gelber, William Burroughs, Alexander Trocchi and others have stimulated interest in the "junky" lifestyle. According to Norman Mailer, these rebels even consider the use of narcotics to be part of a new radicalism, justified somewhat by the futility of current opposition in strictly political terms! In truth, "the end of ideology" has seen its own terrible realization. . . .

Our comrade Alexander Trocchi was fortunately able to return to Europe at the end of May 1961. As there are a number of rumors circulating, the editors of Internationale Situationniste are not in a position to officially confirm whether he escaped the persecutions of the New York police by secretly crossing the Canadian border. In spite of the monstrous imbecility of the accusation, which was clearly demonstrated by two earlier situationist publications, we be can sure that this affair is by no means over.

Modern society is currently based in twenty highly industrialized nations, where every tendency of its transformation and the essential phenomena of its crisis are constituted. The countries in question are Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States (this list matches almost exactly that of nations that have sufficient technological capacities to produce nuclear arms). The situationist movement already extends to 11 of these 20 nations — more than half. We have even reached a proportion approaching 2/3 if we discount those countries outside the European majority: indeed the situationist organization, which spreads from this zone, has reached 9 nations out of 14.

In Munich in January, a common declaration by the German and Swedish sections of the SI, "The Avant-garde is Undesirable!", was published on the occasion of a modernist cultural exhibition disrupted by our comrades. This pamphlet, signed by Kunzelmann, Prem, Sturm and Zimmer on the one hand; Steffan Larsson, K. Lindell and J. Nash on the other, and thrown into the crowd at the opening, declared that

"if an avant-garde puts the very meaning of life into question and goes in search of the realization of the claims of this field of operations, it finds itself cut off from all social possibility. The aesthetic by-products of the avant-garde — paintings, films and poems, etc. — instantly become desirable and completely ineffectual. What is undesirable is the program of an entirely new organization of the conditions of life that will alter the very basis of society."

Some time earlier, the German section published a manifesto on the festival, notably declaring:

"Boycott all systems and all conventions in power! They have lost the game. . . . The festival is the unpopular art of the people. Creativity makes its festival with all things through continuous recreation. Just as Marx discovered a scientific revolution, we have discovered a festive revolution. . . . A revolution without festivals is not a revolution. There is no artistic freedom without the power of the festival. . . . Our demand is the most serious of games."

The Central Council of the SI met for the second time in Paris from 6 to 8 January. Most of its work was devoted to the study of the construction of an experimental city, beginning with a few conditions put forth by an Italian cultural center. The SI admitted that they could only pursue these talks in the perspective of recognizing the right of the builders to organize the entire lifestyle of this zone; the permanent arrangement of 20% of the buildings; and the right to destroy the buildings if they became obstacles to rearrangement (this last precondition has since brought an end to the negotiations). Kotányi proposed presenting this project as a city of therapeutic play, emphasizing that "the therapeutic ideas of modern psychology have never been realized in a structure"; and, more precisely, to consider the realization of the architecture described by Sade. He also showed that "the military industry is the present measure of society's total technical capacity. Our projects imply techniques that notoriously supersede the capacities of the construction industry. It must therefore be admitted that more militarily oriented experiments hold a great deal of interest for us" (for example the cyclotron in Geneva, produced with the combined resources of several States). Jorn approved, observing that "for those who possess cultural resources, artists are cave dwellers whose only right is to go in search of metallic industrial debris to use in their sculptures. We will correct this little error! Modestly, we are declaring our right to initiate modern art, that is, to emerge from the caves of artistic civilization." Jörgen Nash specified that "every utopian construction is formulated on the basis of an ideal city. We are against the ideal. We have to critique the idealist perfectionism in the old utopian conception (and thus critique Fourier). We will not settle for what is merely satisfactory." The Council adopted a number of basic hypotheses for the definition of this experimental micro-city, on an uninhabited island off the southern coast of Italy.

H. Prem, in place of Sturm, who was unable to make it to this session, brought the Council's attention to the undignified treatment reserved for Norman Mailer by the American media and police, who had discredited a subversive intellectual under the pretext of assaulting his wife with a knife. The council decided on the publication of a special issue of our German journal on UU; and finalized the plan for Internationale Situationniste #6. Nash submitted a number of questions to the Council, concerning the logistical organization of the Göteborg conference.

The third session of the Central Council took place in Munich from 11 to 13 April. Besides tending to current matters, the council decided to adopt sanctions in response to the pressure exerted two weeks earlier by the art dealer Van de Loo. This person, more or less involved with the Ruhr's bourgeois enterprise of the attempting to reinvent unitary urbanism to their own ends, believed he could resort to economic blackmail toward four German situationists who were financially dependent on his offices, threatening them with dismissal if they did not repudiate certain aspects of the SI's activities (namely Debord). The German situationists instantly chose to break with the dealer. Immediately after, he sent a telegraph promising them a tidy sum if they would only resume relations with him. They did not respond to what they considered a bad joke, thus obliging "the acquirer" to explain later that his clumsy telegram was indeed a joke, pure and simple (this was obviously the first time in his life that he had joked about the question of money). This remarkable affair, unique in the history of the cultural avant-garde, at least by some aspects whose weight is not original in the least, has unfortunately led to the loss of Maurice Wyckaert. Wyckaert, also linked to the dealer, although with a considerably wealthier base, made it known to everyone that he would only break with Van de Loo if the latter broke with the SI first. But the Council found it perfectly unacceptable to even think that the dealer had any freedom to "to break with the SI" when he had absolutely nothing to do with them. He simply had tentative license to mix in SI matters as an art dealer entertaining personal relationships with several situationists; and through threats and promises, had aimed at nothing less than to create a part for himself in the SI, with the intention of weakening its politics. Wyckaert was therefore excluded.

The same session of the Council accepted the resignation of Asger Jorn in view of various personal circumstances that would make his participation in the organized activity of the SI extremely difficult — he has nevertheless demonstrated his complete accord with the SI. The Council, momentarily reduced to four members by these departures, agreed not to reconvene before the next conference of the International, at which it will be redesigned.

On a completely different subject, Mr Jean Cau, in the Express of 27 July, writes that Metz station, "built with somber Germanic delirium, will host the next Conference of the Surrealist International." In fact, the fifth Conference of the Situationist International, which will gather in the days that follow, will convene in the Swedish port of Göteborg on the 28 August.

Translated by Reuben Keehan. From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/news6.html

Comments

Cover of Internationale Situationiste #7

central bulletin published by the sections of the situationist international

April 1962

Director: G.-E. Debord

Mail: 32, rue de la Montagne-Geneviève, Paris 5e

This bulletin is edited by the Central Council of the SI: Debord, Kotányi, Lausen, Vaneigem.

All texts published in Internationale Situationniste may be freely reproduced, translated or adapted, even without indication of origin.

Submitted by libcom on September 8, 2005

hibernation.png

From Internationale Situationniste #7 (April 1962).

Submitted by libcom on September 8, 2005

The "balance of terror" between two rival groups of states -- the most visible basic aspect of global politics at the present moment -- is also a balance of resignation: the resignation of each antagonist to the permanence of the other; and within their frontiers, the resignation of people to a fate that escapes them so completely that the very existence of the planet is far from certain, hinging on the prudence and skill of inscrutable strategists. This in turn reinforces a more general resignation to the existing order, to the coexisting powers of the specialists who organize this fate. These powers find an additional advantage in this balance since it permits the rapid liquidation of any original liberatory experience arising on the margin of their systems, particularly within the current movement of the underdeveloped countries. It was through the same method of neutralizing one menace with another -- regardless of who the particular victorious protector may be -- that the revolutionary impetus of the Congo was crushed by sending in the United Nations Expeditionary Corps (two days after their arrival in early July 1960 the Ghanaian troops, the first on the scene, were used to break a transportation strike in Leopoldville) and that of Cuba by the formation of a one-party system (in March 1962 General Lister, whose role in the repression of the Spanish revolution is well known, was named Assistant Chief of Staff to the Cuban Army).

In reality the two camps are not actually preparing for war, but for the indefinite preservation of this balance, which mirrors the internal stabilization of their power. It goes without saying that this will entail an enormous mobilization of resources, since it is imperative to continually escalate the spectacle of possible war. Thus Barry Commoner, head of the scientific committee assigned by the United States government to estimate the destruction that would result from a thermonuclear war, announces that after one hour of such a war 80 million Americans would be killed and that the survivors would have no hope of living normally afterwards. The Chiefs of Staff, who in their projections now count only in megabodies (one megabody = one million corpses), have admitted the impossibility of calculating beyond the first half day since experimental evidence is lacking to make any meaningful estimates at such a level of destruction. According to Nicolas Vichney (Le Monde, 5 January 1962), one extremist faction of American defense doctrine has gone so far as to argue that "the best deterrent would consist of the possession of an enormous thermonuclear bomb buried underground. If the enemy attacked, the bomb would be detonated and the Earth would be blown apart."

The theorists of this "Doomsday System" have certainly found the ultimate weapon for enforcing submission; they have for the first time translated the refusal of history into precise technical powers. But the rigid logic of these doctrinaires only responds to one aspect of the contradictory needs of the society of alienation, whose indissoluble project is to prevent people from living while it organizes their survival (see the opposition of the concepts of life and survival described by Vaneigem in Basic Banalities). Thus the Doomsday System, through its contempt for survival -- which is still the indispensable condition for the present and future exploitation of human labor -- can only play the role of last resort for the ruling bureaucracies: the insane proof of their seriousness. But in order to be fully effective in reinforcing people's submission, the spectacle of a war to come must henceforth extend its sway over the organization of our present peacetime existence, while simultaneously accommodating itself to the basic requirements of that organization.

In this regard the extraordinary development of fallout shelters during 1961 is certainly a decisive turning point in the Cold War, a qualitative leap that will one day be seen as of immense importance in the formation of a cybernetized totalitarian society on a global scale. It began in the United States, where Kennedy in his State of the Union Address last January was already able to assure the Congress: "The nation's first serious civil defense shelter program is under way, identifying, marking and stocking fifty million spaces; and I urge your approval of federal incentives for the construction of public fallout shelters in schools and hospitals and similar centers." This state-controlled organization of survival has rapidly spread, more or less secretly, to other major countries of the two camps. West Germany, for example, was first of all concerned with the survival of Chancellor Adenauer and his team (the disclosure of the plans to this end led to the seizure of the Munich magazine Quick). Sweden and Switzerland are at the point of installing collective shelters under their mountains, where workers buried with their factories will be able to continue to produce without interruption until the grand finale of the Doomsday System. But the launching pad of the civil defense policy is the United States, where a number of flourishing companies, such as the Peace o' Mind Shelter Company (Texas), the American Survival Products Corporation (Maryland), Fox Hole Shelter, Inc. (California) and the Bee Safe Manufacturing Company (Ohio), are advertising and installing countless individual shelters built as private property to ensure the survival of each family. This fad is giving rise to a new interpretation of religious morality, certain clergymen expressing the opinion that one's duty will clearly consist of refusing entry to friends or strangers, even by means of arms, in order to guarantee the salvation of one's own family. Morality had to be adapted to this process of intensifying the terrorism of conformity that underlies all the publicity of modern capitalism. It was already hard, faced with one's family and neighbors, not to have the given model of automobile which a given salary level enables one to buy on credit (a salary level always recognizable in the American-type urban housing developments because the location of the dwelling is precisely determined by the level of salary). It will be even more difficult not to guarantee one's family's survival status once that commodity is on the market.

It is generally estimated that in the United States since 1955 the relative saturation of the demand for "durable goods" has led to an insufficiency of the consumer stimulus necessary for economic expansion. Hence the enormous vogue for trendy gadgets of all sorts, which represent an easily manipulable development in the semidurable goods sector. It is easy to see the shelters' important role in this necessary boost of expansion. With the installation of shelters and their foreseeable offshoots and by-products, all the appurtenances of life on the surface will need to be duplicated for the new duplicate life underground. These investments in subterranean strata as yet unexploited by the affluent society are boosting the sale both of semidurable goods already in use on the surface (as with the boom in canned foods, of which each shelter needs a huge supply) and of particular new gadgets, such as plastic bags for the bodies of people who will die in the shelter and, naturally, continue to lay there with the survivors.

It is easy to see that these (already widespread) individual shelters could not possibly work, if only because of such gross technical oversights as the absence of an independent oxygen supply; and that even the most perfected collective shelters would offer only the slightest possibility for survival if a thermonuclear war was actually accidentally unleashed. But here, as in every racket, "protection" is only a pretext. The real purpose of the shelters is to test -- and thereby reinforce -- people's submissiveness, and to manipulate this submissiveness to the advantage of the ruling society. The shelters, as a creation of a new consumable commodity in the society of abundance, prove more than any previous commodity that people can be made to work to satisfy highly artificial needs, needs that most certainly "remain needs without ever having been desires" (Preliminaries Toward Defining a Unitary Revolutionary Program) and that do not have the slightest chance of becoming desires. The power of this society, its formidable automatic genius, can be measured by this extreme example. If this system were to go to the point of bluntly proclaiming that it imposes such an empty and hopeless existence that the best solution for everyone would be to go hang themselves, it would still succeed in managing a healthy and profitable business by producing standardized ropes. But regardless of all its capitalist wealth, the concept of survival means suicide on the installment plan, a renunciation of life every day. The network of shelters -- which are not intended to be used for a war, but right now -- presents a bizarre caricatural picture of existence under a perfected bureaucratic capitalism. A neo-Christianity has revived its ideal of renunciation with a new humility compatible with a new boost of industry. The world of shelters acknowledges itself as an air-conditioned vale of tears. The coalition of all the managers and their various types of priests will be able to agree on one unitary program: mass hypnosis plus superconsumption.

Survival as the opposite of life, if rarely voted for so clearly as by the buyers of shelters in 1961, can be found at all levels of the struggle against alienation. It is found in the old conception of art, which stressed survival through one's works, an admission of a renunciation of life -- art as excuse and consolation (principally since the bourgeois era of aesthetics, that secular substitute for the religious otherworld). And it is found just as much at the level of the most basic needs, those of food and shelter, with the "blackmail of utility" denounced in the "Basic Program of Unitary Urbanism" (Internationale Situationniste #6), the blackmail that eliminates any human critique of the environment "by the simple argument that one needs a roof over one's head."

The new habitat that is now taking shape with the large housing developments is not really distinct from the architecture of the shelters; it merely represents a less advanced level of that architecture. (The two are closely related and the direct passage from one to the other is already envisaged: the first example in France is a development presently being built in Nice, the basement of which is designed to serve as an atomic shelter for its inhabitants.) The concentration-camp organization of the surface of the earth is the normal state of the present society in formation; its condensed subterranean version merely represents that society's pathological excess. This subterranean sickness reveals the real nature of the "health" at the surface. The urbanism of despair is rapidly becoming dominant on the surface, not only in the population centers of the United States, but also in those of much more backward countries of Europe and even, for example, in the Algeria of the neocolonialist period proclaimed since the "Constantine Plan." At the end of 1961 the first version of the national plan for French territorial development (whose formulation was later toned down) complained in its chapter on Paris of "an inactive population's stubborn insistence on living in the capital" despite the fact that the authors of the report, licensed specialists of happiness and practicality, pointed out that "they could live more agreeably outside Paris." They therefore urged the elimination of this distressing irrationality by the enactment of legal measures to "systematically discourage this inactive population from living in Paris."

Since the main worthwhile activity in this society obviously consists in systematically discouraging the plans made by its managers (until such point as the latter are concretely eliminated), and since those managers are much more constantly aware of this danger than are the drugged masses of executants, the planners are erecting their defenses in all the modern projects of territorial organization. The planning of shelters for the population, whether in the normal form of dwellings or in the "affluent" form of family tombs for preventive habitation, in reality serves to shelter the planners' own power. The rulers who control the architectural incarceration and isolation of their subjects also know how to entrench themselves for strategic purposes. The Haussmanns of the twentieth century no longer stop at facilitating the deployment of their repressive forces by partitioning the old urban clusters into manageable city blocks divided by wide avenues. At the same time that they disperse the population over a vast area in the new prefabricated cities which represent this partitioning in its purest state (where the inferiority of the masses, disarmed and deprived of means of communication, is sharply increased compared with the continually more technically equipped police), they erect inaccessible capital cities where the ruling bureaucracy, for greater security, can constitute the whole of the population.

Different stages of development of these government-cities can be noted. The "Military Zone" of Tirana is a section cut off from the city and defended by the army, wherein are concentrated the homes of the rulers of Albania, the Central Committee building, and the schools, hospitals, stores and diversions for this autarkic elite. The administrative city of Rocher Noir, which was built in a single year to serve as the capital of Algeria when it became evident that the French authorities were no longer capable of maintaining themselves normally in a large city, has exactly the same function as the "Military Zone" of Tirana, though it was erected in open country. Finally, there is the supreme example, Brasilia, the bureaucratic capital that is also the classic expression of functionalist architecture. Parachuted into the center of a vast desert, its inauguration came just at the moment when President Quadros was dismissed by his military and there were premonitions of civil war in Brazil.

Things having gone this far, many specialists are beginning to denounce a number of disturbing absurdities. This is due to their having failed to comprehend the central rationality (the rationality of a coherent delirium) that governs these partial, apparently accidental absurdities, to which their own activities inevitably contribute. Their denunciations of the absurd are thus themselves inevitably absurd, both in their forms and in their means. What is one to think of the naïveté of the nine hundred professors of all the universities and research institutes of the New York-Boston region who in the New York Herald Tribune (30 December 1961) solemnly addressed themselves to President Kennedy and Governor Rockefeller -- a few days before Kennedy proudly issued an initial order for fifty million shelter spaces -- in order to convince them of the perniciousness of "civil defense" development? Or of the horde of sociologists, judges, architects, policemen, psychologists, teachers, hygienists, psychiatrists and journalists who never cease gathering in congresses, conferences and committee meetings of all sorts, all urgently seeking some way to humanize the housing developments? Humanizing housing developments is as ridiculous a notion as humanizing atomic war, and for the same reasons. The shelters reduce not war but the threat of war to "human proportions" -- "human" in modern capitalist terms: marketable human consumption. This sort of investigation of possible humanization strives quite explicitly for a joint working out of the most effective lies for the repression of people's resistance. While boredom and total lack of social life characterize the suburban housing developments in a way as immediate and tangible as a Siberian cold wave, some women's magazines now go to those new suburbs to photograph their fashion models and interview satisfied people. Since the stupefying power of such environments is discernable in the intellectual underdevelopment of the children, their maladjustment is blamed on their previous slum upbringing. The latest reformist theory places its hopes in a sort of culture center -- though without using that particular term so as not to frighten anyone away. In the plans of the Seine Architects Union (Le Monde, 22 December 1961) the prefabricated "bistro-club" that will everywhere humanize their work is presented as a cubic "plastic cell" (28 x 18 x 4 meters) comprising "a stable element: the bistro, which will sell tobacco and magazines, but not alcohol; the remainder will be reserved for various craft activities. . . . It should become a seductive showcase. Hence the aesthetic conception and the quality of the materials will be carefully designed to give their full effect night and day. The play of lights should in fact communicate the life of the bistro-club."

Thus is presented to us, in profoundly revealing terms, a discovery that "could facilitate social integration on a level that would forge the spirit of a small city." The absence of alcohol will be little noticed: in France youth gangs no longer need alcohol to inspire them to go on rampages. The French delinquents seem to have broken with the French tradition of mass alcoholism, which is still so important in the "hooliganism" of the Eastern bloc, while not having yet come around, like American youth, to the use of marijuana or stronger drugs. Though stuck in such an empty transitional period, between the stimulants of two distinct historical stages, they are nevertheless expressing a sharp violence in response to this world we are describing and to the horrible prospect of occupying their dismal niche in it. In any case, if we leave aside the factor of revolt, the unionized architects' project has a certain coherence: their glass bistros are intended as a means of supplementary control on the way to that total surveillance of production and consumption that actually constitutes the famous integration they aim at. The candidly avowed recourse to the aesthetics of the show-window is perfectly illuminated by the theory of the spectacle: in these nonalcoholic bars the consumers themselves become as spectacular as the objects of consumption, for lack of any other attraction. Totally reified man has his place in the show-window as a desirable image of reification.

The internal defect of the system is that it cannot totally reify people; it also needs to make them act and participate, without which the production and consumption of reification would come to a stop. The reigning system is thus in conflict with history -- including its own history, which is at once the history of its reinforcement and the history of the opposition to it.

Today (after a century of struggles and after the traditional or newly formed rulers' liquidation, between the two world wars, of the entire classical workers movement which represented the force of general contestation), in spite of certain appearances, the dominant world more than ever presents itself as permanent on the basis of an enrichment and an infinite extension of an irreplaceable model. We can comprehend this world only by contesting it. And this contestation is neither true nor realistic except insofar as it is a contestation of the totality.

This explains the astonishing lack of ideas evident in all the acts of culture, of politics, of the organization of life, and in everything else -- the lameness of the modernist builders of functionalist cities is only a particularly glaring example. The intelligent specialists are intelligent only in playing the game of specialists; hence the timid conformity and fundamental lack of imagination that make them grant that this or that product is useful, or good, or necessary. The root of the prevailing lack of imagination cannot be grasped unless one is able to imagine what is lacking -- that is, what is missing, hidden, forbidden, and yet possible, in modern life.

This is not a theory without links to the way people see their own lives; it is, on the contrary, a reality in the minds of people as yet without links with theory. Those who really "cohabit with the negative" (in the Hegelian sense) and explicitly recognize this lack as their platform and their power will bring to light the only positive project that can overthrow the wall of sleep; and the measures of survival; and the doomsday bombs; and the megatons of architecture.

SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL (1962)

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

Comments

From Internationale Situationniste #7 (April 1962).

Submitted by libcom on September 8, 2005

As the world of the spectacle extends its reign it approaches the climax of its offensive, provoking new resistances everywhere. These resistances are very little known precisely because the reigning spectacle is designed to present an omnipresent hypnotic image of unanimous submission. But they do exist and are spreading.

Everyone talks about the youth rebellion in the advanced industrial countries, though without understanding much about it (see "Unconditional Defense" in issue #6 of this journal1 ). Militant publications like Socialisme ou Barbarie (Paris) and Correspondence (Detroit) have published well-documented articles on workers' continual on-the-job resistance to the whole organization of work and on their depoliticization and their disillusionment with the unions, which have become a mechanism for integrating workers into the society and a supplementary weapon in the economic arsenal of bureaucratized capitalism. As the old forms of opposition reveal their ineffectiveness, or more often their complete inversion into complicity with the existing order, an irreducible dissatisfaction spreads subterraneanly, undermining the edifice of the affluent society. The "old mole" that Marx evoked in his "Toast to the Proletarians of Europe" is still digging away, the specter is reappearing in all the nooks and crannies of our televised Elsinore Castle, whose political mists are dissipated as soon as workers councils come into existence and for as long as they continue to reign.

Just as the first organization of the classical proletariat was preceded, during the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, by a period of isolated "criminal" acts aimed at destroying the machines of production that were depriving people of their work, we are presently witnessing the first appearance of a wave of vandalism against the machines of consumption that are just as certainly depriving us of our life. In both cases the significance obviously does not lie in the destruction itself, but in the rebelliousness which could potentially develop into a positive project going to the point of reconverting the machines in a way that increases people's real power over their lives. Leaving aside the havoc perpetrated by groups of adolescents, we can point out a few examples of actions by workers that are in large part incomprehensible from the classical "protests and demands" perspective.

On 9 February 1961 in Naples factory workers coming off the day shift found that the streetcars that ordinarily took them home were not running, the drivers having launched a lightning strike because several of them had just been laid off. The workers demonstrated their solidarity with the strikers by throwing various projectiles at the company offices, and then bottles of gasoline which set fire to part of the streetcar station. They then burned several buses while successfully holding off police and firemen. Several thousand of them spread through the city, smashing store windows and electric signs. During the night troops had to be called in to restore law and order, and armored cars moved on Naples. This aimless and totally spontaneous demonstration was obviously a direct revolt against commuting time, which is such a burdensome addition to wage slavery time in modern cities. Sparked by a chance minor incident, this revolt immediately began to extend to the whole consumer-society decor (recently plastered over the traditional poverty of southern Italy): the store windows and neon signs, being at once its most symbolic and most fragile points, naturally drew the first attacks, just as happens during the rampages of rebellious youth.

On August 4 in France striking miners at Merlebach attacked twenty-one cars parked in front of the management buildings. All the commentators pointed out dumbfoundedly that nearly all these automobiles belonged to the workers' fellow employees at the mine. Who can fail to see in this action -- over and beyond the innumerable reasons that always justify aggression on the part of the exploited -- a gesture of self-defense against the central object of consumer alienation?

The strikers of Liège [Belgium] who attempted to destroy the machinery of the newspaper La Meuse on 6 January 1961 attained one of the peaks of consciousness of their movement in thus attacking the means of information held by their enemies. (Since the means of transmitting information are jointly monopolized by the government and the leaders of the socialist and union bureaucracies, this is precisely the crucial point of the struggle, the barrier that continues to bar workers' "wildcat" struggles from any perspective of power and thus condemns them to disappear.) Another symptom, though less interesting because more contingent on the de Gaulle regime's clumsy propagandistic excesses, is nevertheless worth noting in the following communiqué of the unions of French journalists and radio and television technicians last February 9: "Our fellow reporters and technicians who were covering the demonstration Thursday evening were attacked by the crowd merely because they were bearing the 'Radio-Télévision Francaise' insignia. This fact is significant. This is why the SJRT and SUT unions consider themselves justified in stressing in all seriousness that the lives of our fellow reporters and technicians depend on the respect in which their reports are held." Of course, along with the first concrete reactions against the forces of conditioning we cannot close our eyes to the extent to which this conditioning continues to prove successful, even within very combative workers' actions. Thus, when at the beginning of the year the Decazeville miners delegated twenty of their number to go on a hunger strike, they were fighting on the spectacular terrain of the enemy by relying on the tear-jerking potential of twenty stars. They thus inevitably lost, since their only chance of success would have been to do whatever was necessary to extend their collective intervention beyond their limited sector (the only industry they were blocking having already been losing money anyway). Capitalist social organization and its oppositional by-products have so effectively propagated parliamentary and spectacular ideas that revolutionary workers often tend to forget that representation must always be kept to the essential minimum and used as little as possible. But it isn't only industrial workers who are fighting against brutalization. The Berlin actor Wolfgang Neuss perpetrated a most suggestive act of sabotage in last January by placing a notice in the paper Der Abend giving away the identity of the killer in a television detective serial that had been keeping the masses in suspense for weeks.

The assault of the first workers movement against the whole organization of the old world came to an end long ago, and nothing can bring it back to life. It failed. Certainly it achieved immense results, but not the ones it had originally intended. No doubt such deviation toward partially unexpected results is the general rule in human actions; but the one exception to this rule is precisely the moment of revolutionary action, the moment of the all-or-nothing qualitative leap. The classical workers movement must be reexamined without any illusions, particularly without any illusions regarding its various political and pseudotheoretical heirs, for all they have inherited is its failure. The apparent successes of this movement are actually its fundamental failures (reformism or the establishment of a state bureaucracy), while its failures (the Paris Commune or the 1934 Asturian revolt) are its most promising successes so far, for us and for the future. This movement must be precisely delineated in time. The classical workers movement can be considered to have begun a couple decades before the official formation of the International, with the first linkup of communist groups of several countries that Marx and his friends organized from Brussels in 1845. And it was completely finished after the failure of the Spanish revolution, that is, after the Barcelona May days of 1937.

We need to rediscover the whole truth of this period and to reexamine all the oppositions between revolutionaries and all the neglected possibilities, without any longer being impressed by the fact that some won out over others and dominated the movement; for we now know that the movement within which they were successful was an overall failure. Marx's thought is obviously the first which must be rediscovered -- a task that should not present much difficulty in view of the extensive existing documentation and the crudeness of the lies about it. But it is also necessary to reassess the anarchist positions in the First International, Blanquism, Luxemburgism, the council movement in Germany and Spain, Kronstadt, the Makhnovists, etc. Without overlooking the practical influence of the utopian socialists. All this, of course, not with the aim of scholarship or academic eclecticism, but solely in order to contribute toward the formation of a new, profoundly different revolutionary movement, a movement of which we have seen so many premonitory signs over the last few years, one of which is our own existence. We must understand these signs through the study of the classical revolutionary project and vice versa. It is necessary to rediscover the history of the very movement of history, which has been so thoroughly hidden and distorted. It is, moreover, only in this enterprise (and in a few experimental artistic groups generally linked to it) that seductive modes of behavior have appeared -- modes that enable one to take an objective interest in modern society and the possibilities it contains.

There is no other way to be faithful to, or even simply to understand, the actions of our comrades of the past than to profoundly reconceive the problem of revolution, which has been increasingly deprived of thought as it has become posed more intensely in concrete reality. But why does this reconception seem so difficult? Starting from an experience of free everyday life (that is, from a quest for freedom in everyday life) it is not so difficult. It seems to us that this question is quite concretely felt today among young people. And to feel it with enough urgency enables one to rediscover lost history, to salvage and rejudge it. It is not difficult for thought that concerns itself with questioning everything that exists. It is only necessary not to have abandoned philosophy (as have virtually all the philosophers), not to have abandoned art (as have virtually all the artists), and not to have abandoned contestation of present reality (as have virtually all the militants). When they are not abandoned, these questions all converge toward the same supersession. The specialists, whose power is geared to a society of specialization, have abandoned the critical truth of their disciplines in order to preserve the personal advantages of their function. But all real researches are converging toward a totality, just as real people are going to come together in order to try once again to escape from their prehistory.

Many people are skeptical about the possibility of a new revolutionary movement, continually repeating that the proletariat has been integrated or that the workers are now satisfied, etc. This means one of two things: either they are declaring themselves satisfied (in which case we will fight them without any equivocation); or they are identifying themselves with some category separate from the workers, such as artists (in which case we will fight this illusion by showing them that the new proletariat is tending to encompass virtually everybody).

There are related misconceptions about the Third World. Apocalyptic fears or hopes regarding the movements of revolt in the colonized or semicolonized countries overlook this central fact: the revolutionary project must be realized in the industrially advanced countries. Until it is, the movements in the underdeveloped zone seem doomed to follow the model of the Chinese revolution, which began just as the classical workers movement was being destroyed and whose entire subsequent evolution has been dominated by the mutation it suffered due to that destruction. It remains true that the existence of these anticolonialist movements, even if they are polarized around the bureaucratic Chinese model, creates a disequilibrium in the external confrontation of the two great counterbalanced blocs, destabilizing any division of the world by their rulers and owners. But the security of the stakes in the planetary poker game is threatened just as much by the internal disequilibrium that still prevails in the factories of Manchester and East Berlin.

The radical minorities that in obscurity managed to survive the crushing of the classical workers movement (whose force the ruse of history transformed into state police) have handed down the truth of that movement, but only as an abstract truth of the past. Their honorable resistance to force has succeeded in preserving a maligned tradition, but not in redeveloping it into a new force. The formation of new organizations depends on a deeper critique, translated into acts. There must be a complete break with ideology, in which revolutionary groups think they possess official titles guaranteeing their function (that is, we must resume the Marxian critique of the role of ideologies). It is thus necessary to leave the terrain of specialized revolutionary activity -- the terrain of the self-mystification of "serious politics" -- because it has long been seen that such specialization encourages even the best people to demonstrate stupidity regarding all other questions; with the result that they end up failing even in their merely political struggles, since the latter are inseparable from all other aspects of the overall problem of our society. Specialization and pseudoseriousness are among the primary defensive outposts that the organization of the old world occupies in everyone's mind. A revolutionary association of a new type will also break with the old world by permitting and demanding of its members an authentic and creative participation, instead of expecting a participation of militants measurable in attendance time, which amounts to recreating the sole control possible in the dominant society: the quantitative criterion of hours of labor. A genuine enthusiastic participation on the part of everyone is necessitated by the fact that the classical political militant, who "devotes himself" to his radical duties, is everywhere disappearing along with classical politics itself; and even more by the fact that devotion and sacrifice always engender authority (even if only purely moral authority). Boredom is counterrevolutionary. In every way.

The groups that recognize the fundamental (not merely circumstantial) failure of the old politics must also recognize that they can claim to be an ongoing avant-garde only if they themselves exemplify a new style of life, a new passion. There is nothing utopian about this lifestyle criterion: it was constantly evident during the emergence and rise of the classical workers movement. We believe that in the coming period this will not only hold true to the extent it did in the nineteenth century, but will go much further. Otherwise the militants of these groups would only constitute dull propaganda societies, proclaiming quite correct and basic ideas but with virtually no one listening. The spectacular unilateral transmission of a revolutionary teaching -- whether within an organization or in its action directed toward the outside -- has lost all chance of proving effective in the society of the spectacle, which simultaneously organizes a completely different spectacle and infects every spectacle with an element of nausea. Such specialized propaganda thus has little chance of leading to timely and fruitful intervention during situations when the masses are compelled to wage real struggles.

It is necessary to recall and revive the nineteenth-century social war of the poor. The word can be found everywhere, in songs and in all the declarations of the people who worked for the objectives of the classical workers movement. One of the most urgent tasks confronting the SI and other comrades now advancing along convergent paths is to define the new poverty. Certain American sociologists over the last few years have played a role in the exposure of this new poverty analogous to that played by the first utopian philanthropists vis-a-vis workers' action in the previous century: The problem is revealed, but in an idealist and artificial way; because since understanding resides in praxis alone, one can really comprehend the nature of the enemy only in the process of fighting it (this is the terrain on which are situated, for example, G. Keller's and R. Vaneigem's projects of introducing the aggressiveness of the delinquents onto the plane of ideas).

Defining the new poverty also entails defining the new wealth. To the image propagated by the dominant society -- according to which it has evolved (both on its own and in response to acceptable reformist pressure) from an economy of profit to an economy of needs -- must be counterposed an economy of desires, which could be defined as: technological society plus the imagination of what could be done with it. The economy of needs is falsified in terms of habit. Habit is the natural process by which fulfilled desire is degraded into need and is confirmed, objectified and universally recognized as need. The present economy is directly geared to the fabrication of habits, and manipulates people by forcing them to repress their desires.

Complicity with the world's false opposition goes hand in hand with complicity with its false wealth (and thus with a retreat from defining the new poverty). Sartre's disciple Gorz is a good case in point. In Les Temps Modernes #188 he confesses how embarrassed he is that, thanks to his career as a journalist (which indeed is nothing to write home about), he can afford the good things of this society; among which he respectfully mentions taxis and trips abroad -- at a time when taxis inch forward behind the mass of cars that everyone has been forced to buy; and when foreign travel presents us with the same boring spectacle of the same alienation endlessly duplicated around the world. He also waxes enthusiastic -- like Sartre did once upon a time about the "total freedom of criticism in the USSR" -- about "the youth" of the only "revolutionary generations," those of Yugoslavia, Algeria, Cuba, China and Israel. The other countries are old, says Gorz, in order to justify his own senility. He thus relieves himself of the necessity of making any more precise analyses of, or distinctions among, "the youth" of those or other countries, where not everyone is so old or so visible, and where not every revolt is so Gorz.

Fougeyrollas, the latest thinker to have "gone beyond" Marxism, is somewhat disconcerted over the fact that while all previous major stages of historical development were characterized by a change in the mode of production, the communist society heralded by Marx, if it were to come about, would seem to be no more than a continuation of the society of industrial production. Go to the back of the class, Fougeyrollas. The next form of society will not be based on industrial production. It will be a society of realized art. The "absolutely new type of production supposedly in gestation in our society," whose absence Fougeyrollas asserts in Marxisme en question, is the construction of situations, the free construction of the events of life.

SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL (1962)

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

Comments

A faked photograph of a firing squad. Following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the fall of Napoleon III, thousands of Parisians revolted against the new royalist-leaning government and declared Paris an independent commune. Weeks of fighting ensued, during which Versailles troops attacked the city while the Communards threw up barricades, shot hostages, and burned government buildings. Soon afterward, Appert, a Parisian portrait photographer, issued “Crimes of the Commune,” a tendentious ser

From Internationale Situationniste #7 (April 1962).

Submitted by Fozzie on February 3, 2023

We are completely popular. We only take into consideration problems that are already in present in the general population. Situationist theory is in people like fish are in the sea. To those who think the SI is constructing a speculative fortress, we assert the contrary: we are going to dissolve ourselves into the population, which lives out our project at every moment; living first of all, of course, in a world of emptiness and repression.

Anyone who can't understand this ought to go back to studying our program. Publishing the provisional report of a supersession, Internationale Situationniste is one of those rare journals where after having read the most recent issue, one discovers how necessary it is to go back and read the first.

The specialists flatter themselves with the illusion that they control certain fields of knowledge and practice, but none of them escapes our omniscient criticism. We recognize that at this point we still lack the means, and that our lack of such means is due first of all to our lack of information (as much with regard to the inaccessibility of essential documents already in existence as to the absence of any document on the most important problems we can point out). But all the same, it should not be forgotten that the technocratic rabble also lacks this information. Even where it has, by its own standards, the most extensive information at its disposal, they only need to deny us 10% of it. This possibility is a purely stylistic clause, as the ruling bureaucracy, by its very nature, can only do so much with the quantitative, even when information is at hand (it inevitably ignores how the workers work, how people really live); therefore it has no hope of grasping the qualitative. On the other hand, the quantitative is all we really we lack, and soon it too will be ours, for we control the qualitative, which multiplies the quantity of the information we have at our disposal. This example can be extended to the understanding of the past: there is certainly a need for a more thorough evaluation of certain historical periods, even without a general accession to the scholarship of the historians.

The naked truth, familiar to every specialist, contradicts the current organization of reality (the decor of Sarcelles, say, or the lifestyle of Tony Armstrong-Jones), in making an implaccable and immediate critique. The specialists have congratulated themselves for too long on not only representing these facts, but all present reality. How they tremble! Their good times are over. We'll bring them down, along with every hierarchy they protect.

We are capable of bringing about a contestation in every discipline. No specialist remain will master of a single specialty. We are ready to provisionally handle the forms within which assessments and calculations can be made; we already know the margin of error of such calculations. The factor of error introduced by the use of categories that we know are false can thus be reduced. It's easy for us to choose the battlefield each time. If it is necessary to confront the "models" that are today the converging points of technocratic thought (total concurrence or total planning), our "model" is total communication. We can no longer be called utopian. An hypothesis should be recognized here that will possibly never be realized exactly in reality, no more than anything else. But with the theory of the potlatch as irreversible expression, we alone hold its complimentary factor. "Utopia" is no longer possible because the conditions of its realization already exist. It has been diverted [détourné] to serve the perpetuation of the current order, whose absurdity is so terrible that it is realizing its utopia first, at any cost, without anyone daring to formulate its theory, even after the fact. It is the inverse utopia of repression: it has every power at its disposal, and nobody wants it.

We are leading a study of "the positive pole of alienation," more exact than that of its negative pole. In addition to our diagnosis of the poverty of wealth, we are capable of redrawing the map of the extreme wealth of poverty. These maps that speak of a new topography will in fact be the first realization of "human geography." We will replace oil deposits with layers of untapped proletarian consciousness.

In such conditions, it is easy to understand the general tone of our relationship with an impotent intellectual generation. We make no concessions. It is clear that the masses who spontaneously think as we do must exclude the intellectuals unanimously, that is to say the people who, holding the lease on contemporary thought, must necessarily content themselves with their own thinking about thinkers. Accepted as such, and therefore as impotent, they then question the impotence of thought in general (see the editorial clowns of Arguments #20, devoted precisely to these intellectuals).

Right from the start of our common action, we have been clear. But now, our game is becoming so important that we no longer have to talk with the self-appointed orators. Our partisans are everywhere, and we have no intention of deceiving them. We will provide their weapons.

As for those who might well be worthwhile orators, they should know very well that their relations with us cannot be inoffensive. We are at a decisive point, and although we are aware of the proportion of our errors, we can all still oblige these possible allies a total choice. We can only be accepted or rejected as a whole; never subdivided.

There is nothing surprising about these truths. What is surprising is rather that the specialists of opinion polls cannot recognize how soon this anger will rise to breaking point. One day soon, they will have the shock of seeing their architects chased down and hanged in the streets of Sarcelles.

The failure of other groups, who have more or less seen the necessity of the coming change, is their positivity. When these groups try to be an avant-garde or the newest political formation, they believe that everyone should know something about the old praxis, and here they fall short.

Those who want to constitute a political positivity too soon depend entirely on traditional politics. In the same way, many people have urged the situationists to constitute a positive art. But our strength is in never having done that. Our dominant position in modern culture has never been shown better than by the decision made at the Göteborg Conference to refer from now on to all artistic production by members of the SI in the present framework as anti-situationist, so that they will contribute to a simultaneous destruction and consolidation.

The interpretation that we defend in culture can be regarded as a simple hypothesis, and we expect that it will very soon be verified effectively and transcended; but in every way it possesses the essential characteristics of rigorous scientific verification in the sense that it explains and arranges a number of phenomena that are, for others, incoherent and unexplainable — which are therefore sometimes even hidden by other forces; and in that it makes it possible to foresee several facts that will be controllable later. We do not deceive ourselves for an instant on the so-called objectivity of various researchers in culture or what is conveniently known as the human sciences. On the contrary, the rule seems to be to hide in this objectivity as many problems as responses. The SI must expose what is hidden, thereby exposing itself as the possibility "hidden" by its enemies. Picking up on the contradictions that others have chosen to forget, we will succeed in transforming ourselves into the practical force laid out in the Hamburg Theses, as established by Debord, Kotányi, Trocchi and Vaneigem in the summer of 1961.

The irreducible project of the SI is total freedom made concrete in acts and in the imagination, for freedom is not easy to imagine in the existing oppression. We will be victorious, identifying ourselves in the most profound desires that exist in all, giving them every license. The "motivational researchers" of modern advertising find in peoples' subconscious the desire for objects; we find only the desire to break the hindrances of life. We are the representatives of the mind-power of the great majority. Our first principles must be beyond dispute.

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

Comments

a black and white cartoon of a white woman on a beach "Tanning lotion, a good book, my transistor, and... above all... I have absolutely nothing to do!"

From Internationale Situationniste #7 (April 1962).

Submitted by Fozzie on February 3, 2023

The question of power is so well hidden in sociological and cultural theory that the experts can blacken thousands of pages on communication — or the means of mass communication in modern society — without ever mentioning that the communication of which they speak is unilateral, that the consumers of communication have no way of responding. Within this false communication, there is a rigorous division of labor that ends up confirming the more general division between organizers and consumers in the era of industrial culture (which integrates and formulates the unity of work and leisure). Those who are not disturbed by the tyranny exerted on life at this level have no understanding of contemporary society; and thus find themselves perfectly qualified to add their brushstrokes to the frescos of sociology. All those who display wonder or amazement at this mass culture, which cultivates the masses and at the same time "massifies high culture" through a globally unified mass media, forget that culture, even high culture, is now buried in museums; and that this includes manifestations of revolt and self-destruction. They also forget that the masses — of whom, in the final analysis, we are all a part — are excluded from life (from participation in life), excluded from liberated action: condemned to mere subsistence in spectacular style. The present law is that everyone has to consume the greatest possible quantity of nothingness, even the respectable nothingness of traditional culture, which has been perfectly severed from its original significance (progressive cretinism is always moved when it sees the theater of Racine on television, or Balzac being read in Yakut; to be sure, it envisaged no other human progress).

The revealing notion of the bombardment of information must be understood in its broadest sense. Today's population is permanently subjected to a bombardment of rubbish that is in no way dependent on the mass media. And above all, nothing could be more misguided, more typical of the antediluvian Left, than imagining that the mass media competes with other spheres of modern social life where people's real problems are seriously posed. The university, the church, and the conventions of traditional politics and architecture strongly express the morass of incoherent trivialities that tend, anarchically yet imperatively, to shape every attitude of daily life (how to dress, who to meet, how to be content). The foremost sociologists of "communication" inevitably contrast the satisfaction of the artist, identified in and justified by his work, to the alienation employed by the mass media, thus demonstrating little more than their euphoric incapacity to conceive of artistic alienation for what it really is.

The theory of information immediately neglects the main power of language, which is its combativeness and supersession at a poetic level. A literature that touches the void, the perfect neutrality of form and content, can only be deployed as a function of a mathematical experiment (like the "potential literature" that is the final full stop on the long white page written by [Raymond] Queneau). In spite of the superb hypotheses of an "informational poetic" (Abraham Moles) — the moving assurance of their misinterpretation of Schwitters and Tzara — the technicians of language never understand the language of technology. They have no idea who judges all this.

Considered in all its richness — with regard to the entirety of human praxis and not to the use of punch cards to hasten the arrival of pay-cheques — communication can only exist in communal action. The most striking excesses of incomprehension are therefore linked to the excess of non-intervention. No example can be clearer than that of the long and pathetic history of the French Left in the face of the popular insurrection in Algeria. The death of traditional politics in France has been proven not only by the abstention of almost all of the workers, but further, without a doubt, by the political imbecility of the minority who resolved to act: thus the militant illusions of the extreme Left of the Popular Front can be described as second rate, initially because this formula is rigorously impractical in the current period, but also because since 1936, it has largely proven to be something of a counter-revolutionary army. While the mystifications of the old political organizations have now revealed their collapse, a new politics has failed to appear. Indeed, the Algerian problem appears as one of France's archaisms, to the extent that the principle tendency in France is to accede to modern capitalism as it stands. The still unofficial 'savage' phenomena of deception and refusal that accompany this development have nothing to do with the struggle of developing Algerians. For what is not distinguished is the future reality of a common radical contestation, a community of interests that today seem so different, a community no longer founded on the imperative of memories (of what could be — and, more often, of what could have been — in the old workers' movement's support for the exploited in the colonies). The only solidarity considered would consist of a few reflexes that are themselves becoming archaic, and therefore abstract: waiting for the mythic and eternal French Left of the PC [Communist Party], PSU [Unified Socialist Party] and SFIO [French Section of the Workers' International] to perform alongside the GPRA [Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic] as a section of the 3rd International (taking into account their various 'blunders' and 'betrayals'). Yet everything that has happened since 1920 demonstrates that a fundamental critique of these solutions is inevitable everywhere; and that it is posed powerfully and directly in the armed struggle of the Algerians. The only truly internationalist solidarity — as long as it is not degraded by Leftist Christian moralism — can be a solidarity between the revolutionaries of both countries; supposing, of course, that such revolutionaries can be found in France; and that the Algerians can sufficiently distinguish their interests when the current national front is faced with the choice on the nature of its power in the near future.

Those wishing to carry out avant-garde action in France in this period have been torn between, on the one hand, the fear of cutting themselves off completely from the old political communities (which are in a state of advanced glaciation), or in any case their language; and on the other, a certain contempt for the real fear in some sectors interested in the struggle against colonialist extremism — the students, for example — because of the complacency that they demonstrate toward an anthology of political archaisms (unity of inclusive action against fascism, etc.).


JOHANNESBURG, 18-1-62: Minister for defense M. François Fouché announced last year that South Africa is going to intensify its arms manufacturing in order to become self-sufficient. (Reuters)

The failure of any group to take this opportunity to link, in an exemplary manner, the maximum program of potential revolt in capitalist society to the maximum program of the current revolt of the colonized, is naturally explained by the weakness of such groups; but this weakness itself must never be considered an excuse: on the contrary, it is the defeat of functioning and rigor. Even under the harshest repression, it is inconceivable for an organization that represents people's real contestation to remain weak.

The complete separation of the workers of France and Algeria — which should be understood as not principally spatial, but temporal — has led to this frenzy of information, even 'from the Left'; thus, the morning after killing of eight French protesters by the police on February 8th, to papers spoke of the bloodiest clash on record in Paris since 1934, without mentioning that less than four months previously, on October 18th, Algerian demonstrators had been massacred in their dozens. Or that the "Anti-Fascist Committee of Saint-Germain-des-Prés" were permitted to write on a poster in March: "The People of France and Algeria have imposed the negotiation. . . ." without being killed by the ridicule of the enumeration of these two forces, and in this order.

At a time when the reality of communication is so deeply rotten, it is not surprising that a mineralogical study of petrified communication is developing in sociology. Nor that in art, the neo-dadaist rogues are discovering the importance of the dada movement as a formal positivity to exploit yet again, after having already adopted what they could from so many other modernist currents since the twenties. They work hard to forget the authentic dadaism of Germany and its involvement in the rise of the German revolution after the armistice of 1918. For those who produce a new cultural position today, the necessity of such a liaison has by no means diminished. Put simply, the new must be discovered in the art and politics of its time.

The simple anti-communication currently borrowed from dadaism by the most reactionary defenders of the established lies has no value in an era where the most urgent thing is the creation, at the most basic and complex levels of practice, of a new communication. The worthiest continuation of dada, its legitimate successor, arose elsewhere, in the summer of 1960. The spontaneous revolt of a people took hold, more than anywhere else, in its children; at the very moment when rationality's exploitation faltered, this people knew immediately how to détourn the language of its masters as poetry, as mode of action. The Congolese expression of this period (cf. the role of the poet Lumumba) warrants further investigation, for the recognition of the greatness and effectiveness of the only communication possible, whose intervention in events nonetheless paves the way for the transformation of the world.

Although the public has been strongly led to believe the opposite — and not only by the mass media — the coherency of the Congolese action, as long as they do not abolish their avant-garde, and the excellent use they have made of the rare means at their disposal, is the exact opposite of the fundamental incoherence of the social organization of every developed country and its dangerous incapacity to find an acceptable use for its technological powers. Sartre, who is so representative of his misguided generation that he has succeeded in being duped by all the mystifications that his contemporaries merely choose between, decided recently, in a note in Médiations #2, that it is impossible speak of a disappearing artistic language that corresponds to a time of disappearance, as "this era constructs far more than it destroys." The scales may well appear to be tipped in favor of the former, but only when construction is confused with production. Sartre must notice that despite all the torpedoes, there are more boats on the sea today than there were before the war; and that in spite of all the fires and collisions there are still more and more buildings and cars. There are also more books, as Sartre should know only too well. And yet the reasons for living in a society are being destroyed. The variations that present a change of face only last as long as any other chief of police would, after which they rejoin the general disappearance of the old world. The only useful thing left to do is to reconstruct society and life on other foundations, foundations unknown to the various neo-philosophers who have ruled the desert of so-called modern and progressive thought for so long. These "great men" are not even fit for the museum, because theirs is a period that even museums would find too hollow. They are all the same — products of the immense defeat of the movement for human emancipation in the first third of the century. They accept this defeat; it defines them exhaustively. And these specialists of error defend their specialization to the last. But now that the climate is changing, these dinosaurs of pseudo-explanation no longer have anywhere left to graze. The sleep of dialectical reason has begotten monsters.

All unilateral ideas of communication are in fact ideas of unilateral communication. They correspond to the worldview and interests of sociology, traditional art and politics. This is what we will change. We are aware of "the incompatibility of our program, as expression, with the available means of expression and reception" (Kotányi "The Next Stage" [also in this issue]). It is a question of simultaneously seeing what can be of use in communication and what can be of use to it. The existing forms of communication, and their present crisis, can be understood and justified only in the perspective of their supersession. One should not respect art or literature so much that one would want to surrender completely. And one should not have so much contempt for the history of art or modern philosophy that one would want to go on as if nothing has happened. Our judgment is has no illusions because it is historical. For us, any use of permitted modes of communication must therefore be the refusal of this communication and at the same time not: a communication containing its refusal; a refusal containing communication, that is to say the reversal of this refusal into a positive project. All this has to lead somewhere. Communication will now contain its own critique.

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

Attachments

Comments

The Fifth SI Conference in Göteborg, Sweden. From Internationale Situationniste #7 (April 1962).

Submitted by libcom on September 8, 2005


Göteborg and surrounding waters

The 5th conference of the Situationist International was held in Göteborg, Sweden, 28-30 August 1961, eleven months after the London Conference. The situationists of nine countries were represented by Ansgar-Elde, Debord, J. de Jong, Kotányi, D. Kunzelmann, S. Larsson, J.V. Martin, Nash, Prem, G. Stadler, Hardy Strid, H. Sturm, R. Vaneigem, Zimmer.

At the first session, with Ansgar-Elde chosen as chairman, news is exchanged on the state of the SI's various sections, and on how people who approach the situationist movement should be treated. The common opinion is that all applications for membership ought subjected to strict examination, especially where already existing artistic groups are involved (as in England and Germany). Prem then proposes that it should be the relevant national sections alone who judge the quality of the situationist within their own country; this would apply not only to evaluating the intentions of newcomers, but also to the circumstances and the potential participation of those already belonging to the SI. This demand meets with several protests in the name of the situationists' very unity and internationalism. The situationists of Prem's tendency obviously call for this exorbitant power of control because their theses, which are a minority within the SI (cf. the debates at the IVth conference), still hold the majority in Germany, after having ruled there uncontested for so long. They propose the exclusion from the German section of opponents within it who support the SI's policies. The decision of the Conference is that the entire SI should be the judge for all countries — with this responsibility going to the CC between Conferences — after information and well-reasoned advice has been submitted to it by each particular section in the case of admissions and, more importantly, any dissent within a country.

Nash declares that the Scandinavians decided to amalgamate into a single section, at least for a year, because of their great geographical dispersion across four states with similar cultural conditions (one of them is even in Iceland). They then considered re-establishing the autonomy of the Danish section, which they initially attempted to maintain, but which found too little local support.


Cutting back just a liter of wine per day or one liter of liqueur for every fifteen frees up an amount corresponding to the cost of a refrigerator within a year. After three months, the savings already allow for the purchase of a vacuum cleaner, a record player or a radio. . . . Every year, the French drink the price of building a city the size of Arras or Brive.
— Elle, 15 September 1961

Next the Conference hears an orientation report by Vaneigem, who says notably:

The Situationist International finds itself, through present historical circumstances as much as its internal evolution, at such a level of development that the activity it considers itself in a position to deploy in a bureaucratic and reified world is predicated on the critical rigor it is capable of maintaining as a cohesive force. Its weakness in the face of the tasks to come, and the expected repression, can only become a strength if every one of its members becomes conscious of what endangers it and what endangers them, that is to say, of what the SI is and what it intends to be. The price of this is the autonomy of individual sections.

The organization of life in capitalist and supposedly anti-capitalist society takes the form of the spectacle. The point is not to elaborate the spectacle of refusal, but to refuse the spectacle. In order for their elaboration to be artistic in the new and authentic sense defined by the SI, the elements of the destruction of the spectacle must precisely cease to be works of art. There is no such thing as situationism, or a situationist work of art, or a spectacular situationist. Once and for all.

Such a perspective means nothing if it is not linked directly to revolutionary praxis, to the will to change the employment of life (an act that can in no way be reduced to merely changing the employers of existing works). The possibility of a new type of critical action, independent of current revolutionary movements, depends, furthermore, on the following.

Indeed, the above is the only context in which the situationists can even talk of a freedom of action. With this accomplished, everything remains to be done: a) to grasp, as an integrated group, the totality (the refusal of reformism) in an insufficient world (where every fragment is a totality, where there is only a fragmentary totality); b) to construct situationist bases in preparation for a unitary urbanism and a free life; c) to return real life to its pre-eminence, for a way of life opposed to all mythical, immutable and quantified worlds; d) to redefine desires in the meticulously explored field of real possibilities; e) to seize control of every technological means that is likely to assure the domination of every possibility.

These interrelated activities provide a preliminary sketch of the project of a permanent revolution.

Our position is that of combatants between two worlds — one that we don’t acknowledge, the other that does not yet exist. We must precipitate the crash; hasten the end of the world, the disaster in which the situationists will recognize their own.

This discourse meets no opposition. In the ensuing discussion on the degree to which this project might be realized in the near future, Vaneigem proposes, in the short term, the project of a potlatch of destruction of selected artistic values; and in the longer term, intervention against UNESCO and the foundation of a first situationist base (the "Château de Silling"). The primitive accumulation of means is a matter of "convincing artists that the SI defends the best of what they have to offer. This will reassure them, both as hostages and as refugees from the enemy camp." The SI, for whom "the refusal of reformism and the impossibility of creation ex nihilo delimit the field of action," aims to locate "bases of support in contemporary society likely to strengthen its future bridgehead, creating an opening from which the conquest of enemy territory may proceed. We will be the shop stewards of cultural production, in the broadest sense of the term."

The second session begins with reports from various sections, mainly on the publication and translation of SI texts. The Scandinavian section poses the additional problem of the production of experimental films in Sweden, in which several of its members have been collectively involved. The Swedes present in Göteborg discuss among themselves which of these films meet situationist requirements, then put the question to the conference. Debord responds that he himself has never made a situationist film, and thus cannot serve as a judge. Kunzelmann expresses a strong skepticism as to the powers the SI can muster in order to act on the level envisaged by Vaneigem.

Kotányi responds to Nash and Kunzelmann: "Since the beginning of the movement there has been a problem as to what to call artistic works by members of the SI. It was understood that none of them was a situationist production, but what to call them? I propose a very simple rule: to call them ‘antisituationist.’ We are against the dominant conditions of artistic inauthenticity. I don’t mean that anyone should stop painting, writing, etc. I don’t mean that that has no value. I don’t mean that we could continue to exist without doing that. But at the same time we know that such works will be coopted by society and used against us. Our impact lies in the elaboration of certain truths which have an explosive power whenever people are ready to struggle for them.

At the present stage the movement is only in its infancy regarding the elaboration of these essential points. The degree of purity characteristic of modern explosives has yet to be attained by the movement as a whole. We cannot count on the effects of our attitudes to everyday life, to the critique of everyday life, to be explosive until everyone has achieved this purity, that is to say, the necessary degree of clarity. Don't forget that this is a matter of anti-situationist production. The clarity that comes with this point is indispensable to the project of further clarification. If this principle is sacrificed, then Kunzelmann will be right, but in a negative sense: the SI will not even be able to attain a mediocre amount of power."

The responses to Kotányi’s proposal are all favorable. It is noted that would-be avant-garde artists are beginning to appear in various countries who have no connection with the SI but who refer to themselves as adherents of "situationism" or describe their works as being more or less situationist. This tendency is obviously going to increase and it would be hopeless for the SI to try to prevent it. While various confused artists nostalgic for a positive art call themselves situationist, antisituationist art will be the mark of the best artists, those of the SI, since genuinely situationist conditions have as yet not at all been created. Admitting this is the mark of a situationist.

With one exception, the Conference unanimously decides to adopt this rule of antisituationist art, binding on all members of the SI. Only Nash objects, his spite and indignation having become sharper and sharper throughout the whole debate, to the point of uncontrolled rage.

At the beginning of the third session, Jacqueline de Jong raises the issue of publishing an English language journal, The Situationist Times, approved during the CC's first session in November 1960, but about which nothing has been done. It is noted that the SI's finances are not sufficient to support so many journals at once, especially in terms of the foreseeable difficulty of the numerous translations that would be involved; and that the translation work done by the SI comrades when it comes to ensuring communication between section is itself not up to scratch. The argument for the sustainable publication of such a journal is repeated, but only the development of the British section's activity is going to create conditions that are healthy and natural enough for such an undertaking. The discussion returns to the realization of a situationist base. Sturm declares that he has no idea what sort of process is being discussed in terms of realizing this project. He sees in Kotányi's speech "abstract consciousness and pure didacticism." Prem resumes in more detail the objections of his friends to Kotányi’s perspectives. He agrees with calling our art antisituationist; and also with organizing a situationist base. But he does not think the SI’s tactics are good. There is talk of people’s dissatisfaction and revolt, but in his view, as his tendency already expressed it at London, "Most people are still primarily interested in comfort and conveniences." He believes that the SI systematically neglects its real chances in culture. It rejects favorable occasions to intervene in existing cultural politics, whereas, in his view, the SI has no power but its power in culture — a power which could be very great and which is visibly within our reach. The majority in the SI sabotages the chances for effective action on the very terrain where it is most possible. It castigates artists who would otherwise be able to succeed in doing something; it throws them out the moment they get the means to make a difference. Because of this, we are constantly being driven into the ground. This leads Prem to believe that "theoretical power these days is sterile, without the capacity to change things practically." Kotányi responds that "we have never for an instant given the impression that we accept such a peculiar theory of modern times," and that the situationist movement's importance lies entirely in the opposite principle. Prem adds that situationist theory is incomprehensible to say the least. Several comrades ask him what he's doing there. Debord quotes Mayakovsky: "No-one calls themselves intelligent simply because they don't understand mathematics or French; but anyone seems to be able to prove their intelligence by not understanding futurism in the least." Our advance on Mayakovsky is marked by the fact that while he was referring to the bourgeois audience, the SI is the first avant-garde whose theory has been found incomprehensible by one of its participants — a participant, moreover, who makes this admission after having been a member for over two years.

Other German situationists strongly oppose Prem, some of them accusing him of having expressed positions in their name that they do not share (but it seems, rather, that Prem simply had the frankness to clearly express the line that dominates in the German section). Finally the Germans come around to agreeing that none of them conceives of theory as separate from its practical results. With this the third session is adjourned in the middle of the night, not without violent agitation and uproar. (From one side there are shouts of “Your theory is going to fly right back in your faces!” and from the other, “Cultural pimps!”).

The fourth session begins with the reading of communications sent to the Conference by two absent situationists, George Keller1 and Uwe Lausen.

On behalf of several members of the German section, Lausen denounces the conformism of life, and even the limitation of the concept of artistic experimentation to a few traditional areas. Instead, he propounds the total freedom demanded by the situationist experiment, aware of how much this is conditioned by the methods of combat against society. "Everyday life," he concludes, "is the last chance for the art of the future. That is where the radical allies we seek are to be found. The old guard say they were radical in their youth, and who can deny it? But they're living in the past. They've forgotten what they wanted. They've fallen asleep. They've had it. We have to rally the waking, wake the sleeping, bury the dead — we have to get going."

Keller writes: "No-one can deny that any new invention is situationist. New inventions belong to us alone, not only because they can be of service to us, but because we are the new inventions in all their multiplicity. This is our world." He requests "a mastery of the dynamic unity of the dérive and a complete knowledge of equivalents for the creation of real disequilibriums, the point of departure for all games." He also suggests unifying the SI's publications where there are divergences that end up developing into specializations — the central journal, in French, being theoretical to the point of studying absolute boredom, while publications in Italy, Scandinavia and Germany generally content themselves with a primarily ludic character. In terms of the SI, this conventional division between seriousness and play is a weakness.

Declaring that the ongoing divergences and undeniable retardations that made themselves known the previous day confirm its currency, the Belgian section supports Keller's proposal in the form of the unified publication of a journal in four editions: English, French, German and Swedish. The German situationists who publish the journal Spur agree to the project in principle, but prefer to postpone its implementation until the time is right; such that the majority of the Conference abstains from voting on a question rejected by the situationists most directly concerned. They stress the urgency, already made evident by the Conference, for them to unify their positions and projects with the rest of the SI. Kunzelmann declares that this discussion could advance quickly on the basis of Vaneigem's report, which would be studied more closely in Germany.

Nonetheless, the Germans commit themselves to propagating and elaborating situationist theory as soon as possible, as they have begun doing with issues 5 and 6 of Spur. On their request, the Conference adds Attila Kotányi and J. de Jong to the editorial committee of Spur in order to verify this process of unification. (But in January this decision is flouted by their putting out, without Kotányi and de Jong’s knowledge, an issue #7 marking a distinct regression from the preceding ones — which leads to the exclusion of those responsible.)

The new Central Council elected by the Conference is composed of Ansgar-Elde, Debord, Kotányi, Kunzelmann, Lausen, Nash and Vaneigem. Meanwhile, Zimmer is assigned to the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism in Brussels. It is voted to hold the 6th Conference at Anvers, after the rejection of the Scandinavian proposal to hold it secretly in Warsaw. The Conference does decide, however, to send a delegation of three situationists to Poland to develop our contacts there.

At the close of the last session, the Conference ends with a far more constructive celebration, for which, unfortunately, no minutes are taken. This celebration turns into a dérive from The Sound crossing all the way to the port of Frederikshavn; and, for others, continues on to Hamburg.


The situationists fraternize with Swedish workers at the conclusion of the Göteborg Conference

Edited from translations by Ken Knabb and Reuben Keehan. From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/goteborg.html

  • 1Pseudonym of Asger Jorn, who had officially resigned from the SI four months earlier.

Attachments

Comments

A cheesy advert for a fallout shelter featuring illustrations of stereotypical white suburban american family above a fallout shelter

From Internationale Situationniste #7 (April 1962).

Submitted by libcom on September 8, 2005

1

Bureaucratic capitalism has found its legitimation in Marx. I am not referring here to orthodox Marxism's dubious merit of having reinforced the neocapitalist structures whose present reorganization is an implicit homage to Soviet totalitarianism; I am stressing the extent to which crude versions of Marx's most profound analyses of alienation have become generally recognized in the most commonplace realities -- realities which, stripped of their magical veil and materialized in each gesture, have become the sole substance of the daily lives of an increasing number of people. In a word, bureaucratic capitalism contains the tangible reality of alienation; it has brought it home to everybody far more successfully than Marx could ever have hoped to do, it has banalized it as the reduction of material poverty has been accompanied by a spreading mediocrity of existence. As poverty has been reduced in terms of survival, it has become more profound in terms of our way of life -- this is at least one widespread feeling that exonerates Marx from all the interpretations a degenerate Bolshevism has made of him. The "theory" of peaceful coexistence has accelerated this awareness and revealed, to those who were still confused, that exploiters can get along quite well with each other despite their spectacular divergences.

2

"Any act," writes Mircea Eliade, "can become a religious act. Human existence is realized simultaneously on two parallel planes, that of temporality, becoming, illusion, and that of eternity, substance, reality." In the nineteenth century the brutal divorce of these two planes demonstrated that power would have done better to have maintained reality in a mist of divine transcendence. But we must give reformism credit for succeeding where Bonaparte had failed, in dissolving becoming in eternity and reality in illusion. This union may not be as solid as the sacraments of religious marriage, but it lasts, which is the most the managers of coexistence and social peace can ask of it. This is also what leads us to define ourselves -- in the illusory but inescapable perspective of duration -- as the end of abstract temporality, as the end of the reified time of our acts; to define ourselves -- does it have to be spelled out? -- at the positive pole of alienation as the end of social alienation, as the end of humanity's term of social alienation.

3

The socialization of primitive human groups reveals a will to struggle more effectively against the mysterious and terrifying forces of nature. But struggling in the natural environment, at once with it and against it, submitting to its most inhuman laws in order to wrest from it an increased chance of survival -- doing this could only engender a more evolved form of aggressive defense, a more complex and less primitive attitude, manifesting on a higher level the contradictions that the uncontrolled and yet influenceable forces of nature never ceased to impose. In becoming socialized, the struggle against the blind domination of nature triumphed inasmuch as it gradually assimilated primitive, natural alienation, but in another form. The struggle against natural alienation gave rise to social alienation. Is it by chance that a technological civilization has developed to such a point that this social alienation has been revealed by its conflict with the last areas of natural resistance that technological power hadn't managed (and for good reasons) to subjugate? Today the technocrats propose to put an end to primitive alienation: with a stirring humanitarianism they exhort us to perfect the technical means that "in themselves" would enable us to conquer death, suffering, discomfort and boredom. But to eliminate death would be less of a miracle than to eliminate suicide and the desire to die. There are ways of abolishing the death penalty than can make one miss it. Up till now the particular uses that have been made of technology -- or more generally the socio-economic context in which human activity is confined -- while quantitatively reducing the number of occasions of pain and death, have allowed death itself to eat like a cancer into the heart of each person's life.

4

The prehistoric food-gathering age was succeeded by the hunting age during which clans formed and strove to increase their chances of survival. Hunting grounds and preserves were staked out from which outsiders were absolutely excluded -- the welfare of the whole clan depended on it. As a result, the freedom gained by settling down more safely and comfortably within the natural environment engendered its own negation outside the boundaries laid down by the clan and forced the group to modify its customary rules in organizing its relations with excluded and threatening groups. From the moment it appeared, socially engendered economic survival implied the existence of boundaries, restrictions, conflicting rights. It should never be forgotten that until now both history and our own nature have developed in accordance with the development of private appropriation: the seizing of control by a class, group, caste or individual of a general power over an socio-economic survival whose form remains complex, ranging from ownership of land, territory, factories or capital to the "pure" exercise of power over people (hierarchy). Beyond the struggle against regimes whose vision of paradise is a cybernetic welfare state lies the necessity of a still vaster struggle against a fundamental and initially natural state of things, in the development of which capitalism plays only an incidental, transitory role; a state of things that will only disappear with the disappearance of the last traces of hierarchical power -- along with the "swine of humanity," of course.

5

To be an owner is claim a good one prevents others from using -- while at the same time acknowledging everyone's abstract, potential right to ownership. By excluding people from a real right of ownership, the owner extends his dominion over those he has excluded (absolutely over nonowners, relatively over other owners), without whom he is nothing. The nonowners have no choice in the matter. The owner appropriates and alienates them as producers of his own power, while the necessity of ensuring their own physical existence forces them despite themselves to collaborate in producing their own exclusion and to survive without ever being able to live. Excluded, they participate in ownership through the mediation of the owner, a mystical participation characterizing from the outset all the clan and social relationships that gradually replaced the principle of obligatory cohesion in which each member was an integral part of the group ("organic interdependence"). Their guarantee of survival depends on their activity within the framework of private appropriation; they reinforce a property right from which they are excluded. Due to this ambiguity each of them sees himself as participating in ownership, as a living fragment of the right to possess, and this belief in turn reinforces his condition as excluded and possessed. (Extreme cases of this alienation: the faithful slave, the cop, the bodyguard, the centurion -- creatures who, through a sort of union with their own death, confer on death a power equal to the forces of life and identify in a destructive energy the negative and positive poles of alienation, the absolutely submissive slave and the absolute master.) It is of vital importance to the exploiter that this appearance is maintained and made more sophisticated; not because he is especially Machiavellian, but simply because he wants to stay alive. The organization of appearance depends on the survival of the owner and his privileges, which in turn depend on the physical survival of the nonowner, who can thus remain alive while being exploited and excluded from being a real person. Private appropriation and domination are thus originally imposed and felt as a positive right, but in the form of a negative universality. Valid for everyone, justified in everyone's eyes by divine or natural law, the right of private appropriation is objectified in a general illusion, in a universal transcendence, in an essential law under which everyone individually manages to tolerate the more or less narrow limits assigned to his right to live and to the conditions of life in general.

6

In this social context the function of alienation must be understood as a condition of survival. The labor of the nonowners is subject to the same contradictions as the right of private appropriation. It transforms them into possessed beings, into producers of their own expropriation and exclusion, but it represents the only chance of survival for slaves, for serfs, for workers -- so much so that the activity that allows their existence to continue by emptying it of all content ends up, through a natural and sinister reversal of perspective, by taking on a positive appearance. Not only has value been attributed to work (as a form of self-sacrifice during the old regime, and in its most mentally degrading forms in bourgeois ideology and in the so-called People's Democracies), but very early on to work for a master, to alienate oneself willingly, became the honorable and scarcely questioned price of survival. The satisfaction of basic needs remains the best safeguard of alienation; it is best dissimulated by being justified on the grounds of undeniable necessities. Alienation multiplies needs because it can satisfy none of them; nowadays lack of satisfaction is measured in the number of cars, refrigerators, TVs: the alienating objects have lost the ruse and mystery of transcendence, they are there in their concrete poverty. To be rich today is to possess the greatest quantity of poor objects.

Up till now surviving has prevented us from living. This is why much is to be expected of the increasingly obvious impossibility of survival, an impossibility that will become all the more obvious as the glut of conveniences and elements of survival reduces life to a single choice: suicide or revolution.

7

The sacred presides even over the struggle against alienation. As soon as the relations of exploitation and the violence that underlies them are no longer concealed by the mystical veil, there is a breakthrough, a moment of clarity -- the struggle against alienation is suddenly revealed as a ruthless hand-to-hand fight with naked power, power exposed in its brute force and its weakness, a vulnerable giant whose slightest wound confers on the attacker the infamous notoriety of an Erostratus. Since power survives, the event remains ambiguous. Praxis of destruction, sublime moment when the complexity of the world becomes tangible, transparent, within everyone's grasp; inexpiable revolts -- those of the slaves, the Jacques, the iconoclasts, the Enragés, the Fédérés, Kronstadt, the Asturias, and -- promises of things to come -- the hooligans of Stockholm and the wildcat strikes. Only the destruction of all hierarchical power will allow us to forget these. We intend to make sure that it does.1

The deterioration of mythical structures and their slowness in regenerating themselves, which make possible the awakening of consciousness and the critical penetration of insurrection, are also responsible for the fact that once the "excesses" of revolution are past, the struggle against alienation is grasped on a theoretical plane, subjected to an "analysis" that is a carryover from the demystification preparatory to revolt. It is at this point that the truest and most authentic aspects of a revolt are reexamined and repudiated by the "we didn't really mean to do that" of the theoreticians charged with explaining the meaning of an insurrection to those who made it -- to those who aim to demystify by acts, not just by words.

All acts contesting power call for analysis and tactical development. Much can be expected of:

a) the new proletariat, which is discovering its destitution amid consumer abundance (see the development of the workers' struggles presently beginning in England, and the attitudes of rebellious youth in all the modern countries);

b) countries that have had enough of their partial, sham revolutions and are consigning their past and present theorists to the museums (see the role of the intelligentsia in the Eastern bloc);

c) the Third World, whose mistrust of technological myths has been kept alive by the colonial cops and mercenaries, the last, over-zealous militants of a transcendence against which they are the best possible vaccination;

d) the force of the SI ("our ideas are in everyone's mind"), capable of forestalling remote-controlled revolts, "crystal nights"2 and sheepish resistance.

8

Private appropriation is linked to the dialectic of particular and general. In the mystical realm where the contradictions of the slave and feudal systems are resolved, the nonowner, excluded as a particular individual from the right of ownership, strives to ensure his survival through his labor: the more he identifies with the interests of the master, the more successful he is. He knows the other nonowners only through their common plight: the compulsory surrender of their labor power (Christianity recommended voluntary surrender: once the slave "willingly" offered his labor power, he ceased to be a slave), the search for the optimum conditions of survival, and mystical identification. Struggle, though born of a universal will to survive, takes place on the level of appearance where it brings into play identification with the desires of the master and thus introduces a certain individual rivalry that reflects the rivalry between the masters. Competition develops on this plane as long as the exploitive relations remain dissimulated behind a mystical veil and as long as the conditions producing this veil persist; or to put it another way, as long as the degree of slavery determines the slave's consciousness of the degree of lived reality. (We are still at the stage of calling "objective consciousness" what is in reality the consciousness of being an object.) The owner, for his part, depends on the general acknowledgment of a right from which he alone is not excluded, but which is seen on the plane of appearance as a right accessible to each of the excluded taken individually. His privileged position depends on such a belief, and this belief is also the basis for the strength that is essential if he is to hold his own among the other owners; it is his strength. If he seems to renounce exclusive appropriation of everything and everybody, if he poses less as a master than as a servant of the public good and defender of collective security, then his power is crowned with glory and to his other privileges he adds that of denying, on the level of appearance (which is the only level of reference in the world of one-way communication), the very notion of personal appropriation. Denying that anyone has this right, he repudiates the other owners. In the feudal perspective the owner is not integrated into appearance in the same way as the nonowners, slaves, soldiers, functionaries and servants of all kinds. The lives of the latter are so squalid that the majority can live only as a caricature of the Master (the feudal lord, the prince, the major-domo, the taskmaster, the high priest, God, Satan). But the master himself is also forced to play one of these caricatural roles. He can do so without much effort since his pretension to total life is already so caricatural, isolated as he is among those who can only survive. He is already one of our own kind (with the added grandeur of a past epoch, which adds a poignant savor to his sadness); he, like each of us, was anxiously seeking the adventure where he could find himself on the road to his total perdition. Could the master, at the very moment he alienates the others, see that he has reduced them to dispossessed and excluded beings, and thus realize that he is only an exploiter, a purely negative being? Such an awareness is unlikely, and would be dangerous. By extending his dominion over the greatest possible number of subjects, isn't he enabling them to survive, giving them their only chance of salvation? ("What would become of the workers if the capitalists weren't kind enough to employ them?" the high-minded souls of the nineteenth century liked to ask.) In fact, the owner officially excludes himself from all claim to private appropriation. To the sacrifice of the nonowner, who through his labor exchanges his real life for an apparent one (thus avoiding immediate death by allowing the master to determine his variety of living death), the owner replies by appearing to sacrifice his nature as owner and exploiter; he excludes himself mythically, he puts himself at the service of everyone and of myth (at the service of God and his people, for example). With an additional gesture, with an act whose gratuitousness bathes him in an otherworldly radiance, he gives renunciation its pure form of mythical reality: renouncing the common life, he is the poor man amidst illusory wealth, he who sacrifices himself for everyone while all the other people only sacrifice themselves for their own sake, for the sake of their survival. He turns his predicament into prestige. The more powerful he is, the greater his sacrifice. He becomes the living reference point of the whole illusory life, the highest attainable point in the scale of mythical values. "Voluntarily" withdrawn from common mortals, he is drawn toward the world of the gods, and his more or less recognized participation in divinity, on the level of appearance (the only generally acknowledged frame of reference), consecrates his rank in the hierarchy of the other owners. In the organization of transcendence the feudal lord -- and through association with him the other owners of power or means of production, in varying degrees -- is led to play the principal role, the role that he really does play in the economic organization of the group's survival. As a result, the existence of the group is bound on every level to the existence of the owners as such, to those who, owning everything because they own everybody, force everyone to renounce their lives on the pretext of the owners' unique, absolute and divine renunciation. (From the god Prometheus, punished by the gods, to the god Christ, punished by men, the sacrifice of the Owner becomes vulgarized, it loses its sacred aura, becomes humanized.) Myth thus unites owner and nonowner, enveloping them in a common form in which the necessity of survival, whether mere physical survival or survival as a privileged being, forces them to live on the level of appearance and of the inversion of real life, the inversion of the life of everyday praxis. We are still there, waiting to live a life less than or beyond a mystique against which our every gesture protests while submitting to it.

9

Myth -- the unitary absolute in which the contradictions of the world find an illusory resolution, the harmonious and constantly harmonized vision that reflects and reinforces the reigning order -- is the sphere of the sacred, the extrahuman zone where an abundance of revelations are manifested but where the revelation of the process of private appropriation is carefully suppressed. Nietzsche saw this when he wrote "All becoming is a criminal revolt from eternal being, and its price is death." When the bourgeoisie claimed to replace the pure Being of feudalism with Becoming, all it really did was to desacralize Being and resacralize Becoming to its own profit. It elevated its own Becoming to the status of Being, no longer that of absolute ownership but rather that of relative appropriation: a petty democratic and mechanical Becoming, with its notions of progress, merit and causal succession. The owner's life hides him from himself; bound to myth by a life-and-death pact, he cannot see himself in the positive and exclusive enjoyment of any good except through the lived experience of his own exclusion. (And isn't it through this mythical exclusion that the nonowners will come to grasp the reality of their own exclusion?) He bears the responsibility for a group, he takes on the burden of a god. Submitting himself to its benediction and its retribution, he swathes himself in austerity and wastes away. Model of gods and heroes, the master, the owner, is the true reality of Prometheus, of Christ, of all those whose spectacular sacrifice has made it possible for "the vast majority of people" to continue to sacrifice themselves to the extreme minority, to the masters. (Analysis of the owner's sacrifice should be examined more carefully: isn't the case of Christ really the sacrifice of the owner's son? If the owner can never sacrifice himself except on the level of appearance, then Christ stands for the real immolation of the owner's son when circumstances leave no other alternative. As a son he is only an owner at an early stage of development, an embryo, little more than a dream of future ownership. In this mythic dimension belongs Maurice Barrès's famous remark in 1914, when war had arrived and made his dreams come true at last: "Our youth, as is proper, has gone to shed torrents of our blood.") This rather distasteful little game, before it became transformed into a symbolic rite, knew a heroic period when kings and tribal chiefs were ritually put to death according to their "will." Historians assure us that these august martyrs were soon replaced by prisoners, slaves or criminals. The penalty was delegated, but the rulers kept the halo.

10

The concept of a common fate is based on the sacrifice of the owner and the nonowner. Put another way, the notion of a "human condition" is based on an ideal and tormented image whose purpose is to try to resolve the irresolvable opposition between the mythical sacrifice of the minority and the really sacrificed life of everyone else. The function of myth is to unify and eternalize, in a succession of static moments, the dialectic of "will-to-live" and its opposite. This universally dominant factitious unity attains its most tangible and concrete representation in communication, particularly in language. Ambiguity is most manifest at this level, it leads to a lack of real communication, it puts the analyst at the mercy of ridiculous phantoms, at the mercy of words -- eternal and changing instants -- whose content varies according to who pronounces them, as does the notion of sacrifice. When language is put to the test, it can no longer dissimulate the misrepresentation and thus it provokes the crisis of participation. In the language of an era one can follow the traces of total revolution, unfulfilled but always imminent. They are the exalting and terrifying signs of the upheavals they foreshadow, but who takes them seriously? The discredit striking language is as deeply rooted and instinctive as the suspicion with which myths are viewed by people who at the same time remain firmly attached to them. How can key words be defined by other words? How can phrases be used to point out the signs that refute the phraseological organization of appearance? The best texts still await their justification. When a poem by Mallarmé becomes the sole explanation for an act of revolt, then poetry and revolution will have overcome their ambiguity. To await and prepare for this moment is to manipulate information not as the last shock wave whose significance escapes everyone, but as the first repercussion of an act still to come.

11

Born of man's will to survive the uncontrollable forces of nature, myth is a public welfare policy that has outlived its necessity. It has consolidated its tyrannical force by reducing life to the sole dimension of survival, by negating it as movement and totality.

When contested, myth homogenizes the diverse attacks on it; sooner or later it engulfs and assimilates them. Nothing can withstand it, no image or concept that attempts to destroy the dominant spiritual structures. It reigns over the expression of facts and of lived experience, on which it imposes its own interpretive structure (dramatization). Private consciousness is the consciousness of lived experience that finds its expression on the level of organized appearance.

Myth is sustained by rewarded sacrifice. Since every individual life is based on its own renunciation, lived experience must be defined as sacrifice and recompense. As a reward for his asceticism, the initiate (the promoted worker, the specialist, the manager -- new martyrs canonized democratically) is granted a niche in the organization of appearances; he is made to feel at home in alienation. But collective shelters disappeared with unitary societies, all that's left is their later concrete embodiments for the use of the general public: temples, churches, palaces... memorials of a universal protection. Shelters are private nowadays, and even if their protection is far from certain there can be no mistaking their price.

12

"Private" life is defined primarily in a formal context. It is, to be sure, engendered by the social relations created by private appropriation, but its essential form is determined by the expression of those relations. Universal, incontestable but constantly contested, this form makes appropriation a right belonging to everyone and from which everyone is excluded, a right one can obtain only by renouncing it. As long as it fails to break free of the context imprisoning it (a break that is called revolution), the most authentic experience can be grasped, expressed and communicated only by way of an inversion through which its fundamental contradiction is dissimulated. In other words, if a positive project fails to sustain a praxis of radically overthrowing the conditions of life -- which are nothing other than the conditions of private appropriation -- it does not have the slightest chance of escaping being taken over by the negativity that reigns over the expression of social relationships: it is coopted like an inverted mirror image. In the totalizing perspective in which it conditions the whole of everyone's life, and in which its real and its mythic power can no longer be distinguished (both being both real and mythical), the process of private appropriation has made it impossible to express life any way except negatively. Life in its entirety is immersed in a negativity that corrodes it and formally defines it. To talk of life today is like talking of rope in the house of a hanged man. Since the key of will-to-live has been lost we have been wandering in the corridors of an endless mausoleum. The dialogue of chance and the throw of the dice3 no longer suffices to justify our lassitude; those who still accept living in well-furnished weariness picture themselves as leading an indolent existence while failing to notice in each of their daily gestures a living denial of their despair, a denial that should rather make them despair only of the poverty of their imagination. Forgetting life, one can identify with a range of images, from the brutish conqueror and brutish slave at one pole to the saint and the pure hero at the other. The air in this shithouse has been unbreathable for a long time. The world and man as representation stink like carrion and there's no longer any god around to turn the charnel houses into beds of lilies. After all the ages men have died while accepting without notable change the explanations of gods, of nature and of biological laws, it wouldn't seem unreasonable to ask if we don't die because so much death enters -- and for very specific reasons -- into every moment of our lives.

13

Private appropriation can be defined notably as the appropriation of things by means of the appropriation of people. It is the spring and the troubled water where all reflections mingle and blur. Its field of action and influence, spanning the whole of history, seems to have been characterized until now by a fundamental double behavioral determination: an ontology based on sacrifice and negation of self (its subjective and objective aspects respectively) and a fundamental duality, a division between particular and general, individual and collective, private and public, theoretical and practical, spiritual and material, intellectual and manual, etc. The contradiction between universal appropriation and universal expropriation implies that the master has been seen for what he is and isolated. This mythical image of terror, destitution and renunciation presents itself to slaves, to servants, to all those who can't stand living as they do; it is the illusory reflection of their participation in property, a natural illusion since they really do participate in it through the daily sacrifice of their energy (what the ancients called pain or torture and we call labor or work) since they themselves produce this property in a way that excludes them. The master can only cling to the notion of work-as-sacrifice, like Christ to his cross and his nails; it is up to him to authenticate sacrifice, to apparently renounce his right to exclusive enjoyment and to cease to expropriate with purely human violence (that is, violence without mediation). The sublimity of the gesture obscures the initial violence, the nobility of the sacrifice absolves the commando, the brutality of the conqueror is bathed in the light of a transcendence whose reign is internalized, the gods are the intransigent guardians of rights, the short-tempered shepherds of a peaceful, law-abiding flock of owners and owner wannabes. The gamble on transcendence and the sacrifice it implies are the masters' greatest conquest, their most accomplished submission to the necessity of conquest. Anyone who intrigues for power while refusing the purification of renunciation (the brigand or the tyrant) will sooner or later be tracked down and killed like a mad dog, or worse: as someone who only pursues his own ends and whose blunt disdain for "work" lacks any tact toward others' feelings: serial killers like Troppmann, Landru, Petiot were doomed to defeat because they murdered people without justifying it in the name of defending the Free World, the Christian West, the State or Human Dignity. By refusing to play the rules of the game, pirates, gangsters and outlaws disturb those with good consciences (whose consciences are a reflection of myth); but the masters, by killing the encroacher or enrolling him as a cop, reestablish the omnipotence of the "eternal truth": namely, that those who don't sell themselves lose their right to survive and those who do sell themselves lose their right to live. The sacrifice of the master is the essence of humanism, which is what makes humanism -- and let this be understood once and for all -- the miserable negation of everything human. Humanism is the master taken seriously at his own game, acclaimed by those who see in his apparent sacrifice (that caricatural reflection of their real sacrifice) a reason to hope for salvation. Justice, Dignity, Nobility, Freedom... these words that yap and howl, are they anything but household pets who have continued to reliably return home to their masters since the time when heroic lackeys won the right to walk them on the streets? To use them is to forget that they are the ballast that enables power to rise out of reach. And if we imagine a regime deciding that the mythical sacrifice of the masters should not be promoted in such universal forms, and setting about tracking down these word-concepts and wiping them out, we could well expect the Left to be incapable of combating it with anything more than a plaintive battle of words whose every phrase, invoking the "sacrifice" of a previous master, calls for an equally mythical sacrifice of a new one (a leftist master, a regime mowing down workers in the name of the proletariat). Bound to the notion of sacrifice, humanism is born of the mutual fear of masters and slaves: it is nothing but the solidarity of a shit-scared humanity. But those who reject all hierarchical power can use any word as a weapon to punctuate their action. Lautréamont and the illegalist anarchists were already aware of this; so were the dadaists.

The appropriator thus becomes an owner from the moment he puts the ownership of people and things in the hands of God or of some universal transcendence, whose omnipotence is reflected back on him as a grace sanctifying his slightest gesture. To oppose an owner thus consecrated is to oppose God, nature, the fatherland, the people. In short, to exclude oneself from the whole physical and spiritual world. "We must neither govern nor be governed," writes Marcel Havrenne so neatly. For those who add an appropriate violence to his humor, there is no longer any salvation or damnation, no place in the universal order, neither with Satan, the great coopter of the faithful, nor in any form of myth, since they are the living proof of the uselessness of all that. They were born for a life yet to be invented; insofar as they lived, it was on this hope that they finally came to grief.

Two corollaries of singularization in transcendence:

a) If ontology implies transcendence, it is clear that any ontology automatically justifies the being of the master and the hierarchical power wherein the master is reflected in degraded, more or less faithful images.

b) Over the distinction between manual and intellectual work, between practice and theory, is superimposed the distinction between work-as-real-sacrifice and the organization of work in the form of apparent sacrifice.

It would be tempting to explain fascism -- among other reasons for it -- as an act of faith, the auto-da-fé of a bourgeoisie haunted by the murder of God and the destruction of the great sacred spectacle, dedicating itself to the devil, to an inverted mysticism, a black mysticism with its rituals and its holocausts. Mysticism and high finance.

It should not be forgotten that hierarchical power is inconceivable without transcendence, without ideologies, without myths. Demystification itself can always be turned into a myth: it suffices to "omit," most philosophically, demystification by acts. Any demystification so neutralized, with the sting taken out of it, becomes painless, euthanasic, in a word, humanitarian. Except that the movement of demystification will ultimately demystify the demystifiers.

RAOUL VANEIGEM (April 1962)

(Concluded in the next issue)

  • What will become of the totality inherent in unitary society when it comes up against the bourgeois demolition of that society?
  • Will an artificial reconstitution of unity succeed in hoodwinking the worker alienated in consumption?
  • But what can be the future of totality in a fragmented society?
  • What unexpected supersession of this society and of its whole organisation of appearance will finally bring us to a happy ending?

IF YOU DON'T ALREADY KNOW, FIND OUT IN PART TWO

End of Part 1. Translated by Ken Knabb (slightly modified from the version in the Situationist International Anthology). Footnotes by translator.

  • 1 Erostratus burned down a famous Greek temple in 356 BC so that his name would be remembered for all time. Jacques: French peasants who revolted in the Jacquerie of 1358; by extension, a jacquerie is any particularly violent peasant rebellion. Enragés: extremist current during the French Revolution (1793). Fédérés: insurgents of the Paris Commune (1871), particularly those massacred in its last stand.
  • 2 The "Crystal Night" was a Nazi-orchestrated mass reaction against Jews in Germany in 1938, so called because of the enormous number of store windows broken.
  • 3 Reference to Mallarmé's poem "A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance." Vaneigem's sense is somewhat obscure (as is the poem), but seems to refer to the inadequacy of indifferent alternation between arbitrary decision and leaving things purely to chance. "Stéphane Mallarmé, in the great poem that expresses and sums up the idea he pursued throughout his life, declares: A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance. By the game of dice he symbolized pure thought, which is in essence Number. What he meant by chance is everything that escapes conscious thought and that arises out of its very lapses. He somberly proclaimed the failure of the human spirit, its inability to succeed in mastering itself." (André Rolland de Renéville, Expérience Poétique.)

Comments

From Internationale Situationniste #7 (April 1962).

Submitted by Fozzie on February 6, 2023

What is the most revolutionary element to make its appearance in the SI? The most revolutionary: that is to say the most in touch with the future. And what is the most critical point? To respond to this question, I shall analyze the SI's program as if I were speaking to a philosopher. What an audacious and absurd undertaking! I see the innovative element in the fact that we have begun to better understand the peculiarity of our 'being-in-the-world,' and to better understand the nature of our program: the consequences of the incompatibility of our program, as expression, with the available means of expression and reception.

What is the most embarrassing point in the SI's original program, the one that does most to prevent people from sleeping? Responding to this question in philosophical terms is clearly absurd. And yet, as contemporary philosophy is situated entirely within the theme of 'the abandoning of philosophy' (cf. Thèses de Hambourg), this occasions a certain surprise, and this surprise is recognized by all theoreticians of information as the condition of the transmission of a 'quantity of information.'

From the start, the situationist project was a revolutionary program. It was practical, quasi-political, objective, in favor of transforming of the world; and linked to the present real transformation, reified but general and inter-bureaucratic. On the other hand, this program was intersubjective, nourished by desire, by what is radically anti-alienating in the lives of everyone — a drink mixed by thirst. From the start, we were conscious that the manager, the sociologist and the artist comprise a troika paid to make people believe that desires can be cannibalized, or that the energies of these desires can be converted into 'needs without ever having been desires.' We were equally conscious that a unique historical opportunity allowed the managers to expropriate to their own ends 'all the instruments by which a society thinks and sees itself.' Their effectiveness was multiplied by the underestimation of this power, nourished by the most diverse sources, and was due in part to the ignorance diffused by these very channels of spectacles and 'information.' In short: power enters into a direct grip on the system by which individuals communicate with themselves and with others (the responsibility of everyone in this system is recognized by everyone, except for power).

These elements existed in the SI from the start. Their classic content corresponded with Marx's classic criteria for revolutionary theory: don't let idealists exploit the subjective.

We are now involved in a transcendence of this classic stage. It is becoming clear that other movements — surrealism, Marxism, existentialism, etc. — dropped the chestnut when it got too hot for them (they cannot forget the old Hegelian philosophy, even if they have forgotten that the dialectic was originally the dialectic of the subjective and the objective). I see this transcendence, as I have said, in the fact that we have begun to better understand the peculiarity of our 'being-in-the-world,' the consequences of the incompatibility of our program, as expression, with the available means of expression. And I would add that this is not only about 'our program,' that everyone participates automatically — for or against, but always in this 'infinitely complicated conflict between alienation and the struggle against alienation' (Lefebvre) — in the situationist program.

From the start of the discussions about the implications of the situationist program, we have posed claims in accordance with this program and we have proposed constructions. At the same time, we have recognized the 'chimerical,' 'utopian' character of some of these images and the 'manichean' character of some of these claims. Examples are easy enough to find in our published texts. In spite of this, the approach to this problem remains accidental and we insist on the legitimacy of the momentary utopia, on the revolutionary value of such claims, on the necessity of material means, or completely on the contrary, on the necessity, at a primitive stage, of 'thinking our ideas rigorously enough in common' (Internationale Situationniste #2 1 ).

I believe that though these remarks are accompanied by a certain embarrassment, they are profoundly just. And yet it is here that I see a step already taken in relation to the first programmatic stage, and the possibility of a great evolution to come.

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

Comments

Police raid on Gruppe Spur, plus exclusions, resignations, reprints, typos., etc. From Internationale Situationniste #7 (April 1962).

Submitted by Fozzie on February 6, 2023

The SI's Central Council gathered in Paris from 10 to 11 February. Apart from the six CC delegates (Ansgar-Elde sent an apology for his absence), eight other situationists present in Paris at the time took part in the discussion. Considering the worsening since the Göteborg conference of the opposition toward the SI from within the German section — particularly the content of issue 7 of Spur; the distrust and hostility that this group holds toward the comrades implementing the SI's directives in Germany and elsewhere; and its now undeniable collusion with the ruling class of European culture — a motion demanding the exclusion of Kunzelmann (one of the two German CC delegates), as well as that of Prem, Sturm and Zimmer, was presented by Debord, Kotànyi, Lausen and Vaneigem. Nash, rebuking those responsible for Spur, was in favor of them publishing a retraction, but stopped short of demanding an exclusion. After a debate on this subject, however, Nash decided on the option of exclusion, which was subsequently settled with a vote of 5 to 1. For his part, Kunzelmann approved of all the CC's critiques, but insisted that he was not personally responsible for any of the incriminating facts. Nevertheless, given the opportunity, he was unable to bring himself to make a definitive break with the others, and thus joined them in their exclusion. This exclusion was immediately made public with the tract Nicht hinauslehnen! The only person present and not implicated to express sympathy for the positions of the excluded was Lothar Fisher, who must therefore be counted among them.

With this affair out of the way, the CC turned to the discussion of a more precise definition of culture and everyday life, of the dialectic of the spectacle and the strike force that we are now capable of assembling. A theoretical discussion has thus been opened, which is expected to culminate in a coherent exposition in the form of a pocket dictionary of situationist concepts within the space of a year. A resolution was made for the creative détournement of the "popular university" in Denmark (cf. Mme E Simon's study Réveil national et culture populaire en Scandinavie, PUF distribution). The CC entrusted the publication of the SI's new German journal Der deutsche Gedanke to Uwe Lausen.

In terms of the exclusions, the CC decided that it would be better to limit numbers in order to exercise stricter control on admission to the SI, which is currently far too easy, by only selecting elements that are completely sound. Various sympathizers seem to think that there is something to gain from pretending to be converted (for example, it is well-known that the SI's Scandinavian section is easier to join than the nouveau roman school). If this is practiced, the SI can hope to accomplish its task with only several dozen more exclusions, that is to say with the least expense.

A reprint of Internationale Situationniste #2 is currently under way. It will be sent to those who have requested it in order to complete their collections.

We should draw attention to the substantial amount of typographical errors marring our previous issue, most of which occurred at the printers. To avoid any contention, note that page 11, first column, line 13 should read: "deliberately by the police"; page 13, second column, line 42: "the vanishing point of the planned environment"; page 14, at the end of the first column: "The society of free time and consumption is lived as a society of empty time, as consumption of emptiness"; page 15, first column, line 15: "a major embarrassment to the good people"; page 16, line 3: "a falsified need"; page 26, at the start of the second column: "the constantly recurring possibilities of alienation arising within the very struggle against alienation; but we should stress that this applies to the highest level of research"; page 30, second column, line 10: "not a religion. This is the conflict"; page 40, line 19: "for those who possess cultural resources."

While all these mistakes were corrected in most copies of Internationale Situationniste #6, this led to the creation of two new ones: on page 10, the caption should end "by destroying the natural link these objects may have with other objects, so as to have them become more than anything else a material environment with a high standing"; and in the second point of the program of unitary urbanism on page 16, it should read: "are really useful only in reinforcing reification" (instead of "reedification"). But if that were the case, Kotànyi and Vaneigem's readers would surely have reified themselves.

Owing to major differences on the political action to take in the wake of the great Belgian strike, André Frankin broke with our SI comrades in Belgium — and therefore with all other situationists — in March 1961, letting us know in a letter of 13 September the same year that he found all the SI's ideas to be total rubbish, fishing in troubled waters, with the exception, however, of the few plagiarized in his own texts (published in issues 3, 4 and 5 of this journal). The least that can be said is that just as we he will no longer have anything to do with us, we will no longer have anything to do with him.

In a circular dated 27 October 1961, Maurice Lemaître and two other relics from the golden age of the lettrist avant-garde, finally conceding that the lettrist group is no more, while at the same time proposing that "lettrism is now beginning to find its rightful place" in esoteric history and major exhibitions, formed themselves into a kind support group whose members "are able to ensure that their names are associated with the phrase: the lettrist movement." Already assured of the adherence of three other well and truly conservative mammoths, the signatories then addressed themselves to four people who had taken various sides in the conflicts of this avant-garde toward the time of its break-up. Finding himself among those solicited, Debord of course chose not to respond. Then, in a letter on 4 November, they tried again, concluding that his extended silence authorized them to report his acceptance in the imminent publication of their poverties. Debord then telegraphed them: "You filthy bastards. I forbid you to use my signature in any way whatsoever. Be warned." They were smart enough to leave it at that. But their gesture was still rather peculiar, given that none of these people had ever shown the least interest in approaching a situationist before.

These particular sort of academics know that they are the SI's sworn enemies, and know it so well that they devoted an entire issue of their interminable review to an almost frenzied denunciation of us (Poésie Nouvelle #13, October 1960); and that we ourselves have said (in issues 4 and 5 of Internationale Situationniste) that we hold their theory in extremely low esteem, to say nothing of what we think of several of their very lives. This incident therefore demonstrates their scorn for all thought, including their own. But they still feel the need to revert to this opportunism. And their talent at cutting and pasting is enough to show their vocation for engagement and reengagement in that wretched legion of arrivistes who haven't even arrived. They're grasping at straws.

In our previous issue, we reported on the threats of seizure that delayed the release of Spur #5, which included a collection of texts on unitary urbanism, and which was finally published in Munich in June 1961. On 9 November, after the publication of issue 6, a series of raids succeeded in confiscating every copy of each issue of the German situationist journal that the police could find; all the situationists were subjected to lengthy interrogations, and four of them were charged. In an initial pamphlet distributed the next day with the signatures of thirty-one people — most of them from the SI — in solidarity with the accused, the German section emphasized that "for the first time since 1945, a search has been carried out on the premises of artists." The pamphlet showed the considerable intimidating moves that constituted the threats to ban publication, prosecution and even imprisonment (the demonstrated subversion appeared to have been mainly directed at religion), and by calling on the support of intellectuals and artists, led initially to additional charges of contempt of court.

But as it turned out, this solidarity was expressed almost immediately in Germany and abroad, and the authorities were left to retract to the point of allowing the return of the confiscated publications. The remainder of the proceedings are at a standstill.

In its February 1962 issue, the German journal Vernissage having insinuated that the exclusion three months later of several German situationists could well have been linked to their problems with the vice squad, or to their drunkenness, a letter by the current German section on 15 March, approved by the rest of the SI to this modern art version of Confidential, affirmed that all the situationists are and remain in solidarity with those concerned with this affair, and pointed out: "the grounds for their exclusion is their refusal to follow the SI in all its extreme conclusions. In any case, we could not have reproached these comrades for the non-conformism of their behavior or their art. We would even go so far as to declare that, from the point of view of the editorship of Vernissage — that is to say from your point of view as lowly shopkeepers, servants and hustlers — we are worse..."

Elsewhere, two German artists on whom the SI had always been able to rely for solidarity protested that on this occasion, they did not want to be counted among those who supported Spur, clearly demonstrating their sympathies with the police.

At the time of the November 1961 ambush at Kindu on Italian pilots serving in the UN's occupying forces in the Congo, just as at the very moment of the execution of nineteen priests in Congolo last January, traces could be found of Colonel Pakassa and his troops from the Western Province Army. Unfortunately, colonel Pakassa was arrested shortly afterwards, at the same time that the Leopoldville government imprisoned the moderate Gizenga — as the start of the same process of liquidation applied to Lumumba — and while the Lumumbist mutiny of troops in Stanleyville was quashed by General Lundula, several units being disbanded and numerous soldiers shot.

The journalists who praised Jean-Louis Bédouin’s Twenty Years of Surrealism either didn’t read it, or were unaware that surrealism effectively continued to exist for the twenty years following Maurice Nadeau’s work.1 It is also difficult to understand the warm reception for a book that describes with such little imagination a period of such little interest. The history of these twenty years is the history of the neglect of twenty years of modern art. And even within the tiny sector to which Bédouin limits himself, the information is really of very little consequence. Why talk, for example, of Asger Jorn’s debt to the collage technique of Max Ernst (p.105), when Jorn has never hidden the fact that all of Ernst’s work has influenced him heavily? Why openly consider the surrealist groups of three continents to be mere spin-offs of a distant headquarters in Paris, where nothing actually happens anymore anyway? Why mention Ça commence bien,2 the 1954 tract “co-signed by the lettrists” on the Rimbaud centenary (p.278), except to gloss over the polemic between the signatories that ensued almost immediately afterwards? It can’t be denied that this was interesting as an extreme case of the ravages of Stalinism on its enemies: the members of this particular lettrist faction, some of whom would later contribute to the founding of the SI, were treated by the surrealists as NKVD henchmen simply for having mentioned class struggle. A surrealist tract entitled Familiers du Grand Truc3 declared that the lettrists would soon embark on carriers as bearers of false-witness at Moscow show trials. It’s a shame the surrealists didn’t stick to automatic writing, foreseeing that such and such a department store would burn down, or finding out what lay ahead for them in 1939. By choosing to attempt rational discourse instead, they made a wildly inaccurate prediction about a few people joining the NKVD (which even at stage was, of course, no longer), and are now completely incapable of seeing the future, let alone the present, of this year’s models: Hantaï and Pauwels.4

Finally, the leitmotif of Bédouin’s prose on almost every page is the credulous “youths,” the “young people” who adhere en masse to surrealist doctrine, the surrealist generations that come and go like clockwork. Every year, there are new young people ready to stand up for the surrealist project, which has to be a good thing, right? And what is it that they've done? On this rather important point, Bédouin’s account remains vague.

In December 1959, The Meaning of Decay in Art, an editorial note in issue 3 of this journal, pointed out that if Lucien Goldmann really wanted to accept, in his Recherches dialectiques, that "art as an independent phenomenon separated from other realms of social life" could be led to disappear in a future where it would be necessary to conceive of an art that would no longer be "separated from life," then he was declaring it from a point of view far removed from reality, because he did so without recognizing its verification in the expression of his time. He was still thinking in terms of the classical/romantic dichotomy, already so unfortunate in Marx. His subsequent progress cannot be ignored. In Mediations #2 (May-August 1961), he conceived "very seriously and only as an hypothesis" (the italics are his), the idea that "in a world where the inauthenticity of objects and people is, to varying degrees, universal, but where radical inauthenticity cannot exist, one would have to expect to discover "at least two structural stages of cultural creation: the thematic expression of absence; and, at a more advanced level, the question of the radical destruction of the object." Even more tentatively, he adds: "It goes without saying that the first characterizes a major movement within modern literature, from Kafka to Robbe-Grillet, and that it was perhaps even already an important part of the works like those of Mallarmé and Valéry, while the second forms the basis of non-figurative painting as well as a number of important currents in modern poetry."
He also discovers, much to his amazement, that people resist reification! Page 153: "The provisional hypothesis that we are formulating today is that reification, which tends toward the complete dissolution and integration of different groups into a single society, has a character so contrary to reality, not to mention biology, that it engenders a more or less strong sense of opposition in all individuals, a resistance which can be more or less general and more or less collective, and which forms the backdrop for creativity."

And thus in 1961, we suddenly see that the world, being what it is, "engenders literature with the absence of art and art with the destruction of the object." It's safe to say that Goldmann ignores this, for he is so enchanted by his discovery that he hasn't yet considered that the desert island on which that unexpected spiritual tempest stranded him might well be as heavily populated as the French concentration camps. The tracks of the Man Friday he is expecting to see there are those of every single cultural revolution of the last one hundred years.

We should quote the rather telling paragraph that makes up Goldmann's cautious conclusion: "These remarks are only hypotheses; naturally, they need to be clarified and verified by in-depth collective research that would take up to several years. Such as they are, they nevertheless appear suggestive enough to us that in the interests of this work itself, formulating and proposing them in the discussion has been extremely useful." You'd have to agree that despite the nobility of such honesty, it says a thing or two about the capacities of the researcher.

In August 1961, the art dealer Otto Van de Loo, brought to task in our previous issue (p.41 5 ), published a long declaration entitled Offene Erklarung zu einem Artikel der Internationale Situationniste, in which he confirmed our entire version of the affair in a highly detailed but excruciatingly embarrassing style, to the point of asserting that no one could doubt the joke constituted by his telegraphed offer of a contract for 1,000 Deutschmarks a month to renew ties with a few artists on whom he had earlier put pressure in decidedly nobler and more sentimental terms. We'll let you be the judge of all those who think that the artistic economy is so extravagant to be so sure that an artist could produce any kind of return on 1,200 New Francs per month (especially when this sum, "unthinkable" in August 1961 because it was so high, has become unthinkable eight months later because it is so low). To bolster his denial, he added that works by these artists were worth nothing and interested no-one. But to judge him by his own criteria, he is either a fool or a liar, because this argument is effectively an admission that he was indeed interested in them as members of the SI, and that he planned to take advantage of their enterism in order exert a level of influence on decisions made by them in their capacity as situationists. He boasted that he had partially succeeded, and even that he was capable of continuing this influence because in the same declaration, he made much of the cordial personal relations he maintained with a few situationists at the time. He went so far as to draw on this argument to throw the seriousness of the information in the SI journal into doubt. We therefore stand by all our remarks in IS #6, underlining that we are not declaring our opposition to a specific art dealer — which would mean that we could investigate alliances with others — but that we are protecting the SI from outside pressures with the most definite measures. And to prove it, and to bring this incident to an end, we will point out that all those whose cordiality formed the basis of Van de Loo's postcards from 30 August have since been forced to leave the SI.


JV Martin organizes the resistance with loyal elements following Nash's putsch.
Translation: "Sabotage! Contact headquarters by space radio!"

In Sweden on 15 March, Jörgen Nash and Ansgar-Elde suddenly declared their opposition to the Situationist International, and set about converting the Scandinavian section into yet another "Bauhaus," hoping to use the seal of situationism to attract a few highly profitable art dealers. The development of this conspiracy was no doubt precipitated by the recent elimination of the SI's right wing, on whose support the Nashists had relied. (In the case of Spur, the project was discovered to be a sort of National Situationism, organized as an autonomous force, seeking to expand into Switzerland and Austria, which found support in Northern Europe). In their declaration, the Nashists did not shy from resorting to the most outrageous lies, going so far as to give the impression that on 10 February, at the SI's last Central Council — in session under some sort of alleged pressure from the streets! — the minority were intimidated by cunning use of the atmosphere of civil war that has apparently been prevalent in Paris for the last two years (alas!). They even thought that they needed to enlarge this miserable minority by bolstering their enterprise with someone else, whom they asserted retrospectively was a member of the CC, when the entire SI knows that this is clearly not true. The Nashist gangsters can expect no reconciliation with us.

On 23 March, the Central Council of the SI delegated the Danish situationist J.V. Martin complete power to represent the Situationist International in the zone covered by the Scandinavian section (Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden) until the Anvers Conference; to immediately regroup all the authentic situationists; and to co-ordinate every means necessary in the struggle against Nashism.

Translated by Reuben Keehan. From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/news7.html

  • 1Historie du surréalisme (1945-48).
  • 2A Good Start. The LI responded to the surrealists' tract with the leaflet, Et Ça finit mal! [And a Bad End!].
  • 3The Great Friends of the Grand Truc: a reference to the bourgeois politicians in Chant de guerre parisien [Parisian War Cry], Rimbaud's poem on the Commune.
  • 4Simon Hantaï (b.1922), Hungarian-French painter, and Louis Pauwels (1920-1997), author and editor of the science fiction journal Planète.
  • 5Situationist News

Attachments

Comments

cover of IS8

central bulletin published by the sections of the situationist international

January 1963

Director: G.-E. Debord

Mail: B.P. 75-06 Paris

This bulletin is edited by the Central Council of the SI: Bernstein, Debord, Kotányi, Lausen, Martin, Strijbosch, Trocchi, Vaneigem.

All texts published in Internationale Situationniste may be freely reproduced, translated or adapted, even without indication of origin.

Submitted by libcom on September 7, 2005

From Internationale Situationniste #8 (January 1963).

Submitted by libcom on September 7, 2005

The human appropriation of nature is the real adventure we have embarked on. It is the central, indisputable project, the issue that encompasses all other issues. What is always fundamentally in question in modern thought and action is the possible use of the dominated sector of nature. A society's basic perspective on this question determines the choices among the alternative directions presented at each moment of the process, as well as the rhythm and duration of productive expansion in each sector. The lack of such a comprehensive, long-term perspective -- or rather the monopoly of a single untheorized perspective automatically produced by the present power structure's blind economic growth -- is at the root of the emptiness of contemporary thought over the last forty years.

The advances in production and in constantly improving technological potentials are proceeding even faster than nineteenth-century communism predicted. But we have remained at a stage of overequipped prehistory. A century of revolutionary attempts has failed: human life has not been rationalized and impassioned; the project of a classless society has yet to be achieved. We find ourselves caught up in an endless expansion of material means that continues to serve fundamentally static interests and notoriously obsolete values. The spirit of the dead weighs very heavily on the technology of the living. The economic planning that reigns everywhere is insane, not so much because of its academic obsession with organizing the enrichment of the years to come as because of the rotten blood of the past that circulates through its veins, continually pumped forth with each artificial pulsation of this "heart of a heartless world."

Material liberation is only a precondition for the liberation of human history, and can only be judged as such. A country's decision as to which kind of minimum level of development is to be given priority depends on the particular project of liberation chosen, and therefore on who makes this choice -- the autonomous masses or the specialists in power. Those who accept the ideas of one or another type of specialist organizers regarding what is indispensable may be liberated from any deprivation of the objects those organizers choose to produce, but they will never be liberated from the organizers themselves. The most modern and unexpected forms of hierarchy will always turn out to be nothing but costly remakes of the old world of passivity, impotence and slavery -- the antithesis of humanity's mastery of its history and its surroundings -- regardless of the material forces abstractly possessed by the society.

Because of the fact that in present-day society the domination of nature presents itself both as an increasingly aggravated alienation and as the single great ideological justification for this social alienation, it is criticized in a one-sided, undialectical and insufficiently historical manner by some of the radical groups who are halfway between the old degraded and mystified conception of the workers movement, which they have superseded, and the new form of total contestation which is yet to come. (See, for example, the significant theories of Cardan and others in the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie.) These groups, rightly opposing the continually more thorough reification of human labor and its modern corollary, the passive consumption of a leisure activity manipulated by the ruling class, often end up unconsciously harboring a sort of nostalgia for earlier forms of work, for the really "human" relationships that were able to flourish in the societies of the past or even during the less developed phases of industrial society. As it happens, this attitude fits in quite well with the system's efforts to obtain a higher yield from existing production by doing away with both the waste and the inhumanity that characterize modern industry (in this regard see Instructions for an Insurrection in Internationale Situationniste #6). But in any case, these conceptions abandon the very core of the revolutionary project, which is nothing less than the suppression of work in the usual present-day sense (and of the proletariat) and of all the justifications of previous forms of work. It is impossible to understand the sentence in the Communist Manifesto that says "the bourgeoisie has played an eminently revolutionary role in history" if one ignores the possibility, opened up to us by the domination of nature, of replacing work with a new type of free activity; or if one ignores the role of the bourgeoisie in the "dissolution of old ideas," that is, if one follows the unfortunate tendency of the classical workers movement to define itself positively in terms of "revolutionary ideology."

In Basic Banalities Vaneigem has elucidated the process of the dissolution of religious thought and has shown how its function as anesthetic, hypnotic and tranquilizer has been taken over, at a lower level, by ideology. Like penicillin, ideology has become less effective as its use has become more widespread. As a result, the dosage has to be continually increased and the packaging made more sensational (one need only recall the diverse excesses of Nazism or of today's consumer propaganda). Since the disappearance of feudal society the ruling classes have been increasingly ill-served by their own ideologies: these ideologies (as petrified critical thought), after having been used by them as general weapons for seizing power, end up presenting contradictions to their particular reign. What was originally an unconscious falsification (resulting from an ideology's having stopped at partial conclusions) becomes a systematic lie once certain of the interests it cloaked are in power and protected by a police force. The most modern example is also the most glaring: it was by taking advantage of the element of ideology present in the workers movement that the bureaucracy was able to establish its power in Russia. Any attempt to modernize an ideology -- whether an aberrant one like fascism or a consistent one like the ideology of spectacular consumption in developed capitalism -- tends to preserve the present, which is itself dominated by the past. An ideological reformism hostile to the established society can never be effective because it can never get hold of the means of force-feeding thanks to which this society can still make effective use of ideologies. Revolutionary theory must mercilessly criticize all ideologies -- including, of course, that particular ideology called "the death of ideologies" (whose title is already a confession since ideologies have always been dead thought), which is merely an empiricist ideology rejoicing over the downfall of envied rivals.

The domination of nature implies the question "For what purpose?" but this very questioning of man's praxis must itself dominate this domination, though it could not take place except on the basis of it. Only the crudest answer is automatically rejected: "To carry on as before, producing and consuming more and more," prolonging the reifying domination that has been inherent in capitalism from its beginnings (though not without "producing its own gravediggers"). We have to expose the contradiction between the positive aspects of the transformation of nature -- the great project of the bourgeoisie -- and its cooption and trivialization by hierarchical power, which in all its contemporary variants remains faithful to the same model of bourgeois "civilization." In its massified form, this bourgeois model has been "socialized" for the benefit of a composite petty bourgeoisie that is taking on all the capacities for mindless manipulability characteristic of the former poor classes and all the signs of wealth (themselves massified) that signify membership in the ruling class. The bureaucrats of the Eastern bloc are objectively led to follow the same pattern; and the more they produce, the less need they have for police in maintaining their particular schema for the elimination of class struggle. Modern capitalism loudly proclaims a similar goal. But they're all astride the same tiger: a world in rapid transformation in which they desire the dose of immobility necessary for the perpetuation of one or another variant of hierarchical power.

The criticisms of the present social order are all interrelated, just as are the apologetics for that order. The interrelation of the apologetics is merely less apparent in that they have to praise or lie about numerous mutually contradictory details and antagonistic variants within the system. But if you really renounce all the variants of apologetics, you get straight to the critique that does not suffer from any guilty conscience because it is not compromised with any present ruling force. If someone thinks that a hierarchical bureaucracy can be a revolutionary power, and also agrees that mass tourism as it is globally organized by the society of the spectacle is a good thing and a pleasure, then, like Sartre, he can pay a visit to China or somewhere else. His mistakes, lies and stupidity should surprise no one. Everybody finds their own level (other travelers, such as those who go to serve Tshombe in Katanga, are even more detestable and are paid in more real coin). The intellectual witnesses of the left, eagerly toddling to wherever they are invited, bear witness to nothing so much as their own abdication of thinking -- to the fact that their "thought" has for decades been abdicating its freedom as it oscillates between competing bosses. The thinkers who admire the present achievements of the East or the West and who are taken in by all the spectacular gimmicks have obviously never thought about anything at all, as anyone can tell who has read them. The society they reflect naturally encourages us to admire its admirers. In many places they are even allowed to play their little game of "social commitment," in which they ostentatiously proclaim their support (with or without regretful reservations) for the form of established society whose label and packaging inspires them.

Every day alienated people are shown or informed about new successes they have obtained, successes for which they have no use. This does not mean that these advances in material development are bad or uninteresting. They can be turned to good use in real life -- but only along with everything else. The victories of our day belong to star-specialists. Gagarin's exploit shows that man can survive farther out in space, under increasingly unfavorable conditions. But just as is the case when medicine and biochemistry enable a prolonged survival in time, this quantitative extension of survival is in no way linked to a qualitative improvement of life. You can survive farther away and longer, but never live more. Our task is not to celebrate such victories, but to make celebration victorious -- celebration whose infinite possibilities in everyday life are potentially unleashed by these technical advances.

Nature has to be rediscovered as a "worthy opponent." The game with nature has to be exciting: each point scored must concern us directly. The conscious construction of a moment of life is an example of our (shifting and transitory) control of our time and our environment. Humanity's expansion into the cosmos is -- at the opposite pole from the postartistic construction of individual life (though these two poles of the possible are intimately linked) -- an example of an enterprise in which the pettiness of specialized military competition clashes with the objective grandeur of the project. The cosmic adventure will be extended, and thus opened up to a participation totally different from that of specialist guinea pigs, farther and more quickly when the collapse of the miserly reign of specialists on this planet has opened the floodgates of everyone's creativity -- a creativity which is presently blocked and repressed, but which is potentially capable of leading to an exponential progress in dealing with all human problems, supplanting the present cumulative growth restricted to an arbitrary sector of industrial production. The old schema of the contradiction between productive forces and production relations should obviously no longer be understood as a short-term death warrant for the capitalist production system, as if the latter were inevitably doomed to stagnate and become incapable of continuing its development. This contradiction should be seen rather as a judgment (which remains to be executed with the appropriate weapons) against the miserable development generated by this self-regulating production -- a development that must be condemned for its paltriness as well as for its dangerousness -- in view of the fantastic potential development that could be based on the present economic infrastructure.

The only questions that are openly posed in the present society are loaded questions, questions that already imply certain obligatory responses. When people point out the obvious fact that the modern tradition is a tradition of innovation, they shut their eyes to the equally obvious fact that this innovation does not extend everywhere. During an era when ideology could still believe in its role, Saint-Just declared: "In a time of innovation everything that is not new is pernicious." God's numerous successors who organize the present society of the spectacle know very well what asking too many questions can lead to. The decline of philosophy and the arts also stems from this suppression of questioning. The revolutionary elements of modern thought and art have with varying degrees of precision demanded a praxis that would be the minimum terrain necessary for their development -- a praxis that is still absent. The nonrevolutionary elements add new embellishments to the official questions, or to the futile questioning of pure speculation (the specialty of Arguments).

There are many ideological rooms in the House of the Father, i.e. in the old society, whose fixed frames of reference have been lost but whose law remains intact (God doesn't exist, but nothing is permitted). Every facility is granted to the modernisms that serve to combat the truly modern. The gang of hucksters of the unbelievable magazine Planète, which so impresses the school teachers, epitomizes a bizarre demagogy that profits from the gaping absence of contestation and revolutionary imagination, at least in their intellectual manifestations, over the last nearly half a century (and from the numerous obstacles still placed in the way of their resurgence today). Playing on the truism that science and technology are advancing faster and faster without anyone knowing where they are going, Planète harangues ordinary people with the message that henceforth everything must be changed -- while at the same time taking for granted 99% of the life really lived in our era. The daze induced by the barrage of novelties can be taken advantage of to calmly reintroduce outmoded nonsense that has virtually died out in even the most backward regions. The drugs of ideology will end their history in an apotheosis of vulgarity that even Pauwels [editor of Planète], for all his efforts, cannot yet imagine.

Ideology, in its various fluid forms that have replaced the solid mythical system of the past, has an increasingly large role to play as the specialist rulers need to increasingly regulate all aspects of an expanding production and consumption. Use value -- indispensable still, but which had already tended to become merely implicit since the predominance of a market economy -- is now explicitly manipulated (or artificially created) by the planners of the modern market. It is the merit of Jacques Ellul, in his book Propaganda (1962), which describes the unity of the various forms of conditioning, to have shown that this advertising-propaganda is not merely an unhealthy excrescence that could be prohibited, but is at the same time a remedy in a generally sick society, a remedy that makes the sickness tolerable while aggravating it. People are to a great extent accomplices of propaganda, of the reigning spectacle, because they cannot reject it without contesting the society as a whole. The single important task of contemporary thought must center upon this question of reorganizing the theoretical and material forces of contestation.

The alternative is not only between real life and a survival that has nothing to lose but its modernized chains. It is also posed within survival itself, with the constantly aggravated problems that the masters of survival are not able to solve. The risks of atomic weapons, of global overpopulation, and of the increasing material impoverishment of the great majority of humanity are subjects of official alarm, even in the popular press. One very banal example: in an article on China (Le Monde, September 1962) Robert Guillain writes, without irony, on the population problem: "The Chinese leaders seem to be giving it fresh consideration and apparently want to deal with it. They are coming back to the idea of birth control, which was tried out in 1956 and then abandoned in 1958. A national campaign has been launched against early marriages and in favor of family planning in young households." The oscillations of these specialists, immediately followed by official orders, reveal the sort of interest they really have in the liberation of the people just as completely as the opportunistic religious conversions of princes in the sixteenth century (cujus regio, ejus religio)1 revealed the real nature of their interest in the mythical arsenal of Christianity. The same journalist notes that "the USSR is not helping China because its available resources are now being devoted to the conquest of space, which is fantastically expensive." The Russian workers have no more say in determining the quantity of surplus "available resources" produced by their labor, or in deciding whether that surplus is to be devoted to the moon rather than to China, than the Chinese peasants have in deciding whether or not they will have children. The epic of modern rulers at grips with real life, which they are driven to take complete charge of, has found its best literary expression in the Ubu cycle. The only raw material that has yet to be tried out in this experimental era of ours is freedom of thought and behavior.

In the vast drugstores of ideology, of the spectacle, of social planning and the justification of that planning, the specialized intellectuals have their jobs, their particular departments to take care of. (We are referring here to those who have a significant role in the actual production of culture -- a stratum that should not be confused with the growing mass of "intellectual workers" whose conditions of work and life are becoming increasingly indistinguishable from those of ordinary blue-collar and white-collar workers as all of them evolve in accordance with the requirements of modern industry.) There's something for every taste. A certain Roberto Guiducci, for example, demonstrates his understanding about "The Difficult Quest for a New Politics" (Arguments #25-26) by writing that the present social backwardness "leaves us caught between the stupidity of living within dead institutions and the mere ability to express proposals that are as yet scarcely realizable." In order to avoid this painful dilemma, he confines his own proposal within the most modest and "realizable" limits: After having succeeded in lumping Hegel and Engels in the same sentence with Stalin and Zhdanov [Stalin's Minister of Culture], he proposes that we grant that "the romantic impatience of the young Marx and the tormented exegeses of Gramsci are equally moth-eaten and outdated." Although the blasé tone gives the impression that he has been through all that and succeeded in recovering from such illusions, it is in fact quite obvious from reading him that he was never capable of reading Hegel or Gramsci in the first place. Instead, he probably passed many years venerating Zhdanov and Togliatti. Then one fine day, like the other puppets of Arguments (whatever the particular Communist Party of their origin), he decided to call everything into question. Some of them may have had dirtier hands than others, but they all had clogged up minds. Like the others, he undoubtedly passed some weeks "reconsidering" the young Marx. But if he had really ever been capable of understanding Marx, or even simply of understanding the time in which we live, how could he have failed to see through Zhdanov from the very beginning? It's been so many years since he and others reconsidered revolutionary thought, it all naturally appears to him as very "outdated." But did he reconsider anything whatsoever ten years ago? It's very unlikely. We can say, then, that Mr. Guiducci is a man who reconsiders more quickly than does history, because he is never in step with history. His stereotypical nullity will never need to be reconsidered by anyone.

At the same time, a part of the intelligentsia is working out the new contestation, beginning to develop the real critique of our era and to envisage correspondingly appropriate actions. Within the spectacle, which is its factory, this intelligentsia struggles against the organization of production and against the very aims of that production. Engendering its own critics and saboteurs, it is joining with the new lumpen, the lumpen of consumer capitalism that is expressing the refusal of the goods that present-day work enables one to acquire. It is also beginning to reject the conditions of individual competition, and thus the servility, to which the creative intelligentsia is subjected: the movement of modern art can be considered as a continual deskilling of intellectual labor power by the creators (whereas the workers as a whole, insofar as they accept the hierarchical strategy of the ruling class, are able to compete by categories).

The revolutionary intelligentsia has now to accomplish an immense task, beginning with an uncompromising departure from the long period during which "the sleep of dialectical reason engendered monsters" -- a period which is now drawing to a close. The new world that must be understood comprises both the continual increase of material powers that have yet to be put to good use and the spontaneous acts of personal opposition engaged in by people without any conscious perspective. In contrast to the old utopianism, which put forward more or less arbitrary theories that went beyond any possible practice (though not without having some significant influence), there is now, within the various problematics of modernity, a mass of new practices that are seeking their theory.

The "intellectual party" that some dream of is impossible, because the collective intelligence of such a union of intellectuals would only be on the miserable level of people like Guiducci, or Morin, or Nadeau. The officially recognized intelligentsia is fundamentally satisfied with things as they are (if it is dissatisfied with anything, it is nevertheless quite satisfied with its own mediocre literary expression of that dissatisfaction). Even if it votes for the Left, so what? It is in fact the social sector that is most instinctively antisituationist. Like a preview audience, it tastes and tests the consumer products that will gradually be made available to all the workers of the developed countries. We intend to disillusion this stratum of intellectuals, to expose the fraudulence of all their trendy values and tastes ("modern" furniture, the writings of Queneau). Their shame will be a revolutionary sentiment.

It is necessary to distinguish, within the intelligentsia, between the tendencies toward submission and the tendencies toward refusal of the employment offered; and then, by every means, to strike a sword between these two fractions so that their total mutual opposition will illuminate the first advances of the coming social war. The careerist tendency, which basically expresses the condition of all intellectual service within class society, leads this stratum, as Harold Rosenberg notes in The Tradition of the New, to expatiate on its own alienation without engaging in any oppositional actions because this alienation has been made comfortable. But as the whole of modern society moves toward this comfort -- a comfort which is at the same time becoming increasingly poisoned by boredom and anxiety -- the practice of sabotage can be extended to the intellectual terrain. Thus, just as in the first half of the nineteenth century revolutionary theory arose out of philosophy (out of critical reflections on philosophy and out of the crisis and death of philosophy), so now it is going to rise once again out of modern art and poetry, out of its supersession, out of what modern art has sought and promised, out of the clean sweep it has made of all the values and rules of everyday behavior.

Although the living values of intellectual and artistic creation are utterly contrary to the submissive intelligentsia's entire mode of existence, the latter wants to embellish its social position by claiming a sort of kinship with this creation of "values." Being more or less aware of this contradiction, this hired intelligentsia tries to redeem itself by an ambiguous glorification of artistic "bohemianism." The valets of reification acknowledge this bohemian experience as a moment of richness within extreme poverty, as a moment of the qualitative within everyday life, a qualitativeness which is excluded everywhere else. But the official version of this fairy tale must have an edifying ending: this moment of pure qualitativeness within poverty must finally arrive at ordinary "riches." Poor artists have produced masterpieces which in their time had no market value. But they are redeemed (their venture into the qualitative is excused, and even turned into an inspiring example) because their work, which at the time was only a by-product of their real activity, later turns out to be highly valued. Living people who struggled against reification have nevertheless ended up producing their quota of commodities. Invoking a sort of aesthetic Darwinism, the bourgeoisie applauds the bohemian values that have proved fit enough to survive and enter into its quantitative paradise. The fact that it is rarely the same people who possess the products at the stage of creation and at the stage of profitable commodities is discreetly downplayed as an unimportant and purely accidental detail.

The accelerated degradation of cultural ideology has given rise to a permanent crisis in this intellectual and artistic valorization, a crisis that dadaism brought out into the open. A dual movement has clearly characterized this cultural breakdown: on one hand, the dissemination of false novelties automatically recycled with new packaging by autonomous spectacular mechanisms; and on the other hand, the public refusal to play along and the sabotage carried out by individuals who were clearly among those who would have been most capable of renewing "quality" cultural production (Arthur Cravan is a prototype of these people, glimpsed passing through the most radioactive zones of the cultural disaster without leaving behind them any commodities or memories).2 The conjunction of these two demoralizing forces continues to aggravate the malaise of the intelligentsia.

After dadaism, and despite the fact that the dominant culture has succeeded in coopting a sort of dadaist art, it is far from certain that artistic rebellion in the next generation will continue to be cooptable into consumable works. At the same time that the most elementary spectacular conmanship can exploit an imitation postdadaist style to produce all sorts of salable cultural objects, there exist in several modern capitalist countries centers of nonartistic bohemianism united around the notion of the end of art or the absence of art, a bohemianism that explicitly no longer envisages any artistic production whatsoever. Its dissatisfaction can only radicalize with the progress of the thesis according to which "the art of the future" (the phrase itself is misleading since it implies dealing with the future in terms of present specialized categories) will no longer be valued as a commodity, since we are discovering that it is only a subordinate aspect of the total transformation of our use of space, of feelings and of time. All the real experiences of free thought and behavior that succeed in taking shape in these conditions are certainly moving in our direction, toward the theoretical organization of contestation.

We believe that the role of theorists -- a role which is indispensable, but which must not be dominant -- is to provide information and conceptual tools that can shed light on people's hidden desires and on the social crisis they are experiencing; to clarify things and show how they fit together; to make the new proletariat aware of the "new poverty" that must be named and described.

We are presently witnessing a reshuffling of the cards of class struggle -- a struggle which has certainly not disappeared, but whose lines of battle have been somewhat altered from the old schema. Similarly, the nation-state has yet to be transcended; individual nationalisms have merely been incorporated into the framework of supernations, the framework of two global blocs which are themselves composed of concentrated or dispersed multinational zones (e.g. Europe or the Chinese sphere of influence) within which there may be various modifications and regroupings of individual nations or ethnic regions (Korea, Wallonia, etc.).

In the context of the reality presently beginning to take shape, we may consider as proletarians all people who have no possibility of altering the social space-time that the society allots to them (regardless of variations in their degree of affluence or chances for promotion). The rulers are those who organize this space-time, or who at least have a significant margin of personal choice (even stemming, for example, from a significant survival of older forms of private property). A revolutionary movement is a movement that radically changes the organization of this space-time and the very manner of deciding on its ongoing reorganization (as opposed to merely changing the legal forms of property or the social origin of the rulers).

The vast majority everywhere consumes the odious, soul-destroying social space-time "produced" by a tiny minority. (It should be noted that this minority produces literally nothing except this organization, whereas the "consumption" of space-time, in the sense we are using here, encompasses the whole of ordinary production, in which the alienation of consumption and of all life obviously has its roots.) The ruling classes of the past at least knew how to spend in a humanly enriching way the meager slice of surplus-value they managed to wrest from a static social production grounded on general scarcity; the members of today's ruling minority have lost even this "mastery." They are nothing but consumers of power -- a power limited to organizing this miserable survival. And their sole purpose in so miserably organizing this survival is to consume that power. The lord of nature, the ruler, is degraded by the pettiness of his exercise of power (the scandal of the quantitative). Mastery without degradation would guarantee full employment -- not of all the workers, but of all the forces of the society, of all the creative possibilities of everyone, for themselves individually and for dialogue with each other. Where then are the real masters? At the other pole of this absurd system. At the pole of refusal. The masters come from the negative, they are the bearers of the antihierarchical principle.

The distinction drawn here between those who organize space-time (together with their direct agents) and those who are subjected to that organization is intended to clearly reveal the polarization that is obscured by the intentionally woven complexity of the hierarchies of function and salary, which gives the impression that all the gradations are virtually imperceptible and that there are scarcely any more real proletarians or real capitalists at the two extremities of a social spectrum that has become highly flexible. Once this distinction is posed, other differences in status must be considered as secondary. It should not be forgotten, however, that an intellectual or a "professional revolutionary" worker is liable at any moment to tumble irretrievably into cooption -- into one niche or another in one clan or another in the camp of the ruling zombies (which is far from being harmonious or monolithic). Until real life is present for everyone, the "salt of the earth" is always susceptible to going bad. The theorists of the new contestation can neither compromise with the ruling powers nor constitute themselves as a separate power without immediately ceasing to be such (their role as theorists will then be taken over by others). This amounts to saying that the revolutionary intelligentsia can realize its project only by suppressing itself -- that the "intellectual party" can really exist only as a party that supersedes itself, a party whose victory is at the same time its own disappearance.

SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL (1963)

Revised translation by Ken Knabb of the complete article (the version in the Situationist International Anthology is slightly abridged). Translator's notes below.

  • 1cujus regio ejus religio: "The ruler determines the religion of his subjects" -- main provision of the Treaty of Augsburg (1555).
  • 2Arthur Cravan: poet, boxer, deserter from 17 nations, precursor of dadaism. Disappeared off the coast of Mexico in 1920.

Comments

From Internationale Situationniste #8 (January 1963).

Submitted by libcom on September 7, 2005

IN MÉDIATIONS, no.4, Lucien Goldmann, recently turned critic specializing in the cultural avant-garde, speaks of an "avant-garde of absence," one that expresses in art and style a certain rejection of the reification of modern society, but which, in his opinion, expresses nothing else. He recognizes the negative role of avant-garde culture in our century about forty-five years after the event but, oddly enough, among his friends and contemporaries. Thus we find, disguised as resuscitated Dadaists, none other than Ionesco, Beckett, Sarraute, Adamov, and Duras, not to mention the Robbe-Grillet of Marienbad fame. This merry little crew, all present and accounted for, thereupon re-enacts as farce the tragedy of the murder of artistic forms. Sarraute! — can you imagine? Adamov! — who would have believed it? Goldmann, an attentive audience, comments solemnly on what he sees: "Most of the great avant-garde writers express above all, not actual or possible values, but their absence, the impossibility of formulating or perceiving acceptable values in whose name they might criticize society." Here is precisely what is false, as is immediately apparent when one abandons the actors of Goldmann's comic novel to examine the historical reality of German Dadaism, or of Surrealism between the two wars. Goldmann seems literally unaware of them — which is curious: would he think that one is justified in rejecting the historical interpretation of his Dieu Caché, while hinting that one has never read Pascal or Racine since the seventeenth century is complex and it's all one can do to get through Cotin's complete works? It is hard to see how he could have even a cursory knowledge of the original, and still find such freshness in the copy. Even his vocabulary in unsuited to the subject. He talks about "great writers" of the avant-garde, a notion that the avant-garde has long since rightly cast into ridicule once and for all. Later, mentioning the tasteful diversions agreeably mounted by Planchon with the bits and pieces of a dying theatrical tradition, Goldmann, still sniffing some avant-gardism there, says that all the same he does not find in it "a literary creation of equal importance, centered on the presence of humanist values and historical development." The notable quantity of insignificance that indelibly marks Goldmann's avant-garde nevertheless makes Planchon look good. But lastly Goldmann talks about literary creation. Doesn't he know that the rejection of literature, the very destruction of style, has been the prime tendency of twenty or thirty years of avant-garde experiments in Europe, that his circus of clowns have looked only through the wrong end of the telescope, and cultivate with the parsimony of small stockholders? The avant-garde of the true self-destruction of art had expressed inseparably the absence and possible presence of quite another life. And does one have to plunge into the mystification of humanism so as not to follow Adamov into that absence that suits him so well that he stands a good chance of becoming its owner?

Let us be more serious than Goldmann. In the same article, he wonders whether there exist in present society, in this modern capitalism that is consolidating itself and developing in the regrettable ways we know, "social forces strong enough to overcome it or at least pointing in that direction." This is indeed a very important question. We will try to answer yes. A properly demystified study of real artistic or political avant-garde moments can in any case provide elements worth appreciating that are as rare in Ionesco's work as in Garaudy's. What is socially visible in the world of the theater is more remote than ever from social reality. Even its avant-garde art and its challenging thought are henceforth cosmetically disguised in the illumination of this visual element. Those who refrain from entering this Son et lumière of the present that so bedazzles Goldmann are precisely the ones, like the Situationists for the moment, who are in the avant-garde of presence. What Goldmann calls the avant-garde of absence is nothing more than the absence of an avant-garde. We are confident that nothing of all this pretence and agitation will remain in the history and real problematics of this period. On this point as on others, a hundred years will tell whether we were wrong.

Moreover, Goldmann's avant-garde and its absenteeism are already behind the times (except for Robbe-Grillet, who bets on all the numbers in the roulette of avant-garde theater). The most recent tendency is to be integrated, to integrate several arts among themselves, and at all costs to integrate the spectator. First of all, ever since Marienbad, which for journalists is the obligatory reference point, there have been countless works that cannot exist without "the individual participation of the spectator, each of whom is destined to experience it differently" (Jacques Siclier in Le Monde, November 28, 1962, in connection with some televised ballet or other). Marc Saporta has just published a card-game novel; one is supposed to shuffle the cards before reading in order to participate. Next to be integrated: experimental music with ceramics, which the visitor will be able to listen to at the Starczewski exhibition in Paris. Music by Stockhausen, but whose score becomes "mobile" at the whim of the performer, with an abstract film by the German Kirchgässer (Institute of Contemporary Music in Darmstadt). Nicolas Schoeffer has been integrated with the house of Philips in an audiovisual climate (the "creation-wall"). Finally, countless integrations throughout Europe, which themselves get inter-integrated in biennales, which everywhere become Himalayas of integration. In the same journal, Médiations, one might point out the integration of a new profession: the criticism in "abstract" prose of the abstract work. It was common fifteen years ago in painting catalogues, where Michel Tapié performed wonders, and it makes its appearance in literature with Jean Ricardou, who simply transposes the sensible and childish forms of textual explication, but with the improvement that he paints black on black by commenting on the scarcely readable pages, deliberately poor in content, of the pure nouveau roman, in an abstract critical language worthy of its model for content and readability. You can also integrate whatever you like — thirty teaspoons, a hundred thousand bottles, a million Swiss — in "nouveau réalisme," such is its strength. The new figuration would like to integrate the past, present, and future of painting in anything that will pay off — no-fault insurance for lovers of the abstract and lovers of the figurative as well.

Our culture being what it is, all that gets integrated are dissolutions of one with another. And no one cares to point out that these dissolutions are themselves almost always repetitions of something older (Saporta's card-game novel is an echo of Paul Nougé's card-game poem, Le jeu des mots et du hasard, dating back to before 1930 and reissued a few years ago. One could multiply such examples). As for the integration of the spectator into these wonderful things, it is a poor little image of his integration into the new cities, into the banks of television monitors in the office or factory where he works. It pursues the same plan, but with infinitely less force, and even infinitely fewer guinea pigs. The old forms of the art of neo-decadence are now, in themselves, far from the center of struggle for the control of modern culture. The change in the cultural terrain is not only the thesis of the revolutionary avant-garde in our culture, it is also unfortunately the opposite project, already widely achieved by the present rulers. One ought not, however, to overlook the specialists of the "kinetic" movement. All they want is to integrate time into art. They've had no luck, since the program of our period is rather to dissolve art in the experience of time.

Already some researchers, to ensure themselves a less crowded speciality, have at several points ventured beyond these hasty integrations and their flimsy justifications. Some technicians would like to reform the spectacle. Le Parc, in a tract published in September 1962 by the "Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel," thinks it possible for the passive spectator to evolve into a "stimulated spectator" or even an "interpreter-spectator," but still within the framework of specialized old-hat ideas that would provide "some kinds of sculptures to be grappled with, dances to be painted, swordplay paintings." At most, Le Parc reaches the point of using a few para-Situationist formulas: "In frankly admitting the reversal of the traditional situation of the passive spectator, one distorts the idea of the spectacle. . . ." This is an idea, however, that it is better not to distort, but properly to gauge its place in an society. The futility of Le Parc's hopes for his spectator who will gratify him by achieving "real participation (the manipulation of elements)" — oh yes! and visual artists will certainly have their elements all ready — take on more solidarity when, at the end of his text, he extends a hand toward "the notion of programming," i.e., to the cybernetics of power. There are those who go much further (cf. France-Observateur, December 27, 1962), like the "Service de la Recherche de la R.T.F.," which wanted nothing less than to "create a situation" last December 21 by organizing a conference at UNESCO, with the participation of the well-known extraterrestrials who edit the journal Planète.

The dialectic of history is such that the victory of the Situationist International in matters of theory already obliges its adversaries to disguise themselves as Situationists. From now on there are two tendencies in the approaching struggle against us: those who proclaim themselves Situationists without having any idea of what it's all about (the several varieties of Nashism), and those who, on the contrary, decide to adopt a few ideas without the Situationists, and without mentioning the S.I. The growing probability that some of the simplest and least recent of our theses will be confirmed leads a number of people to adopt portions of one or the other without saying so. This is certainly not a matter of acknowledging antecedents or personal merits, etc. If there is any reason to point out this tendency, it is to denounce it on a single crucial point: in doing so, these people can speak of a new problem, so as to popularize it themselves after having rejected it as long as they could, and now extirpating only its violence, its connection with general subversion, thereby watering it down to an academic statement, or worse. With such intentions, it is necessary to conceal the S.I.

Thus the journal Architecture d'aujourd'hui (no. 102, June-July 1962) has finally got around to an account of "fantastic architecture," including certain former and present attempts that could be very interesting. But it so happens that only the S.I. holds the key to their interesting application. For the scribblers of Architecture d'aujourd'hui, they only serve to decorate the walls of passivity. The editor of this journal, for example, in his personal activity as an artist, if one may say so, has tried almost all the styles of fashionable sculptors, imitating them to the letter, which seems to have made him an expert on the subject of artistic conditioning. When such people take it into their heads that the surroundings ought to be improved, they act like reformers, countering a stronger pressure by slowing it down. These authorities of today are quite prepared to reform the environment, but without touching the life that goes on within it. And they coolly give the name of "system" to investigations in these matters, so as to be shielded from any conclusions. It is not for nothing that in this issue they criticize the underdeveloped "techinician" of unitary urbanism who had to leave the S.I. in 1960. Even this meager subtheory is too troubling for the eclecticism of converts from the old functionalism. We, however, rightly defend no system, and we see better than anyone, at all levels, the system that they themselves defend, and which defends them while maiming them so much. We want to destroy such a system.

We must make the same objection to those people who for six or ten months in some journals have been starting to rethink the problem of leisure time, or that of the new human relationships that will be necessary within the future revolutionary organization. What is missing here? Actual experience, the oxygen of ruthless criticism of what exists, the total picture. The Situationist point of view now seems as indispensable as yeast, without which the dough of the best themes raised by the S.I. falls again in a few years. Those who are entirely shaped by the boredom of current life and thought can only rejoice in the leisure of boredom. Those who have never accurately perceived either the present or the potential of the revolutionary movement can only search for a psychotechnical philosophers' stone. One that would transmute modern depoliticized workers into devoted militants of leftist organizations, reproducing so well the model of established society that, like a factory, they could hire a few psychosociologists to apply a little oil to their microgroups. The method of sociometry and psychodrama will not lead anyone very far ahead in the construction of situations.
To the degree that participation becomes more impossible, the second-class engineers of modernist art demand everyone's participation as their due. They distribute this invoice with the instruction booklet as the now explicit rule of the game, as if this participation had not always been the implicit rule of an art where it actually existed (within the limits of class and depth which have framed all art). They urge us insolently to "take part" in the spectacle, in an art that so little concerns us. Behind the comic aspect of this glorious beggary, one comes upon the sinister spheres of the cultural gendarmes who organize "participation in things where is it impossible to participate" — work or the leisure of private life — (cf. Internationale Situationniste 6, page 16 [Basic Program of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism]). In this light, one ought probably to take another look at the seeming naïveté of Le Parc's text, its peculiar unreality in the relation to the public he would like to "stimulate." "In this concern for the spectators' violent participation," he writes, "one could even arrive at non-realization, non-contemplation, non-action. One might then be able to imagine, for example, a dozen non-action spectators sitting motionless in the most complete darkness and saying nothing." It so happens that when people are placed in such a situation, they cry out, as all those who participated in the real action of the negative avant-garde have fortunately been able to notice. Nowhere has there been, as Goldmann believes, an avant-garde of pure absence, but only the staging of the scandal of absence to appeal to a desired presence, "provocation to that game that is the human presence" (Manifesto in Internationale situationniste 4). The pupils of the "Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel" have such a metaphysical idea of an abstract public that they certainly won't find it on the terrain of art — all these tendencies postulate with incredible impudence a totally besotted public, capable of the same weighty seriousness as these specialists for their little contrivances. But on the other hand, such a public shows signs of being created at the level of global society. It is the "lonely crowd" of the world of theater, and here Le Parc is no longer so far ahead of reality as he thinks; in the organization of this alienation, there surely is no spectator free to remain purely passive. Even their passivity is organized, and Le Parc's "stimulated spectators" are already everywhere.

Furthermore, we note that the idea of constructing situations is a central one of our time. Its mirror image, its slavish symmetry, appears in all conditioning. The first psychosociologists — Max Pagès claims that only about fifty of them have emerged in the last twenty years — are about to multiply quickly; they are learning how to manipulate quickly; they are learning how to manipulate given but still crude situations, which would include the permanent collective situation that has been devised for the inhabitants of Sarcelles. The artists who align themselves in this camp to rescue a speciality of scene painters from cybernetic machination do not hide the fact that they've made their debut in the manipulation of integration. But with respect to the artistic negation that rebels against this integration, it appears that no one, unless he sticks to a position, can approach this minefield of situations without bumping into another dispute, coherent on all levels. And first of all the political level, where no future revolutionary organization can seriously be conceived any longer without several "Situationist" qualities.

We speak of recovering free play, when it is isolated on the sole terrain of familiar artistic dissolution. In the spring of 1962, the press began to take note of the practice of the happening among the artistic avant-garde of New York. This is a kind of spectacle dissolved to the extreme, an improvisation of gestures, of a Dadaist bent, by people thrown together in an enclosed space. Drugs, alcohol, and sex all play a role. The gestures of the "actors" attempt a mixture of poetry, painting, dance and jazz. One can regard this form of social encounter as a borderline case of the old artistic spectacle whose remnants get thrown into a common grave, or as an attempt at renewal — in that case, too overloaded with aesthetics — of an ordinary surprise party or classical orgy. One might even think that, by its naive wish for "something to happen," the absence of outside spectators, and the wish to make some small innovations on the meager scale of human relations, the happening is an isolated attempt to construct a situation on the basis of poverty (material poverty, poverty of human contact, poverty inherited from the artistic spectacle, poverty of the specific philosophy driven to "ideologize" the reality of these moments). The situations that the S.I. has defined, on the other hand, can only be constructed on the basis of material and spiritual richness. Which is another way of saying that an outline for the construction of situations must be the game, the serious game, of the revolutionary avant-garde, and cannot exist for those who resign themselves on certain points to political passivity, metaphysical despair, or even the pure and experienced absence of artistic creativity. The construction of situations is the supreme goal and first model of a society where free and experimental modes of conduct prevail. But the happening did not have to wait long to be imported to Europe (December at the Galerie Raymond Cordier in Paris) and turned completely upside-down by its French imitators. The result was a mob of spectators frozen in the atmosphere of an Ecole des Beaux-Arts ball, as pure and simple publicity for an opening of little Surrealist-type things.
Whatever is constructed on the basis of poverty will always be reclaimed by the surrounding poverty, and will serve its perpetuators. Early in 1960 (cf. "Die Welt als labyrinth," in Internationale situationniste 4), the S.I. avoided the trap that the Stedelijk Museum's proposal had become, a proposal that called for the construction of a setting that would serve as a pretext for a series of urban dérives in Amsterdam and thus for some unitary urbanist projects. It turned out that the plan for a labyrinth submitted by the S.I. would be subjected to thirty-six kinds of restrictions and controls, thereby reducing it to something scarcely different from a product of traditional avant-garde art. We accordingly broke the agreement. This avant-garde museum seems to have remained inconsolable for quite a while, since only in 1962 did it finally come forth with "its" labyrinth, more simply entrusted to the "nouveau réalisme" gang, which assembled something very photogenic with "dada in its heart," as Tzara used to say in the good old days.

We see that when we comply with the requests of those who urge us to exhibit usable and convincing detailed plans — why should we have to convince them? — they either turn them against us at once as proof of our utopianism, or else favor a watered-down version for the moment. The truth is that you ask for detailed plans from almost all the others — you're the one who decides what number might be satisfactory — but certainly not from us; it is our thesis that there can be no fundamental cultural renewal in details, but only in toto. We are obviously well situated to discover, some years before others, all the possible tricks of the extreme cultural decay of our time. Since they can only be used in the spectacle of our enemies, we keep some notes about them in a drawer. After a while, someone really rediscovers a lot of them spontaneously and broadcasts them with great fanfare. Most of the ones we possess, however, have not yet been "overtaken by history." Several may never be. It is not even a game; it is one more experimental confirmation.

We think that modern art, wherever it has really found innovators and critics through the very conditions of its appearance, has well performed its role, which was a great one; and that it remains, despite speculation on its products, hated by the enemies of freedom. One needs only to look at the fear inspired at this moment in the leaders of the homeopathic de-Stalinization by the slightest sign of its return to their homeland, where it had been caused to be forgotten. They denounce it as a leak in their ideology and confess it is vital to their power to hold a monopoly in manipulating this ideology at every level. All the same, those who now make money in the West on the respectful extensions and artificial revivals of the stymied old cultural game are in reality the enemies of modern art. As for ourselves, we are its residuary legatees.

We are against the conventional form of culture, even in its most modern state, while obviously not preferring ignorance, the petit-bourgeois common sense of the local butcher, or neo-primitivism. There is an anticultural attitude that flows toward an impossible return to the old myths. We place ourselves on the other side of culture. Not before it, but after. We say that one must attain it, while going beyond it as a separate sphere, not only as a domain reserved for specialists, but above all as the domain of a specialized production that does not directly affect the construction of life — including the very lives of its own specialists.

We are not wholly lacking in a sense of humor; but this very humor is of a somewhat different kind. If it is a matter of choosing quickly what attitude to adopt toward our ideas, without getting into the fine points or some more subtle understanding of nuances, the simplest and most correct one is to take us literally and with utter seriousness.

How are we going to bankrupt the prevailing culture? In two ways, at first gradually and then abruptly. We propose to use some concepts artistic in origin in a nonartistic way. We have begun with an artistic exigency, which did not resemble any former aestheticism since it was indeed the exigency of revolutionary modern art at its highest moments. We have thus brought this exigency into life, toward revolutionary politics, meaning its absence and the search for explanations of its absence. The total revolutionary politics that flows from it, and that is confirmed by the highest moments of the true revolutionary struggle of the last hundred years, then comes back to the beginning of this project (a wish for direct life), but now without there being any art or politics as independent forms, nor the recognition of any other separate domain. The objection to the world, and its reconstruction, live only in the undivided nature of such a project, in which the cultural struggle, in the conventional sense, is merely the pretext and cover for a deeper task.

It is easy to draw up an endless list of problems and difficulties in order of priority, as well as some short-term impossibilities that are saddening. It is probable that the excitement, for example, aroused among Situationists by the project of massive demonstration at the Paris headquarters of UNESCO testifies first of all to the taste, latent in the S.I., to find a concrete field of intervention, where Situationist activity would appear openly and positively as such, a kind of construction of the event here combined with the taking of a resounding position against the world center of bureaucratized culture. Complementary to this aspect of things, the views upheld by Alexander Trocchi, previously and at this moment, on the clandestine nature of a portion of Situationist actions may lead us to augment our freedom of intervention. To the degree to which, as Vaneigem writes, "we cannot avoid making ourselves known up to a certain point in a spectacular way," [Basic Banalities, part 2] these new forms of clandestinity would doubtless be useful in combating our own spectacular image, which our enemies and disgraced followers are already forging. Like every source of attraction that can be constituted in this world (and though our "attraction" is really quite particular), we have not begun to unleash the adverse forces of submission to ourselves. If we are not to yield to these forces, we will have to invent for ourselves adequate defences, which in the past have been very little studied. Another worrisome subject for the Situationists is surely the kind of specialization requires, in a society of highly specialized thought and practice, by the task of holding the fort of nonspecialization, besieged and breached on all sides, while raising the flag of totality. Still another is the obligation to judge people in terms of our actions and theirs, and to break off relations with several whom it would be pleasant to know in private life — an unacceptable frame of reference. Nevertheless, the quarrel with what exists, it is also involves daily life, is naturally translated into struggles within daily life. The list of these difficulties, we say, is a long one, but the arguments that flow from it are still extremely weak, since we are perfectly well aware of the alternative way of thinking at this crossroads of our time: namely, unconditional surrender on all points. We have founded our cause on almost nothing: irreducible dissatisfaction and desire with regard to life.

The S.I. is still far from having created situations, but it has already created Situationists, and that is something. This power of liberated dispute, in addition to its first direct applications, shows that such liberation is not impossible. This is how from now on, in different areas, the task will be glimpsed.

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

Comments

From Internationale Situationniste #8 (January 1963).

Submitted by Fozzie on February 9, 2023

Translator's note: 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!

Draft 0.0

Well Said SI!

“The Council has decided that all people who collaborate with the journal Arguments starting from January 1st, 1961, cannot be admitted under any circumstances, now or in the future, among the Situationists. The announcement of this boycott draws its force from the importance that we know the S.I. secures at least in the culture of the years ahead. Interested parties can bet, on the contrary, on the dubious company it will attract.”

(Resolution of the C.C. Of the SI, 6 November 1960, published in Internationale Situationniste #5 – page 13 – December 1960.)

“Maybe one day we’ll dare to face the problem of God, to question religion and the sacred.”

(Opening statement of the editorial of Arguments #24, fourth quarter 1961, published in March 1962.)

“One could go so far as to term this level of everyday life a colonised sector… Everyday life, policed and mystified by every means, is a sort of reservation for the good natives who keep modern society running without understanding it — this society with its rapid growth of technological powers and the forced expansion of its market.

(Internationale Situationniste #6 – page 22 – August 1961.)

“Today it strikes [one] that everyday life, considered in sum, can be seen as the colonised domain of existence, as a “reservation” for the good natives who keep society running, [and which has] become the enemy of any militant activity. ”

(Arguments #25-26 – page 46 – 1st and 2nd quarters of 1961, published in June.)

“All texts published in Internationale Situationniste may be freely reproduced, translated and adapted, even without indication of origin.”

(Anti-copyright warning at the beginning of all issues of I.S.)

AND NOW, THE PROOF OF OUR JUDGMENT IS MADE: “ARGUMENTS” HAS TO DIE!

Translated by Ian Thompson (July 2013), except for quote from ‘Internationale Situationniste 5 translated by Anthony Hayes “with help from NOT BORED!”, and quote from ‘Internationale Situationniste 6 translated by Ken Knabb.

Comments

The Situationist International responds to a manifesto written by Jørgen Nash of its Scandinavian section.

Submitted by libcom on September 7, 2005

The declaration published 25 June 1962 by the Situationist International concerning the trial of Uwe Lausen in Munich enumerated three types of negation the situationist movement has met with so far: police, as in Germany1 ; silence, for which France easily holds the record; and widespread falsification, in which northern Europe has provided the most fertile field of study over the last year. [...]

In Internationale Situationniste #7 (pp. 53-54)2 . we mentioned the sort of manifesto in which Jørgen Nash attacked the SI in the name of the Scandinavian section. Reckoning on the considerable geographical dispersion of the Scandinavian situationists, Nash had not even consulted with all of them before his putsch. Surprised at not being unanimously followed and at finding himself countered on the spot by the partisans of the SI majority -- who immediately circulated a definitive repudiation of his imposture -- Nash at first feigned astonishment that things had gone to the point of a complete break with the situationists; as if the fact of launching a public surprise attack full of lies was compatible with carrying on a dialogue, on the basis of some sort of Nashist Scandinavian autonomy. The development of the conspiracy scarcely leaves any doubt as to his real objectives, since his new Swedish "Bauhaus," consisting of two or three Scandinavian ex-situationists plus a mass of unknowns flocking to the feast, immediately plunged into the most shopworn forms of artistic production. [...] In the polemic between Nashists and situationists in Scandinavia, the Nashists resorted, in addition to all the threats and violence they thought feasible, to the systematic spreading of false information (with the active collusion of certain journalists). [...] But all their efforts to gain time and all their petty maneuvers to prolong the confusion could not save the Nashists from appearing for what they are: alien to the SI; much more sociable, certainly, but much less intelligent. [...]

We don't want to attribute some particular perversity to Nash and his associates. It seems to us that Nashism is an expression of an objective tendency resulting from the SI's ambiguous and risky policy of consenting to act within culture while being against the entire present organization of this culture and even against all culture as a separate sphere. (But even the most intransigent oppositional attitude cannot escape such ambiguity and risk, since it still necessarily has to coexist with the present order.) The German situationists who were excluded at the beginning of 1962 expressed an opposition comparable to that of the Nashists -- though with more frankness and artistic capacity -- to the extent that such opposition contains elements of a legitimately arguable position. Heimrad Prem's statement at the Göteborg Conference (see Internationale Situationniste #7) complained about the situationist majority's continued refusal of a large number of offers to sponsor "creations" on the conventional avant-garde artistic plane where many people wanted to involve the SI, so as to bring things back to order and the SI back into the old fold of artistic praxis. Prem expressed the desire of the situationist artists to find a satisfactory field of activity in the here and now. [...] The Nashists have simply gone much further in their bad faith and in their complete indifference to any theory and even to conventional artistic activity, preferring the grossest commercial publicity. But Prem and his friends, though comporting themselves more honorably, had themselves certainly not completely avoided concessions to the cultural market. The SI has thus for a time included a number of artists of repetition incapable of grasping the present mission of the artistic avant-garde; which is not too surprising if one takes into account both the scarcely delineated stage of our project and the notorious exhaustion of conventional art. The moment when the contradictions between them and us lead to these antagonisms marks an advance of the SI, the point where the ambiguities are forced into the open and clearly settled. The point of no return, in our relations with the partisans of a renewal of conventional art under the aegis of a situationist school, was perhaps reached with the decision adopted at Göteborg to refer to artistic productions of the movement as "antisituationist" art. The contradictions expressed in Nashism are quite crude, but the development of the SI may lead to others at a higher level. [...]

DEFINITION
adopted by the SI Conference at Anvers
on the motion of J.V. Martin

Nashism (French: Nashisme; German: Nashismus; Italian: Nascismo): Term derived from the name of Nash, an artist who seems to have lived in Denmark in the twentieth century. Primarily known for his attempt to betray the revolutionary movement and theory of that time, Nash's name was detourned by that movement as a generic term applicable to all traitors in struggles against the dominant cultural and social conditions. Example: "But like all things transient and vain, Nashism soon faded away." Nashist: A partisan of Nash or of his doctrine. By extension, any conduct or expression evincing the aims or methods of Nashism. Nashistique: Popular French doublet probably derived by analogy to the English adjective Nashistic. Nashisterie: The general social milieu of Nashism. The slang term Nashistouse is vulgar.

The SI cannot be a massive organization, and it will not even accept disciples, as do the conventional avant-garde groups. At this point in history, when the task is posed, in the most unfavorable conditions, of reinventing culture and the revolutionary movement on an entirely new basis, the SI can only be a Conspiracy of Equals, a general staff that does not want troops. We need to discover and open up the "Northwest Passage" toward a new revolution that cannot tolerate masses of followers, a revolution that must surge over that central terrain which has until now been sheltered from revolutionary upheavals: the conquest of everyday life. We will only organize the detonation: the free explosion must escape us and any other control forever.

One of the classic weapons of the old world, perhaps the one most used against groups delving into the organization of life, is to single out and isolate a few of their participants as "stars." We have to defend ourselves against this process, which, like almost all the usual wretched choices of the present society, has an air of being "natural." Those among us who aspired to the role of stars or depended on stars had to be rejected. [...]

The same movement that would have us accept situationist followers would commit us to erroneous positions. It is in the nature of a disciple to demand certainties, to transform real problems into stupid dogmas from which he derives his role and his intellectual security. And later, of course, to demonstrate his modernity by revolting, in the name of those simplified certainties, against the very people who transmitted them to him. In this way, over a period of time generations of submissive elites succeed one another. We intend to leave such people outside and to resist those who want to transform the SI's theoretical problematics into a mere ideology. Such people are extremely handicapped and uninteresting compared with those who may not be aware of the SI but who confront their own lives. Those who have really grasped the direction the SI is going in can join with it because all the supersession we talk about is to be found in reality, and we have to find it together. The task of being more extremist than the SI falls to the SI itself; this is even the first law of its continuation.

There are already certain people who, through laziness, think they can rigidify our project into a perfect program, one already present, admirable and uncriticizable, in the face of which they have nothing more to do -- except perhaps to declare themselves still more radical at heart, while abstaining from any activity on the grounds that everything has already been definitively said by the SI. We say that, on the contrary, not only do the most important aspects of the questions we have posed remain to be discovered -- by the SI and by others -- but also that the greater portion of what we have already discovered is not yet published due to our lack of all sorts of means; to say nothing of the still more considerable lack of means for the experiments the SI has barely begun in other domains (particularly in matters of behavior). But to speak only of editorial problems, we now think that we ourselves should rewrite the most interesting parts of what we have published so far. It is not a matter of revising certain errors or of suppressing a few deviationist seeds that have since blossomed into gross results3 (e.g. Constant's technocratic concept of a situationist profession -- see Internationale Situationniste #4, pp. 24-25), but of correcting and improving the most important of our theses, precisely those whose development has brought us further, on the basis of the knowledge since gained thanks to them. This will require various republications, although the SI's current difficulties in publishing are far from being resolved.

Those who think that the early situationist thought is already fixed in past history, and that the time has come for violent falsification or rapt admiration of it, have not grasped the movement we are talking about. The SI has sown the wind. It will reap a tempest.

SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL (1963)

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

  • 1Translators' note: In 1961-1962 the German situationists were subjected to a series of police harassments -- searches, confiscation of SI publications, arrests for immorality, pornography, blasphemy, incitement to riot, etc. The SI conducted an international campaign on their behalf, even after the majority of them had been excluded from the SI for moderation and compromises in other regards. Uwe Lausen, who had not been excluded, was the only one to eventually be jailed (for three weeks); the others got fines and suspended sentences. See Internationale Situationniste #6, p. 6; #7, p. 51; #8, p. 64.
  • 2Libcom note: Situationist News
  • 3Translator's note: An example of the gross results: "The ex-situationist Constant, whose Dutch collaborators had already been excluded from the SI for having agreed to construct a church, now himself presents models of factories in his catalogue published in March by the Municipal Museum of Bochum. Apart from plagiarizing two or three poorly understood fragments of situationist ideas, this slippery character has nothing better to propose than to act as a public-relations man in integrating the masses into capitalist technological civilization; and he reproaches the SI for having abandoned his whole program of transforming the urban milieu, which he alone is carrying out. Under these conditions, yes!" (Internationale Situationniste #6, p. 6.) Constant (Constant Nieuwenhuis) resigned from the SI in 1960. He is the same person later mentioned in On the Poverty of Student Life as a member of the Provo hierarchy.

Comments

From Internationale Situationniste #8 (January 1963).

Submitted by libcom on September 7, 2005

The problem of language is at the heart of all the struggles between the forces striving to abolish the present alienation and those striving to maintain it. It is inseparable from the very terrain of those struggles. We live within language as within polluted air. Despite what humorists think, words do not play. Nor do they make love, as Breton thought, except in dreams. Words work -- on behalf of the dominant organization of life. Yet they are not completely automated: unfortunately for the theoreticians of information, words are not in themselves "informationist"; they contain forces that can upset the most careful calculations. Words coexist with power in a relation analogous to that which proletarians (in the modern as well as the classic sense of the term) have with power. Employed by it almost full time, exploited for every sense and nonsense that can be squeezed out of them, they still remain in some sense fundamentally alien to it.

Power presents only the falsified, official sense of words. In a manner of speaking it forces them to carry a pass, determines their place in the production process (where some of them conspicuously work overtime) and gives them their paycheck. Regarding the use of words, Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty correctly observes, "The question is which is to be master -- that's all." He adds that he himself (a socially responsible employer in this respect) pays overtime to those he employs excessively. We should also understand the phenomenon of the insubordination of words, their desertion or open resistance (manifested in all modern writing from Baudelaire to the dadaists and Joyce), as a symptom of the general revolutionary crisis of this society.

Under the control of power, language always designates something other than authentic experience. It is precisely for this reason that a total contestation is possible. The organization of language has fallen into such confusion that the communication imposed by power is exposing itself as an imposture and a dupery. An embryonic cybernetic power is vainly trying to put language under the control of the machines it controls, in such a way that information would henceforth be the only possible communication. Even on this terrain resistances are being manifested; electronic music could be seen as an attempt (obviously limited and ambiguous) to reverse the domination by detourning machines to the benefit of language. But there is a much more general and radical opposition that is denouncing all unilateral "communication," in the old form of art as well as in the modern form of informationism. It calls for a communication that undermines all separate power. Real communication dissolves the state.

Power lives off stolen goods. It creates nothing, it coopts. If it determined the meaning of words, there would be no poetry but only useful "information." Opposition would be unable to express itself in language; any refusal would be nonverbal, purely lettristic. What is poetry if not the revolutionary moment of language, inseparable as such from the revolutionary moments of history and from the history of personal life?

Power's stranglehold over language is connected to its stranglehold over the totality. Only a language that has been deprived of all immediate reference to the totality can serve as the basis for information. News1 is the poetry of power, the counterpoetry of law and order, the mediated falsification of what exists. Conversely, poetry must be understood as direct communication within reality and as real alteration of this reality. It is liberated language, language recovering its richness, language breaking its rigid significations and simultaneously embracing words and music, cries and gestures, painting and mathematics, facts and acts. Poetry thus depends on the richest possibilities for living and changing life at a given stage of socioeconomic structure. Needless to say, this relationship of poetry to its material base is not a subordination of one to the other, but an interaction.

Rediscovering poetry may merge with reinventing revolution, as has been demonstrated by certain phases of the Mexican, Cuban and Congolese revolutions. Outside the revolutionary periods when the masses become poets in action, small circles of poetic adventure could be considered the only places where the totality of revolution subsists, as an unrealized but close-at-hand potentiality, like the shadow of an absent personage. What we are calling poetic adventure is difficult, dangerous and never guaranteed (it is, in fact, the aggregate of behaviors that are almost impossible in a given era). One thing we can be sure of is that fake, officially tolerated poetry is no longer the poetic adventure of its era. Thus, whereas surrealism in the heyday of its assault against the oppressive order of culture and daily life could appropriately define its arsenal as "poetry without poems if necessary," for the SI it is now a matter of a poetry necessarily without poems. What we say about poetry has nothing to do with the retarded reactionaries of some neoversification, even one based on the least antiquated modernistic forms. Realizing poetry means nothing less than simultaneously and inseparably creating events and their language.

In-group languages -- those of informal groupings of young people; those that contemporary avant-garde currents develop for their internal use as they grope to define themselves; those that in previous eras were conveyed by way of objective poetic production, such as the trobar clus and the dolce stil nuovo -- are more or less successful efforts to attain a direct, transparent communication, mutual recognition, mutual accord. But such efforts have been confined to small groups that were isolated in one way or another. The events and celebrations they created had to remain within the most narrow limits. One of the tasks of revolution is to federate such poetic "soviets" or communication councils in order to initiate a direct communication everywhere that will no longer need to resort to the enemy's communication network (that is, to the language of power) and will thus be able to transform the world according to its desire.

The point is not to put poetry at the service of revolution, but to put revolution at the service of poetry. It is only in this way that revolution does not betray its own project. We don't intend to repeat the mistake of the surrealists, who put themselves at the service of the revolution right when it had ceased to exist. Bound to the memory of a partial and rapidly crushed revolution, surrealism rapidly turned into a reformism of the spectacle, a critique of a certain form of the reigning spectacle that was carried out from within the dominant organization of that spectacle. The surrealists seem to have overlooked the fact that every internal improvement or modernization of the spectacle is translated by power into its own encoded language, to which it alone holds the key.

Every revolution has been born in poetry, has first of all been made with the force of poetry. This phenomenon continues to escape theorists of revolution -- indeed, it cannot be understood if one still clings to the old conception of revolution or of poetry -- but it has generally been sensed by counterrevolutionaries. Poetry terrifies them. Whenever it appears they do their best to get rid of it by every kind of exorcism, from auto-da-fé to pure stylistic research. Real poetry, which has "world enough and time," seeks to reorient the entire world and the entire future to its own ends. As long as it lasts, its demands admit of no compromise. It brings back into play all the unsettled debts of history. Fourier and Pancho Villa, Lautréamont and the dinamiteros of the Asturias (whose successors are now inventing new forms of strikes), the sailors of Kronstadt and Kiel, and all those around the world who, with us or without us, are preparing to fight for the long revolution are equally the emissaries of the new poetry.

Poetry is becoming more and more clearly the empty space, the antimatter, of consumer society, since it is not consumable (in terms of the modern criteria for a consumable object: an object that is of equivalent value for each of a mass of isolated passive consumers). Poetry is nothing when it is quoted; it needs to be detourned, brought back into play. Otherwise the study of the poetry of the past is nothing but an academic exercise. The history of poetry is only a way of running away from the poetry of history, if we understand by that phrase not the spectacular history of the rulers but the history of everyday life and its possible liberation; the history of each individual life and its realization.

We must leave no question as to the role of the "conservers" of old poetry, who increase its dissemination while the state, for quite different reasons, is eliminating illiteracy. These people are only a particular type of museum curator. A mass of poetry is naturally preserved around the world, but nowhere are there the places, the moments or the people to revive it, communicate it, use it. And there never can be except by way of détournement, because the understanding of past poetry has changed through losses as well as gains of knowledge; and because any time past poetry is actually rediscovered, its being placed in the context of particular events gives it a largely new meaning. In any case, a situation in which poetry is possible must not get sidetracked into trying to restore poetic failures of the past (such failures being the inverted remains of the history of poetry, transformed into successes and poetic monuments). Such a situation naturally seeks the communication and possible triumph of its own poetry.

At the same time that poetic archeology is restoring selections of past poetry, recited by specialists on LPs for the neoilliterate public created by the modern spectacle, the informationists are striving to do away with all the "redundancies" of freedom in order to simply transmit orders. The theorists of automation are explicitly aiming at producing an automatic theoretical thought by clamping down on and eliminating the variables in life as well as in language. But bones keep turning up in their cheese! Translating machines, for example, which are beginning to ensure the planetary standardization of information along with the informationist revision of previous culture, are victims of their own preestablished programming, which inevitably misses any new meaning taken on by a word, as well as its past dialectical ambivalences. Thus the life of language -- which is bound up with every advance of theoretical understanding ("Ideas improve; the meaning of words participates in the improvement") -- is expelled from the mechanical field of official information. But this also means that free thought can organize itself with a secrecy that is beyond the reach of informationist police techniques. A similar point could be made about the quest for unambiguous signals and instantaneous binary classification, which is clearly linked with the existing power structure. Even in their most delirious formulations, the informationist theorists are no more than clumsy precursors of the future they have chosen, which is the same brave new world that the dominant forces of the present society are working toward -- the reinforcement of the cybernetic state. They are the vassals of the lords of the technocratic feudalism that is now constituting itself. There is no innocence in their buffoonery; they are the king's jesters.

The choice between informationism and poetry no longer has anything to do with the poetry of the past, just as no variant of what the classical revolutionary movement has become can anymore, anywhere, be considered as part of a real alternative to the prevailing organization of life. The same judgment leads us to announce the total disappearance of poetry in the old forms in which it was produced and consumed and to announce its return in effective and unexpected forms. Our era no longer has to write poetic directives; it has to carry them out.

SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL (1963)

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

  • 1Translator's note: The French word information also means "news."

Comments

From Internationale Situationniste #8 (January 1963).

Submitted by libcom on September 7, 2005

Summary of Part 1

The vast majority of people have always had to devote all their energy to SURVIVAL, thereby denying themselves any chance to LIVE. They continue to do so today as the WELFARE STATE imposes the elements of this survival in the form of technological conveniences (appliances, preserved food, prefabricated cities, Mozart broadcast for the masses).

The organization controlling the material equipment of our everyday life is such that what could potentially enable us to construct it richly plunges us instead into a poverty of abundance. Alienation becomes all the more intolerable as each convenience promises freedom and turns out to be only one more burden. We are enslaved by the means of liberation.

To be understood, this problem must be seen in the clear light of hierarchical power. But perhaps it isn't enough to say that hierarchical power has preserved humanity for thousands of years like alcohol preserves a fetus -- by arresting either growth or decay. It should also be specified that hierarchical power represents the highest stage of private appropriation, and historically is its alpha and omega. Private appropriation can be defined as appropriation of things by means of appropriation of people, the struggle against natural alienation engendering social alienation.

Private appropriation entails an ORGANIZATION OF APPEARANCES by which its radical contradictions can be dissimulated: the servants must see themselves as degraded reflections of the master, thus reinforcing, through the looking glass of an illusory freedom, everything that increases their submission and passivity; while the master must identify himself with the mythical and perfect servant of a god or of a transcendence which is nothing other than the sacred and abstract representation of the TOTALlTY of people and things over which he wields power -- a power all the more real and unquestioned as he is universally credited with the virtue of his renunciation. The mythical sacrifice of the boss corresponds to the real sacrifice of the underling; each negates himself in the other, the strange becomes familiar and the familiar strange, each fulfills himself by being the inversion of the other. From this common alienation a harmony is born, a negative harmony whose fundamental unity lies in the notion of sacrifice. This objective (and perverted) harmony is sustained by myth -- this term being used to designate the organization of appearances in unitary societies, that is, in societies where slave, tribal or feudal power is officially consecrated by a divine authority and where the sacred allows power to seize the totality.

The harmony originally based on the "GIFT of oneself" contains a form of relationship that was to develop, become autonomous and destroy it. This relationship is based on partial EXCHANGE (commodity, money, product, labor power...), the exchange of a part of oneself, which underlies the bourgeois notion of freedom. It arises as commerce and technology become preponderant within agrarian-type economies.

When the bourgeoisie seized power the unity of power was destroyed. Sacred private appropriation became secularized in capitalist mechanisms. Freed from the grip of power, the totality once again became concrete and immediate. The era of fragmentation has been nothing but a succession of attempts to recapture an inaccessible unity, to reconstitute some ersatz sacred behind which to shelter power.

A revolutionary moment is when "everything reality presents" finds its immediate REPRESENTATION. All the rest of the time hierarchical power, increasingly deprived of its magical and mystical regalia, strives to make everyone forget that the totality (which has never been anything other than reality!) is exposing its fraudulence.

14

By directly attacking the mythical organization of appearances, the bourgeois revolutions unintentionally attacked the weak point not only of unitary power but of any hierarchical power whatsoever. Does this unavoidable mistake explain the guilt complex that is one of the dominant traits of bourgeois mentality? In any case, the mistake was undoubtedly inevitable.

It was a mistake because once the cloud of lies covering private appropriation was pierced, myth was shattered, leaving a vacuum that could be filled only by a delirious freedom and a splendid poetry. Orgiastic poetry, to be sure, has not yet destroyed power. Its failure is easily explained and its ambiguous signs reveal the blows struck at the same time as they heal the wounds. And yet -- let us leave the historians and aesthetes to their collections -- one has only to pick at the scab of memory and the cries, words and gestures of the past make the whole body of power bleed again. The whole organization of the survival of memories will not prevent them from dissolving into oblivion as they come to life; just as our survival will dissolve in the construction of our everyday life.

And it was an inevitable process: as Marx showed, the appearance of exchange-value and its symbolic representation by money opened a profound latent crisis in the heart of the unitary world. The commodity introduced into human relationships a universality (a 1000-franc bill represents anything I can obtain for that sum) and an egalitarianism (equal things are exchanged). This "egalitarian universality" partially escapes both the exploiter and the exploited, but they recognize each other through it. They find themselves face to face, confronting each other no longer within the mystery of divine birth and ancestry, as was the case with the nobility, but within an intelligible transcendence, the Logos, a body of laws that can be understood by everyone, even if such understanding remains cloaked in mystery. A mystery with its initiates: first of all priests struggling to maintain the Logos in the limbo of divine mysticism, but soon yielding to philosophers and then to technicians both their positions and the dignity of their sacred mission. From Plato's Republic to the Cybernetic State.

Thus, under the pressure of exchange-value and technology (what we might call "mediation at your fingertips"), myth was gradually secularized. Two facts should be noted, however:

a) As the Logos frees itself from mystical unity, it affirms itself both within and against that unity. Rational and logical structures of behavior are superimposed on the old magical and analogical ones, simultaneously negating and preserving them (mathematics, poetics, economics, aesthetics, psychology, etc.).

b) Each time the Logos, the "organization of intelligible appearances," becomes more autonomous, it tends to break away from the sacred and become fragmented. In this way it presents a double danger for unitary power. We have already seen that the sacred expresses power's seizure of the totality, and that anyone wanting to accede to the totality must do so through the mediation of power -- the repression of mystics, alchemists and gnostics is sufficient proof of this. This also explains why present-day power "protects" specialists (though without completely trusting them): it vaguely senses that they are the missionaries of a resacralized Logos. Various historical movements represent attempts within mystical unitary power to found a rival unitary power based on the Logos: Christian syncretism (which makes God psychologically explainable), the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment.

The masters who strove to maintain the unity of the Logos were well aware that only unity can stabilize power. Examined more closely, their efforts can be seen not to have been as vain as the fragmentation of the Logos in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would seem to prove. In the general movement of atomization the Logos has been broken down into specialized techniques (physics, biology, sociology, papyrology, etc.), but at the same time the need to reestablish the totality has become more imperative. It should not be forgotten that all it would take would be an all-powerful technocratic power in order for there to be a totalitarian domination of the totality, for myth's domination of the totality to be succeeded by the Logos's unitary cybernetic power. In such an event the vision of the Encyclopédistes (strictly rationalized progress stretching indefinitely into the future) would have known only a two-century postponement before being realized. This is the direction in which the Stalino-cyberneticians are preparing the future. In this context, peaceful coexistence should be seen as a preliminary step toward a totalitarian unity. It is time everyone realized that they are already resisting it.

15

We know the battlefield. The problem now is to prepare for battle before the pataphysician,(1) armed with his totality without technique, and the cybernetician, armed with his technique without totality, consummate their political coitus.

From the standpoint of hierarchical power, myth could be desacralized only if the Logos, or at least its desacralizing elements, were resacralized. To attack the sacred was at the same time supposed to liberate the totality and thus destroy power. (We've heard that one before!) But the power of the bourgeoisie -- fragmented, impoverished, constantly contested -- maintains a relative stability by relying on the following ambiguity: Technology, which objectively desacralizes, subjectively appears as an instrument of liberation. Not a real liberation, which could be attained only by desacralization -- that is, by the end of the spectacle -- but a caricature, an imitation, an induced hallucination. What the unitary worldview transferred into the beyond (above), fragmentary power pro-jects (literally, "throws forward") into a state of future well-being, of brighter tomorrows proclaimed from atop the dunghill of today -- tomorrows that are nothing more than the present multiplied by the number of gadgets to be produced. From the slogan "Live in God" we have gone on to the humanistic motto "Survive until you are old," euphemistically expressed as: "Stay young at heart and you'll live a long time."

Once desacralized and fragmented, myth loses its grandeur and its spirituality. It becomes an impoverished form, retaining its former characteristics but revealing them in a concrete, harsh, tangible fashion. God doesn't run the show anymore, and until the day the Logos takes over with its arms of technology and science, the phantoms of alienation will continue to materialize and sow disorder everywhere. Watch for those phantoms: they are the first signs of a future order. We must start to play right now if we want to avoid a future condemned to mere survival, or even a future in which survival itself will become impossible (the hypothesis of humanity destroying itself -- and with it obviously the whole experiment of constructing everyday life). The vital objectives of a struggle for the construction of everyday life are the key, sensitive points of all hierarchical power. To build one is to destroy the other. Caught in the vortex of desacralization and resacralization, we aim above all to abolish (1) the organization of appearances as a spectacle in which everyone denies himself; (2) the separation on which private life is based, since it is there that the objective separation between owners and dispossessed is lived and reflected on every level; and (3) sacrifice. These three elements are obviously interdependent, just as are their opposites: participation, communication, and realization.(2) The same applies to their respective contexts: nontotality (a bankrupt world, a controlled totality) and totality.

16

The human relationships that were formerly dissolved in divine transcendence (the totality crowned by the sacred) settled out and solidified as soon as the sacred stopped acting as a catalyst. Their materiality was revealed. As Providence was replaced by the capricious laws of the economy, the power of men began to appear behind the power of gods. Today a multitude of roles corresponds to the mythical role everyone once played under the divine spotlight. Though their masks are now human faces, these roles still require both actors and extras to deny their real lives in accordance with the dialectic of real and mythical sacrifice. The spectacle is nothing but secularized and fragmented myth. It forms the armor of a power (which could also be called essential mediation) that becomes vulnerable to every blow once it no longer succeeds in disguising (in the cacophonous harmony where all the cries drown each other out) its nature as private appropriation, and the greater or lesser dose of misery it allots to everyone.

Roles have become impoverished within the context of a fragmentary power eaten away by desacralization, just as the spectacle represents an impoverishment in comparison with myth. They betray its mechanisms and artifices so clumsily that power, to defend itself against popular denunciation of the spectacle, has no other alternative than to initiate such denunciation itself by even more clumsily replacing actors or ministers, or by organizing pogroms of prefabricated scapegoats (agents of Moscow, Wall Street, the Judeocracy or the Two Hundred Families). Which also means that the whole cast has been forced to become hams, that style has been replaced by mannerisms.

Myth, as a motionless totality, encompassed all movement (pilgrimage can be considered as an example of adventure and fulfillment within immobility). On the one hand, the spectacle can seize the totality only by reducing it to a fragment or a series of fragments (psychological, sociological, biological, philological and mythological worldviews); on the other, it is situated at the point where the process of desacralization converges with the efforts at resacralization. Thus it can succeed in imposing immobility only within the real movement, the movement that changes it despite its resistance. In the era of fragmentation the organization of appearances makes movement a linear succession of motionless instants (this notch-to-notch progression is perfectly exemplified by Stalinist "Dialectical Materialism"). Under what we have called "the colonization of everyday life," the only possible changes are changes of fragmentary roles. In terms of more or less inflexible conventions, one is successively citizen, parent, sexual partner, politician, specialist, professional, producer, consumer. Yet what boss doesn't himself feel bossed? The proverb applies to everyone: You may sometimes get a fuck, but you always get fucked!

The era of fragmentation has at least eliminated all doubt on one point: everyday life is the battlefield where the war between power and the totality takes place, with power having to use all its strength to control the totality.

What do we demand in backing the power of everyday life against hierarchical power? We demand everything. We are taking our stand in a generalized conflict stretching from domestic squabbles to revolutionary war, and we have gambled on the will to live. This means that we must survive as antisurvivors. Fundamentally we are concerned only with the moments when life breaks through the glaciation of survival, whether those moments are unconscious or theorized, historical (e.g. revolution) or personal. But we must also recognize that we are prevented from freely following the course of such moments (except during the moment of revolution itself) not only by the general repression exerted by power, but also by the requirements of our own struggle and tactics. We have to find ways of compensating for this "margin of error" by broadening the scope of these moments and demonstrating their qualitative significance. What prevents what we say about the construction of everyday life from being coopted by the cultural and subcultural establishment (Arguments, academic thinkers with paid vacations) is the fact that all situationist ideas are faithful extensions of acts attempted constantly by thousands of people to try and prevent a day from being nothing but than twenty-four hours of wasted time. Are we an avant-garde? If so, to be avant-garde means to move in step with reality.

17

We don't claim to have a monopoly on intelligence, but only on its use. Our position is strategic, we are at the heart of every conflict. The qualitative is our striking force.(3) People who half understand this journal ask us for an explanatory monograph thanks to which they will be able to convince themselves that they are intelligent and cultured -- that is to say, idiots. Someone who gets exasperated and chucks it in the gutter is making a more meaningful gesture. Sooner or later it will have to be understood that the words and phrases we use are still lagging behind reality. The distortion and clumsiness in the way we express ourselves (which a man of taste called, not inaccurately, "a rather irritating kind of hermetic terrorism") comes from our central position, our position on the ill-defined and shifting frontier where language captured by power (conditioning) and free language (poetry) fight out their infinitely complex war. To those who follow behind us we prefer those who reject us impatiently because our language is not yet authentic poetry -- not yet the free construction of everyday life.

Everything related to thought is related to the spectacle. Almost everyone lives in a state of terror at the possibility that they might awake to themselves, and this fear is deliberately fostered by power. Conditioning, the special poetry of power, has extended its dominion so far (all material equipment belongs to it: press, television, stereotypes, magic, tradition, economy, technology -- what we call captured language) that it has almost succeeded in dissolving what Marx called the undominated sector, replacing it with another, dominated one (see below our composite portrait of "the survivor"). But lived experience cannot so easily be reduced to a succession of empty roles. Resistance to the external organization of life, i.e. to the organization of life as survival, contains more poetry than any volume of verse or prose, and the poet (in the literary sense of the word) is one who has at least understood or sensed this fact. But such poetry is in a most dangerous situation. Certainly poetry in the situationist sense of the word is irreducible and cannot be coopted by power (as soon as an act is coopted it becomes a stereotype, something conditioned by the language of power). But it is encircled by power. Power contains the irreducible by isolating it. But such isolation cannot last; something has to give. The two pincers are, first, the threat of disintegration (insanity, illness, destitution, suicide), and second, remote-controlled therapeutics. The first grants death, the second grants a lifeless survival (empty communication, "togetherness" of family or friends, psychoanalysis in the service of alienation, medical care, ergotherapy). Sooner or later the SI must define itself as therapeutic: we are ready to defend the poetry made by all against the false poetry contrived by power (conditioning). Doctors and psychoanalysts better get it straight too, or they may one day, along with architects and other apostles of survival, have to take the consequences for what they have done.

18

All unresolved, unsuperseded antagonisms weaken. Such antagonisms can evolve only by remaining imprisoned in previous, unsuperseded forms (anticultural art within the cultural spectacle, for example). Any radical opposition that fails or that is partially successful (which amounts to the same thing) gradually degenerates into reformist opposition. Fragmentary oppositions are like the teeth on cogwheels, they mesh with each other and make the machine go round -- the machine of the spectacle, the machine of power.

Myth maintained all antagonisms within the archetype of Manicheanism. But what can function as an archetype in a fragmented society? The memory of previous antagonisms, presented in obviously devalued and unaggressive forms, appears today as the last attempt to bring some coherence into the organization of appearances, so great is the extent to which the spectacle has become a spectacle of confusion and equivalences. We are ready to wipe out all trace of those memories by harnessing all the energy contained in previous antagonisms for a radical struggle soon to come. All the springs blocked by power will one day burst through to form a torrent that will change the face of the world.

In a caricature of antagonisms, power urges everyone to be for or against Brigitte Bardot, the nouveau roman, the 4-horse Citroën, Italian cuisine, mescal, miniskirts, the UN, the classics, nationalization, thermonuclear war and hitchhiking. Everyone is asked their opinion about every detail in order to prevent them from forming one about the totality. However clumsy this maneuver may be, it might have worked if the salesmen in charge of peddling it from door to door were not themselves waking up to their own alienation. To the passivity imposed on the dispossessed masses is added the growing passivity of the directors and actors subjected to the abstract laws of the market and the spectacle and exercising less and less real power over the world. Signs of revolt are already appearing among the actors -- stars trying to escape publicity, rulers criticizing their own power (Brigitte Bardot, Fidel Castro). The tools of power are wearing out; their desire for their own freedom is a factor that should be taken into account.

19

At the moment when slave revolts threatened to overthrow the power structure and reveal the relationship between transcendence and the mechanism of private appropriation, Christianity appeared with its grandiose reformism, whose central democratic demand was for the slaves to accede not to the reality of a human life -- which would have been impossible without denouncing the exclusionary aspect of private appropriation -- but rather to the unreality of an existence whose source of happiness is mythical (the imitation of Christ as the price of the hereafter). What has changed? Anticipation of the hereafter has become anticipation of a brighter tomorrow; the sacrifice of real, immediate life is the price paid for the illusory freedom of an apparent life. The spectacle is the sphere where forced labor is transformed into voluntary sacrifice. Nothing is more suspect than the formula "To each according to his work" in a world where work is the blackmail of survival; to say nothing of "To each according to his needs" in a world where needs are determined by power. Any constructive project that tries to define itself autonomously and thus partially, and does not take into account that it is in fact defined by the negativity in which everything is suspended, becomes reformist. It is trying to build on quicksand as though it were a cement foundation. Ignoring or misunderstanding the context set by hierarchical power can only end up reinforcing that context. The spontaneous acts we see everywhere forming against power and its spectacle must be warned of all the obstacles in their path and must find a tactic taking into account the strength of the enemy and its means of cooption. This tactic, which we are going to popularize, is détournement.

20

Sacrifice must be rewarded. In exchange for their real sacrifice the workers receive the instruments of their liberation (comforts, gadgets), but this liberation remains purely fictitious since power controls the ways in which the material equipment can be used. Power uses to its own ends both the instruments and those who use them. The Christian and bourgeois revolutions democratized mythical sacrifice, the "sacrifice of the master." Today there are countless initiates who receive crumbs of power for putting to public service the totality of their partial knowledge. They are no longer called "initiates" and not yet "priests of the Logos"; they are simply known as specialists.

On the level of the spectacle their power is undeniable: the contestant on "Double Your Money" and the postal clerk chattering all day about all the mechanical features of his car both identify with the specialist, and we know how production managers use such identification to bring unskilled workers to heel. The true mission of the technocrats would be to unify the Logos -- if only (due to one of the contradictions of fragmentary power) they weren't so absurdly compartmentalized and isolated. Each specialist is alienated by being out of phase with the others; each knows everything about one fragment and no one grasps the totality. What real control can the atomic technician, the strategist or the political specialist exercise over a nuclear weapon? What ultimate control can power hope to impose on all the gestures developing against it? The stage is so crowded with actors that chaos is the only master of the show. "Order reigns and doesn't govern" (Internationale Situationniste #6).

To the extent that the specialist takes part in the development of the instruments that condition and transform the world, he is preparing the way for the revolt of the privileged. Until now such revolt has been called fascism. It is essentially an operatic revolt -- didn't Nietzsche see Wagner as a precursor? -- in which actors who have long been pushed aside and see themselves becoming less and less free suddenly insist on playing the leading roles. Clinically speaking, fascism is the hysteria of the spectacular world pushed to the point of climax. In this climax the spectacle momentarily ensures its unity while at the same time revealing its radical inhumanity. Through fascism and Stalinism, which constitute its romantic crises, the spectacle reveals its true nature: it is a disease.

We are poisoned by the spectacle. All the elements necessary for a detoxification (that is, for our own construction of our everyday lives) are in the hands of specialists. We are thus highly interested in all these specialists, but in different ways. Some are hopeless cases: we are not, for example, going to try and show the specialists of power, the rulers, the extent of their delirium. On the other hand, we are ready to take into account the bitterness of specialists imprisoned in roles that are constricted, absurd or ignominious. We must confess, however, that our indulgence has its limits. If, in spite of all our efforts, they persist in putting their guilty conscience and their bitterness in the service of power by fabricating the conditioning that colonizes their own everyday lives; if they prefer an illusory representation in the hierarchy to true fulfillment; if they persist in ostentatiously brandishing their specializations (their painting, their novels, their equations, their sociometry, their psychoanalysis, their ballistics); finally, if, knowing perfectly well -- and soon ignorance of this fact will be no excuse -- that only power and the SI hold the key to using their specialization, they nevertheless still choose to serve power because power, battening on their inertia, has chosen them to serve it, then fuck them! There's a limit to our generosity. They should understand all this, and especially the fact that the revolt of nonruling actors is henceforth linked to the revolt against the spectacle (see below the thesis on the SI and power).

21

The general disparagement of the lumpenproletariat stemmed from the use to which it was put by the bourgeoisie, which it served both as a regulating mechanism for power and as a source of recruits for the more dubious forces of order (cops, informers, hired thugs, artists...). Nevertheless, the lumpenproletariat embodies a remarkably radical implicit critique of the society of work. Its open contempt for both lackeys and bosses contains a good critique of work as alienation, a critique that has not been taken into consideration until now, not only because the lumpenproletariat was an ambiguous sector, but also because during the nineteenth and early twentieth century the struggle against natural alienation and the production of well-being still appeared as valid justifications for work.

Once it became known that the abundance of consumer goods was nothing but the flip side of alienation in production, the lumpenproletariat took on a new dimension: it expressed a contempt for organized work which, in the age of the Welfare State, is gradually taking on the proportions of a demand that only the rulers still refuse to acknowledge. In spite of the constant attempts of power to coopt it, every experiment carried out on everyday life, that is, every attempt to construct it (an activity that has been illegal since the destruction of feudal power, where it was limited and reserved for the ruling minority), is concretized today in the critique of alienating work and the refusal to submit to forced labor. So much so that the new proletariat can be negatively defined as a "Front Against Forced Labor" bringing together all those who resist cooption by power. This is our field of action, the arena where we are gambling on the ruse of history against the ruse of power, backing the worker (whether steelworker or artist) who -- consciously or not -- rejects organized work and life against the worker who -- consciously or not -- accepts working at the dictates of power. In this perspective, it is not unreasonable to foresee a transitional period during which automation and the will of the new proletariat leave work solely to specialists, reducing managers and bureaucrats to the rank of temporary slaves. With the extension of automation, the "workers," instead of supervising machines, could devote their attention to watching over the cybernetic specialists, whose sole task would be to increase a production that, through a reversal of perspective, will have ceased to be the priority sector, so as to serve the priority of life over survival.

22

Unitary power strove to dissolve individual existence in a collective consciousness so that each social unit subjectively defined itself as a particle with a clearly determined weight suspended as though in oil. Everyone had to feel overwhelmed by the omnipresent evidence that everything was merely raw material in the hands of God, who used it for his own purposes, which were naturally beyond individual human comprehension. All phenomena were emanations of a supreme will; any seemingly unexplainable perturbation was presumed to be a means toward some larger, hidden harmony (the Four Reigns, the Wheel of Fortune, trials sent by the gods). One can speak of a collective consciousness in the sense that it was simultaneously for each individual and for everyone: consciousness of myth and consciousness of particular-existence-within-myth. The power of the illusion was such that authentically lived life drew its meaning from what was not authentically lived. This is the reason for the priestly condemnation of life, the reduction of life to pure contingency, to sordid materiality, to vain appearance and to the lowest state of a transcendence that became increasingly degraded as it escaped mythical organization.

God was the guarantor of space and time, whose coordinates defined unitary society. He was the common reference point for all mankind; space and time came together in him just as in him all beings became one with their destiny. In the era of fragmentation, man is torn between a time and a space that no transcendence can unify through the mediation of any centralized power. We are living in a space-time that is out of joint, deprived of any reference point or coordinate, as though we were never going to be able to come into contact with ourselves, although everything invites us to.

There is a place where you create yourself and a time in which you play yourself. The space of everyday life, of one's true realization, is encircled by every form of conditioning. The narrow space of our true realization defines us, yet we define ourselves in the time of the spectacle. To put it another way: our consciousness is no longer consciousness of myth and of particular-being-within-myth, but rather consciousness of the spectacle and of particular-role-within-the-spectacle. (I pointed out above the relationship between all ontology and unitary power; it should be recalled here that the crisis of ontology appears with the movement toward fragmentation.) Or to put it yet another way: in the space-time relation in which everyone and everything is situated, time has become the imaginary (the field of identifications); space defines us, although we define ourselves in the imaginary and although the imaginary defines us qua subjectivities.

Our freedom is that of an abstract temporality in which we are named in the language of power (these names being the roles assigned to us), our only margin of choice being limited to finding officially accepted synonyms for ourselves. In contrast, the space of our authentic realization (the space of our everyday life) is under the dominion of silence. There is no name to name the space of lived experience except in poetry -- in language liberating itself from the domination of power.

23

By desacralizing and fragmenting myth, the bourgeoisie was led to demand first of all independence of consciousness (demands for freedom of thought, freedom of the press, freedom of research, rejection of dogma). Consciousness thus ceased being more or less consciousness-reflecting-myth. It became consciousness of successive roles played within the spectacle. What the bourgeoisie demanded above all was the freedom of actors and extras in a spectacle no longer organized by God, his cops and his priests, but by natural and economic laws, "capricious and inexorable laws" defended by a new team of cops and specialists.

God has been torn off like a useless bandage and the wound has stayed raw. The bandage may have prevented the wound from healing, but it justified suffering, it gave it a meaning well worth a few shots of morphine. Now suffering has no justification whatsoever and morphine is far from cheap. Separation has become concrete. Anyone at all can put their finger on it, and the only answer cybernetic society has to offer us is to become spectators of the gangrene and decay, spectators of survival.

The drama of consciousness to which Hegel referred is actually the consciousness of drama. Romanticism resounds like the cry of the soul torn from the body, a suffering all the more acute as each of us finds himself alone in facing the fall of the sacred totality and of all the Houses of Usher.

24

The totality is objective reality, in the movement of which subjectivity can participate only in the form of realization. Anything separate from the realization of everyday life rejoins the spectacle -- a hibernation in which survival is frozen and served out in slices. There can be no authentic realization except in objective reality, in the totality. Anything else is a farce. The objective realization that functions within the mechanism of the spectacle is nothing but the success of power-manipulated objects (the "objective realization in subjectivity" of famous artists, stars, celebrities of Who's Who). On the level of the organization of appearances, every success -- and even every failure -- is inflated until it becomes a stereotype, and is broadcast as though it were the only possible success or failure. So far power has been the only judge, though its judgment has been subjected to various pressures. Its criteria are the only valid ones for those who accept the spectacle and are satisfied to play a role in it. But there are no more artists on that stage, there are only extras.

25

The space-time of private life was harmonized in the space-time of myth. Fourier's harmony responds to this perverted harmony. As soon as myth no longer encompasses the individual and the partial in a totality dominated by the sacred, each fragment sets itself up as a totality. The fragment set up as a totality is, in fact, the totalitarian. In the dissociated space-time that constitutes private life, time -- made absolute in the form of abstract freedom, the freedom of the spectacle -- consolidates by its very dissociation the spatial absolute of private life, its isolation, its constriction. The mechanism of the alienating spectacle wields such force that private life reaches the point of being defined as that which is deprived of spectacles: the fact that someone escapes roles and spectacular categories is felt as an additional deprivation, a distressful feeling which power uses as a pretext to reduce everyday life to insignificant gestures (sitting down, washing, opening a door).

26

The spectacle that imposes its norms on lived experience itself arises out of lived experience. Spectacular time, lived in the form of successive roles, makes the space of authentic experience the area of objective powerlessness, while at the same time the objective powerlessness that stems from the conditioning of private appropriation makes the spectacle the ultimate of potential freedom.

Elements born of lived experience are acknowledged only on the level of the spectacle, where they are expressed in the form of stereotypes, although such expression is constantly contested and refuted in and by lived experience. The composite portrait of the survivors -- those whom Nietzsche referred to as the "little people" or the "last men" -- can be conceived only in terms of the following dialectic of possibility/impossibility:

a) Possibility on the level of the spectacle (variety of abstract roles) reinforces impossibility on the level of authentic experience.

b) Impossibility (that is, limits imposed on real experience by private appropriation) determines the field of abstract possibilities.

Survival is two-dimensional. Against such a reduction, what forces can bring out what constitutes the daily problem of all human beings: the dialectic of survival and life? Either the specific forces the SI has counted on will make possible the supersession of these contraries, reuniting space and time in the construction of everyday life; or life and survival will become locked in an antagonism growing weaker and weaker until the point of ultimate confusion and ultimate poverty is reached.

27

Lived reality is spectacularly fragmented and labeled in biological, sociological or other categories which, while being related to the communicable, never communicate anything but facts emptied of their authentically lived content. It is in this sense that hierarchical power, imprisoning everyone in the objective mechanism of private appropriation (admission/exclusion, see section #3), is also a dictatorship over subjectivity. It is as a dictator over subjectivity that it strives, with limited success, to force each individual subjectivity to become objectivized, that is, to become an object it can manipulate. This extremely interesting dialectic should be analyzed in greater detail (objective realization in subjectivity -- the realization of power -- and objective realization in objectivity -- which enters into the praxis of constructing everyday life and destroying power).

Facts are deprived of content in the name of the communicable, in the name of an abstract universality, in the name of a perverted harmony in which everyone realizes himself in an inverted perspective. In this context the SI is in the line of contestation that runs through Sade, Fourier, Lewis Carroll, Lautréamont, surrealism and lettrism -- at least in its least known currents, which were the most extreme.

Within a fragment set up as a totality, each further fragment is itself totalitarian. Individualism treated sensitivity, desire, will, intelligence, good taste, the subconscious and all the categories of the ego as absolutes. Today sociology is enriching the categories of psychology, but the introduction of variety into the roles merely accentuates the monotony of the identification reflex. The freedom of the "survivor" will be to assume the abstract constituent to which he has "chosen" to reduce himself. Once any real fulfillment has been put out of the picture, all that remains is a psycho-sociological dramaturgy in which interiority functions as a safety-valve to drain off the effects one has worn for the daily exhibition. Survival becomes the ultimate stage of life organized as the mechanical reproduction of memory.

28

Until now the approach to the totality has been falsified. Power has parasitically interposed itself as an indispensable mediation between man and nature. But the relation between man and nature is based only on praxis. It is praxis which constantly breaks through the coherent veneer of lies that myth and its replacements try to maintain. It is praxis, even alienated praxis, which maintains contact with the totality. By revealing its own fragmentary character, praxis at the same time reveals the real totality (reality): it is the totality being realized by way of its opposite, the fragment.

In the perspective of praxis, every fragment is totality. In the perspective of power, which alienates praxis, every fragment is totalitarian. This should be enough to wreck the attempts that cybernetic power will make to envelop praxis in a mystique, although the seriousness of these attempts should not be underestimated.

All forms of praxis enter our project. They enter with their share of alienation, with the impurities of power; but we are capable of filtering them. We will elucidate the force and purity of acts of refusal as well as the manipulative maneuvers of power, not in a Manichean perspective, but as a means of developing, through our own strategy, this combat in which everywhere, at every moment, the adversaries are seeking to come to grips with one another but only clashing accidentally, lost in irremediable darkness and uncertainty.

29

Everyday life has always been drained to the advantage of apparent life, but appearance, in its mythical cohesion, was powerful enough to repress any mention of everyday life. The poverty and emptiness of the spectacle, revealed by all the varieties of capitalism and all the varieties of bourgeoisie, has revealed both the existence of everyday life (a shelter life, but a shelter for what and from what?) and the poverty of everyday life. As reification and bureaucratization grow stronger, the debility of the spectacle and of everyday life is the only thing that remains clear. The conflict between the human and the inhuman has been transferred to the plane of appearances. As soon as Marxism became an ideology, Marx's struggle against ideology in the name of the richness of life was transformed into an ideological anti-ideology, an antispectacle spectacle. (Just as in avant-garde culture the antispectacular spectacle is restricted to actors alone, antiartistic art being created and understood only by artists, so the relationship between this ideological anti-ideology and the function of the professional revolutionary in Leninism should be examined.) Manicheanism has thus found itself momentarily revived. Why did St. Augustine attack the Manicheans so relentlessly? It was because he recognized the danger of a myth offering only one solution, the victory of good over evil; he saw that the impossibility of such a solution threatened to provoke the collapse of all mythical structures and bring into the open the contradiction between mythical and authentic life. Christianity offered a third way, the way of sacred confusion. What Christianity accomplished through the force of myth is accomplished today through the force of things. There can no longer be any antagonism between Soviet workers and capitalist workers or between the bomb of the Stalinist bureaucrats and the bomb of the non-Stalinist bureaucrats; there is no longer anything but unity in the chaos of reified beings.

Who is responsible? Who should be shot? We are dominated by a system, by an abstract form. Degrees of humanity and inhumanity are measured by purely quantitative variations of passivity. The quality is the same everywhere: we are all proletarianized or well on the way to becoming so. What are the traditional "revolutionaries" doing? They are struggling to eliminate certain distinctions, making sure that no proletarians are any more proletarian than all the others. But what party is calling for the end of the proletariat?

The perspective of survival has become intolerable. What is weighing us down is the weight of things in a vacuum. That's what reification is: everyone and everything falling at an equal speed, everyone and everything stigmatized with an equal value. The reign of equal values has realized the Christian project, but it has realized it outside Christianity (as Pascal surmised) and more importantly, it has realized it over God's dead body, contrary to Pascal's expectations.

The spectacle and everyday life coexist in the reign of equal values. People and things are interchangeable. The world of reification is a world without a center, like the new prefabricated cities that are its decor. The present fades away before the promise of an eternal future that is nothing but a mechanical extension of the past. Time itself is deprived of a center. In this concentration-camp world, victims and torturers wear the same mask and only the torture is real. No new ideology can soothe the pain, neither the ideology of the totality (Logos) nor that of nihilism -- which will be the two crutches of the cybernetic society. The tortures condemn all hierarchical power, however organized or dissimulated it may be. The antagonism the SI is going to revive is the oldest of all, it is radical antagonism and that is why it is taking up again and assimilating all that has been left by the insurrectionary movements and great individuals in the course of history.

30

So many other banalities could be examined and reversed. The best things never come to an end. Before rereading this text (which even the most mediocre intelligence will be able to understand by the third attempt) the reader would be well advised to pay careful attention to the following points -- points as fragmentary as the preceding ones, but which must be discussed in detail and implemented. They concern a central question: the SI and revolutionary power.

Being aware of the crises of both mass parties and "elites," the SI must embody the supersession of both the Bolshevik Central Committee (supersession of the mass party) and of the Nietzschean project (supersession of the intelligentsia).

(a) Every time a power has presented itself as directing a revolutionary upsurge, it has automatically undermined the power of the revolution. The Bolshevik Central Committee defined itself simultaneously as concentration and as representation. Concentration of a power antagonistic to bourgeois power and representation of the will of the masses. This duality led it rapidly to become no more than an empty power, a power of empty representation, and consequently to merge into a common form (bureaucracy) with a bourgeois power that was being pressured (by the Bolshevik threat) into following a similar evolution. The conditions for a concentrated power and mass representation exist potentially in the SI when it notes that it possesses the qualitative and that its ideas are in everyone's mind. Nevertheless we refuse both concentrated power and the right of representation, conscious that we are now taking the only public attitude (for we cannot avoid being known to some extent in a spectacular manner) enabling those who find that they share our theoretical and practical positions to accede to revolutionary power: power without mediation, power entailing the direct action of everyone. Our guiding image could be the Durruti Column, moving from town to village, liquidating the bourgeois elements and leaving the workers to see to their own self-organization.(4)

(b) The intelligentsia is power's hall of mirrors. Opposing power, it never offers anything but passive cathartic identification to those whose every gesture gropingly expresses real opposition. The radicalism -- not of theory, obviously, but of gesture -- that could be glimpsed in the "Declaration of the 121,"(5) however, suggests some different possibilities. We are capable of precipitating this crisis, but we can do so only by entering the intelligentsia as a power against the intelligentsia. This phase -- which must precede and be contained within the phase described in paragraph (a) -- will put us in the perspective of the Nietzschean project. We will form a small, almost alchemical, experimental group within which the realization of the total man can be started. Nietzsche could conceive of such an undertaking only within the framework of the hierarchical principle. It is, in fact, within such a framework that we find ourselves. It is therefore of the utmost importance that we present ourselves without the slightest ambiguity (at the group level, the purification of the nucleus and the elimination of residues now seems to be completed). We accept the hierarchical framework in which we are placed only while impatiently working to abolish our domination over those whom we cannot avoid dominating on the basis of our criteria for mutual recognition.

(c) Tactically our communication should be a diffusion emanating from a more or less hidden center. We will establish nonmaterialized networks (direct relationships, episodic ones, contacts without ties, development of embryonic relations based on sympathy and understanding, in the manner of red agitators before the arrival of revolutionary armies). We will claim radical gestures (actions, writings, political attitudes, works) as our own by analyzing them, and we will consider that our own acts and analyses are supported by the majority of people.

Just as God constituted the reference point of past unitary society, we are preparing to create the central reference point for a new unitary society now possible. But this point cannot be fixed. As opposed to the ever-renewed confusion that cybernetic power draws from the inhuman past, it stands for the game that everyone will play, "the moving order of the future."

RAOUL VANEIGEM (January 1963)

TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1. pataphysician: reference to "pataphysics," the absurdist-nihilist perspective expressed by Alfred Jarry.

2. Many of the themes in "Basic Banalities" were later developed more fully in Vaneigem's book The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967). Chapter 23 of the book deals with the "unitary triad" of participation, communication and realization.

3. striking force: play on de Gaulle's contention that France needed to develop a strong military striking force.

4. Durruti Column: anarchist militia unit led by Buenaventura Durruti during the Spanish civil war.

5. Declaration of the 121: a "Declaration on the Right To Resist the Algerian War" signed by 121 French artists and intellectuals (September 1960). The French government responded with arrests and firings, and even prohibited news media from mentioning the name of any signer -- which only resulted in more people signing. The "Declaration" polarized the intellectual community and contributed toward arousing French public opinion (the first demonstration against the war came a month later). See Internationale Situationniste #5, pp. 5-7, 12.

End of Part 2. Translated by Ken Knabb (slightly modified from the version in the Situationist International Anthology).

Comments

trocchi.jpg

Trocchi's proposals for a radical education establishment, which fed into the creation of the Anti University in Shoreditch, London in 1968. From Internationale Situationniste #8 (January 1963).

Submitted by Fozzie on February 7, 2023

And if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signalling through the flames.

Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, 1958

Revolt is understandably unpopular. As soon as it is defined, it has provoked the measures for its confinement. The prudent man will avoid his definition which is in effect his death-sentence. Besides, it is a limit.

We are concerned not with the coup d'etat of Trotsky and Lenin, but with the coup du monde (seizure of the world), a transition of necessity more complex, more diffuse than the other, and so more gradual, less spectacular. Our methods will vary with the empirical facts pertaining here and now, there and then.

Political revolt is and must be ineffectual precisely because it must come to grips at the prevailing level of political process. Beyond the backwaters of civilization it is an anarchronism. Meanwhile, with the world at the edge of extinction, we cannot afford to wait for the mass. Nor to brawl with it.

The coup du monde must be in the broad sense cultural. With his thousand technicians, Trotsky seized the viaducts and the bridges and the telephone exchanges and the power stations. The police, victims of convention, contributed to his brilliant enterprise by guarding the old men in the Kremlin. The latter hadn't the elasticity of mind to grasp that their own presence there at the traditional seat of government was irrelevant. History outflanked them. Trotsky had the railway stations and the powerhouses, and the "government" was effectively locked out of history by its own guards.

So the cultural revolt must seize the grids of expression and the powerhouses of the mind. Intelligence must become self-conscious, realise its own power, and, on a global scale, transcending functions that are no longer appropriate, dare to exercise it. History will not overthrow national governments; it will outflank them. The cultural revolt is the necessary underpinning, the passionate substructure of a new order of things.

What is to be seized has no physical dimensions nor relevant temporal color. It is not an arsenal, nor a capital city, nor an island, nor an isthmus visible from a peak in Darien. Finally, it is all these things too, of course, all that there is, but only by the way, and inevitably. What is to be seized — and I address that one million (say) here and there who are capable of perceiving at once just what it is that I am about, a million potential "technicians" — is ourselves. What must occur, now, today, tomorrow, in those widely dispersed but vital centres of experience, is a revelation. At the present time, in what is often thought of as an age of the mass, we tend to fall into the habit of regarding history and evolution as something which goes relentlessly on, quite without our control. The individual has a profound sense of his own impotence as he realizes the immensity of the forces involved. We, the creative ones everywhere, must discard this paralytic posture and seize control of the human process by assuming control of ourselves. We must reject the conventional fiction of "unchanging human nature." There is in fact no such permanence anywhere. There is only becoming.1

Organization, control, revolution: each of the million individuals to whom I speak will be wary of such concepts, will find it all but impossible with a quiet conscience to identify himself with any group whatsoever, no matter what it calls itself. That is how it should be. But it is at the same time the reason for the impotence of intelligence everywhere in the face of events, for which no one in particular can be said to be responsible, a yawning tide of bloody disasters, the natural outcome of that complex of processes, for the most part unconscious and uncontrolled, which constitute the history of man. Without organization, concerted action is impossible; the energy of individuals and small groups is dissipated in a hundred and one unconnected, little acts of protest . . . a manifesto here, a hunger strike there. Such protests, moreover, are commonly based on the assumption that social behaviour is intelligent: the hallmark of their futility. If change is to be purposive, men must somehow function together in the social situation. And it is our contention that there already exists a nucleus of men who, if they will set themselves gradually and tentatively to the task, are capable of imposing a new and seminal idea: the world waits for them to show their hand.

We have already rejected any idea of a frontal attack. Mind cannot withstand matter (brute force) in open battle. It is rather a question of perceiving clearly and without prejudice what are the forces that are at work in the world and out of whose interaction tomorrow must come to be; and then, calmly, without indignation, by a kind of mental ju-jitsu that is ours by virtue of intelligence, of modifying, correcting, polluting, deflecting, corrupting, eroding, outflanking . . . inspiring what we might call the invisible insurrection. It will come on the mass of men, if it comes at all, not as something they have voted for, fought for, but like the changing season; they will find themselves in and stimulated by the situation consciously at last to recreate it within and without as their own.

Clearly, there is in principle no problem of production in the modern world. The urgent problem of the future is that of distribution, which is presently (dis)ordered in terms of the economic system prevailing in this or that area. This problem on a global scale is an administrative one and will not finally be solved until existing political and economic rivalries are outgrown. Nevertheless, it is becoming widely recognized that distributive problems are most efficiently and economically handled on a global scale by an international organization like the United Nations (food, medicine, etc.) and this organization has already relieved the various national governments of some of their functions. No great imagination is required to see in this kind of transference the beginning of the end for the nation-state. We should at all times do everything in our power to speed up the process.

Meanwhile, our anonymous million can focus their attention on the problem of "leisure." A great deal of what is pompously called "juvenile delinquency" is the inarticulate response of youth incapable of coming to terms with leisure. The violence associated with juvenile delinquency is a direct consequence of the alienation of man from himself brought about by the Industrial Revolution. Man has forgotten how to play. And if one thinks of the soulless tasks accorded each man in the industrial milieu, of the fact that education has become increasingly technological, and for the ordinary man no more than a means of fitting him for a "job," one can hardly be surprised that man is lost. He is almost afraid of more leisure. He demands "overtime" and has a latent hostility towards automation. His creativity stunted, he is orientated outwards entirely. He has to be amused. The forms that dominate his working life are carried over into leisure, which becomes more and more mechanized; thus he is equipped with machines to contend with leisure that machines have accorded him. And to offset all this, to alleviate the psychological wear and tear of our technological age, there is, in a word, ENTERTAINMENT.

When our man after the day's work comes twitching, tired, off the assembly-line into what are called without a shred of irony his "leisure hours," with what is he confronted? In the bus on the way home he reads a newspaper that is identical to yesterday's newspaper, in the sense that it is a reshake of identical elements . . . four murders, thirteen disasters, two revolutions, and "something approaching a rape" . . . which in turn is identical to the newspaper of the day before that . . . three murders, nineteen disasters, one counter-revolution, and something approaching an abomination . . . and unless he is a very exceptional man, one of our million potential technicians, the vicarious pleasure he derives from paddling in all this violence and disorder obscures from him the fact that there is nothing new in all this "news" and that his daily perusal of it leads not to a widening of consciousness, to a species of mental process that has more in common with the salivations of Pavlov's dogs than with the subtleties of human intelligence.

Contemporary man expects to be entertained. His active participation is almost nonexistent. Art, whatever it is, is something of which it is sometimes even proud to flaunt an attitude of invincible ignorance. This sorry state of affairs is unconsciously sanctioned by the stubborn philistinism of our cultural institutions. Museums have approximately the same hours of business as churches, the same sanctimonious odors and silences, and a snobbish presumption in direct spiritual opposition to the vital men whose works are closeted there. What have those silent corridors to do with Rembrandt and the "no smoking" signs to do with Van Gogh? Beyond the museum, the man in the street is effectively cut off from art's naturally tonic influence by the fashionable brokerage system which, incidentally, but of economic necessity, has more to do with the emergence and establishment of so-called "art-forms" than is generally realized. Art can have no existential significance for a civilization that draws a line between life and art, and collects artifacts like ancestral bones for reverence. Art must inform the living; we envisage a situation in which life is continually renewed by art, a situation imaginatively and passionately constructed to inspire each individual to respond creatively, to bring to whatever act a creative comportment. We envisage it. But it is we, now, who must create it. For it does not exist.

The actual situation could not be in sharper contrast. Art anaesthetizes the living; we witness a situation in which life is continually devitalized by art, a situation sensationally and venally misrepresented to inspire each individual to respond in a stoic and passive way, to bring to whatever act a banal and automatic consent. For the average man, dispirited, restless, with no power of concentration, a work of art to be noticed at all must compete at the level of spectacle. It must contain nothing that is in principle unfamiliar or surprising; the audience must be able easily and without reservation to identify with the protagonist, to plant itself firmly in the "driving-seat" of the emotional roller-coaster and switch over to remote control. What takes place is empathy at a very obvious level, blind and uncritical. To the best of my knowledge, it was Brecht who first drew attention to the danger of that method of acting which aims to provoke the state of empathy in an audience at the expense of judgment. It was to counter this promiscuous tendency on the part of the modern audience to identify that he formulated his "distance-theory" of acting, a method calculated to inspire a more active and critical kind of participation. Unfortunately, Brecht's theory has had no impact whatsoever on popular entertainment. The zombies remain; the spectacle grows more spectacular. To adapt an epigram of a friend of mine: Si vous ne voulouns pas assister au spectacle de la fin du monde, il nous faut travailler a la fin du monde du spectacle [if you don't want to assist in the spectacle of the end of the world, you must work toward ending the world of the spectacle] (Notes editoriales d'Internationale Situationniste, 3 Decembre, 1959. 2 Freely adapted from the original.)

Such art as has claim to be called serious touches popular culture today only by way of the fashion industry and advertizing, and for many years it has been infected by the triviality attaching to those enterprises. For the rest, literature and art exist side by side with mechanized popular culture and, except in an occasional film here and there, have little effect upon it. Only in jazz, which retains the spontaneity and vitality deriving from its proximity to its beginnings, can we see an art which springs naturally out of a creative ambience. But already more adulterated forms tend to be confused with the authentic. In England, for example, we are confronted by the absurd craze for "trad": a rehash of what went on in New Orleans in the early Twenties, simple, obvious, repetitious, overshadows almost completely the vital tradition of the post-Charlie Parker era.

For a long time now the best artists and fine minds everywhere have deplored the gulf that has come to exist between art and life. The same people have usually been in revolt during their youth and have been rendered harmless by "success" somewhere around middle age. The individual is powerless. It is inevitable. And the artist has a profound sense of his own impotence. He is frustrated, even confounded. As in the writings of Kafka, this fearful sense of alienation pervades his work. Certainly the most uncompromising attack on conventional culture was launched by Dada at the end of the First World War. But the usual defense-mechanisms were soon operating: the turds of "anti-art" were solemnly framed and hung alongside "The School of Athens"; Dada thereby underwent castration by card-index and was soon safely entombed in the histories as just another school of art. The fact is that while Tristan Tzara et al could point deftly to the chancre on the body politic, could turn the spotlight of satire on the hypocracies that had to be swept away, they produced no creative alternative to the existing order. What were we to do after we had painted a moustache on the Mona Lisa? Did we really wish Ghenghis Khan to stable his horses in the Louvre? And then?

In a recent essay (The Secret Reins, Encounter No. 102, March, 1962), Arnold Wesker — concerned precisely with this gulf between art and popular culture, and with the possibility of reintegration — refers to the threatened strike of 1919 and to a speech of Lloyd George. The strike could have brought down the government. The Prime Minister said:

You will defeat us. But if you do so, have you weighed the consequences? The strike will be in defiance of the government of the country and by its very success will precipitate a constitutional crisis of the first importance. For, if a force arises in the state which is stronger than the state itself, then it must be ready to take on the functions of the state. Gentlemen — have you considered, and if you have, are you ready?

The strikers were not ready. Mr. Wesker comments:

The crust has shifted a bit, a number of people have made fortunes out of the protest and somewhere a host of Lloyd Georges are grinning contentedly at the situation. . . . All protest is allowed and smiled upon because it is known that the force — economically and culturally — lies in the same dark and secure quarters, and this secret knowledge is the real despair of both artist and intellectual. We are paralyzed by this knowledge, we protest every so often but really the whole cultural scene — particularly on the Left — "is one of awe and ineffectuality." I am certain that this was the secret knowledge that largely accounted for the decline of the cultural activities of the Thrties — no one really knew what to do with the philistines. They were omnipotent, friendly, and seductive. The germ was carried and passed on by the most unsuspected; and this same germ will cause, is beginning to cause, the decline of our new cultural upsurge unless . . . unless a new system is conceived whereby we who are concerned can take away, one by one, the secret reins.

Although I found Mr. Wesker's essay in the end disappointing, it did confirm for me that in England as elsewhere there are groups of people who are actively concerned with the problem. As we have seen, the political-economic structure of western society is such that the gears of creative intelligence mesh with the gears of power in such a way that, not only is the former prohibited from ever initiating anything, it can only come into play at the behest of forces (vested interests) that are often in principle antipathetic towards it. Mr. Wesker's "Centre 42" is a practical attempt to alter this relationship.

I should like to say at once that I have no fundamental quarrel with Mr. Wesker. My main criticism of his project (and I admit my knowledge of it is very hazy indeed) is that it is limited and national in character, and that this is reflected in his analysis of the historical background. He takes the 1956 production of Osborne's Look Back in Anger, for example, to be the first landmark in "our new cultural upsurge." A serious lack of historical perspective, the insularity of his view . . . these features are, I am afriad, indicative of a kind of church-bazaar philosophy which seems to underlie the whole project. Like handicrafts, art should not be expected to pay. Mr. Wesker calls for a tradition "that will not have to rely on financial success in order to continue." And so he was led to seek the patronage of trade unions and has begun to organize a series of cultural festivals under their auspices. While I have nothing against such festivals, the urgency of Mr. Wesker's original diagnosis led me to expect recommendations for action at a far more fundamental level. Certainly, such a programme will not carry us very far towards seizing what he so happily refers to as "the secret reins." I do not think I am being overcautious in asserting that something far less pedestrian than an appeal to the public-spiritedness of this or that group will be the imperative of the vast change we have in mind.

Nevertheless, as one point in what remains an interesting essay, Mr. Wesker quotes Mr. Raymond Williams. Who Mr. Williams is and from what work the quotation is taken I am unfortunately ignorant. I only wonder how Mr. Wesker can quote the following and then go out and look for patronage.

The question is not who will patronize the arts, but what forms are possible in which artists will have control of their own means of expression, in such ways that they will have relation to a community rather than to a market or a patron.

Of course it would be dangerous to pretend to understand Mr. Williams on the basis of such a brief statement. I shall say simply that for myself and for my associates in Europe and America, the key phrase in the above sentence is: "artists will have control of their own means of expression." When they achieve that control, their "relation to a community" will become a meaningful problem, that is, a problem amenable to formulation and solution at a creative and intelligent level. Thus we must concern ourselves forthwith with the question of how to seize and within the social fabric exercise that control. Our first move must be to eliminate the brokers.

At the beginning of these reflections, I said that our methods will vary with the empirical facts pertaining here and now, there and then. I was referring to the tentative, essentially tactical nature of our every act in relation to a given situation, and also to the international constitution of what we might call the new underground. Obviously, all our operations must be adapted to the society in which they take place. Methods used effectively in London might be suicidal or simply impracticable in Moscow or Peking. Always, the tactics are for here and how; never are they in the narrow sense political. Again, these reflections themselves must be regarded as an act of the new underground, a prescriptive document which, in so far as it refers for the most part to what is yet to happen, awaits baptism by fire.

How to begin? At a chosen moment in a vacant country house (mill, abbey, church or castle) not too far from the City of London, we shall foment a kind of cultural "jam session": out of this will evolve the prototype of our spontaneous university.

The original building will stand deep within its own grounds, preferably on a river bank. It should be large enough for a pilot group (astronauts of inner space) to situate itself, orgasm and genius, and their tools and dream-machines and amazing apparatus and appurtenances; with outhouses for "workshops" large as could accommodate light industry; the entire site to allow for sponatneous architecture and eventual town planning. I underline the last because we cannot place too much emphasis on the fact that "l'art integral ne pourvait se realiser qu'au niveau de l'urbanisme" (integral art cannot be accomplished except on the level of urbanism) (Report on the Construction of Situations, Guy-Ernest Debord. At present, town planning is determined by and tends to reinforce conventional functions, conventional attitudes. You sleep here, eat there, work there, die there. A revolutionary architecture will take no account of functions to be transcended.) In the 1920s, Diaghilev, Picasso, Stravinski, and Nijinsky acted in concert to produce a ballet; surely it does not strain our credulity to imagine a far larger group of our contemporaries acting in concert to create a town. We envisage the whole as a vital laboratory for the creation (and evaluation) of conscious situations; it goes without saying that it is not only the environment which is in question, plastic, subject to change, but men also.

It must be said at once that this quick sketch of our action-university is not the product of vague speculation. Not only are there numerous historical parallels, past situations, fortuitous or controlled, some of whose features are manifestly adaptable to our own project. During the past decade in many countries, we have already conducted sufficient experiments of a preparatory nature: we are ready to act.

It used to be said that the British Empire was won on the playing fields of Eton. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the British ruling class was formed exclusively in such institutions; the deportment they conferred on a man was vitally relevant to the growth of England at that time. Unfortunately, the situation at Eton and similar establishments did not continue to inspire its own improvement. Inertia set in. Forms that were once fruitful hardened until they were devoid of contemporary relevance. In the age of relativity, we envisage the spontaneous university as filling the vital formative function of our times.

The Jewish settlement in Israel turned a desert into a garden and astounded all the world. In a flowering garden already wholly sustained by automation, a fraction of such purposiveness applied to the cultivation of men would bring what results?

Then, there was the experimental college at Black Mountain, North Carolina. This is of immediate interest to us for two reasons. In the first place, the whole concept is almost identical to our own in its educational aspect; in the second, some individual members of the staff of Black Mountain, certain key members of wide experience, are actually associated with us in the present venture. Their collaboration in invaluable.

Black Mountain College was widely known throughout the United States. In spite of the fact that no degrees were awarded, graduates and non-graduates from all over America thought it worthwhile to take up residence. As it turns out, an amazing number of the best artists and writers of America seem to have been there at one time or another, to teach and learn, and their cumulative influence on American art in the last fifteen years has been immense. One has only to mention Franz Kline in reference to painting and Robert Creeley in reference to poetry to give an idea of Black Mountain's significance. They are key figures in the American vanguard, their influence everywhere. Black Mountain could be described as an "action university" in the sense in which the term is applied to the paintings of Kline et al. There were no examinations. There was no learning from ulterior motives. Students and teachers participated informally in the creative arts; every teacher was himself a practitioner — poetry, music, painting, sculpture, dance, pure mathematics, pure physics, etc., — of a very high order. In short, it was a situation constructed to inspire the free play of creativity in the individual and the group.

Unfortunately, it no longer exists. It closed in the early Fifties for economic reasons. It was a corporation (actually owned by the staff) which depended entirely on fees and charitable donations. In the highly competitive background of the United States of America such a gratuitous and flagrantly non-utilitarian institution was only kept alive for so long as it was by the sustained effort of the staff. In the end, it proved too ill-adapted to its habitat to survive.

In considering ways and means to establish our pilot projects, we have never lost sight of the fact that in a capitalist society any successful organization must be able to sustain itself in capitalist terms. The venture must pay. Thus we have conceived the idea of setting up a general agency to handle, as far as possible, all the work of the individuals associated with the university. Art, the products of all the expressive media of civilization, its applications in industrial and commercial design, all this is fantastically profitable (consider the Music Corporation of America). But, as in the world of science, it is not the creators themselves who reap most of the benefit. An agency founded by the creators themselves and operated by highly-paid professionals would be in an impregnable position. Such an agency, guided by the critical acumen of the artists themselves, could profitably harvest new cultural talent long before the purely professional agencies were aware it existed. Our own experience in the recognition of contemporary talent during the past fifteen years has provided us with evidence that is decisive. The first years would be the hardest. In time, granting that the agency functioned efficiently from the point of view of the individual artists represented by it, it would have first option on all new talent. This would happen not only because it would be likely to recognize that talent before its competitors, but because of the fact and fame of the university. It would be as though some ordinary agency were to spend 100 per cent on its profits on advertising itself. Other things being equal, why should a young writer, for example, not prefer to be handled by an agency controlled by his (better-known) peers, an agency which will apply whatever profit it makes out of him as an associate towards the extension of his influence and audience, an agency, finally, which at once offers him membership in the experimental university (which governs it) and all that that implies? And, before elaborating further on the economics of our project, it is perhaps time to describe briefly just what the membership does imply.

We envisage an international organization with branch universities near the capital cities of every country in the world. It will be autonomous, unpolitical, economically independent. Membership in one branch (as teacher or student) will entitle one to membership in all branches, and travel to and residence in foreign branches will be energetically encouraged. It will be the object of each branch university to participate in and "supercharge" the cultural life of the respective capital cit[ies] at the same time as it promotes cultural exchange internationally and functions in itself as a non-specialized experimental school and creative workshop. Resident professors will be themselves creators. The staff at each university will be purposively international; as far as practicable, the students also. Each branch of the spontaneous university will be the nucleus of an experimental town to which all kinds of people will be attracted for shorter or longer periods of time and from which, if we are successful, they will derive a renewed and infectious sense of life. We envisage an organization whose structure and mechanisms are infinitely elastic; we see it as the gradual crystallization of a regenerative cultural force, a perpetual brainwave, creative intelligence everywhere recognizing and affirming its own involvement.
It is impossible in the present context to describe in precise detail the day-to-day functioning of the university. In the first place, it is not possible for one individual writing a brief introductory essay [to do so]. The pilot project does not exist in the physical sense, and from the very beginning, like the Israeli kibbutzes, it must be a communal affair, tactics decided in situ, depending upon just what is available when. My associates and I during the past decade have been amazed at the possibilities arising out of the spontaneous interplay of ideas within a group in constructed situations. It is on the basis of such experiences that we have imagined an international experiment. Secondly, and consequently, any detailed preconceptions of my own would be so much excess baggage in the spontaneous generation of the group situation.

Nevertheless, it is possible to make a tentative outline of the economic structure.

We envisage a limited liability company (International Cultural Enterprises Ltd) whose profits are invested in expansion and research. Its income will derive from:

  1. — Commissions earned by the Agency on sales of all original work of the associates.
  2. — Money earned from "patents" or by subsidiaries exploiting applications (industrial and commercial) evolving out of "pure studies." Anyone who has spent time in an art workshop will know what I mean. The field is unlimited, ranging from publishing to interior decorating.
  3. — Retail income. The university will house a "living museum," perhaps a fine restaurant. A showroom will be rented in the city for retail and as an advertisement.
  4. — Such income as derives from "shows," cinematic, theatrical or situationist.
  5. — fees.
  6. — Subsidies, gifts, etc., which in no way threaten the autonomy of the project.

The cultural possibilities of this movement are immense and the time is ripe for it. The world is awfully near the brink of disaster. Scientists, artists, teachers, creative men of goodwill everywhere are in suspense. Waiting. Remembering that it is our kind even now who operate, if they don't control, the grids of expression, we should have no difficulty in recognizing the spontaneous university as the possible detonator of the invisible insurrection.

Text originally in English. From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/invisible.html

  • 1The prise de pouvoir (seizure of power) by an avant garde is obviously only an early stage in a larger, more universal movement, and it must not be forgotten that our group of originators "ne pourra realiser son projet qu'en se supprimant . . . ne peut effectivement exister qu'en tant que parti se depasse lui-meme" ("will be able to achieve its goal only by suppressing itself . . . can really exist only as a party that transcends itself").
  • 2The Meaning of Decay in Art

Comments

cover of Situationistisk Revolution 1

A short text from the Scandinavian section of the S.I.'s Situationistisk Revolution #1 (October 1962). Reprinted in Internationale Situationniste #8 (January 1963)

Author
Submitted by Fozzie on February 7, 2023

A specter is haunting the world — the Situationist International. All the powers of old culture have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter or else to speak in its name, so that their imposture may consign this trouble to the comforts of the past: Malraux and Bomholt, surrealism in Paris and social realism in Budapest, Swedish Nashists and Munich judges!

Two conclusions may be drawn from these facts.

  1. The SI is already acknowledged as a power by all police and by all falsifiers of free thought.
  2. It is high time that the situationists should openly, in all cultural zones where they currently appear, present their ideas, their aims, and their methods of creation, to confront this fairy tale of "situationism," created by the spirit of the past, head on with the radical novelty of the Situationist International itself.

Translated from the French by Reuben Keehan. From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/introduction.html

Comments

a black and white illustration of a father and son in the living room of a european home

From Internationale Situationniste #8 (January 1963).

Author
Submitted by Fozzie on February 8, 2023

What is it that distinguishes an avant-garde from its followers? And what are the means of affecting change, wherever it may be needed? Experimentation. The experiment makes its appearance as undirected, unconscious, meaningless, spontaneous; it becomes conscious with its first repetition, when it can be described and analyzed. It should then be decided if this repetition is "worthwhile" or not. If the answer is yes, the experiment will be set into the rules of the game — experiment into play.

There is no game without repetition. Culture, in its decadence, no longer has the least experimental power. But this decadence has found its end in the rediscovery of play. Human games are composed of repeated situations. When the factors of its construction are not at hand, a situation can merely occur. This is this game of the repetition of a given fact. When the factors of its construction are at our disposal, a situation may be experimentally created. This is the game of the repetition of an experiment.

We want experiments because we want new games. The players are also plagiarists (we are not against plagiarists). Those who conduct experiments in everyday life are also those who make up the revolutionary avant-garde (and this avant-garde is us). Just as a specialized plagiarist has no idea how to experiment and a specialized revolutionary has no idea how to play, those who wish to specialize solely in new games do not know how to play.

A revolution in this day and age will be the critique of revolution as specialized separation, or nothing. And this critique of revolution must be directed towards a defense of play. While the playful revolutionary is the embodiment of the dialectical contradiction, the specialized revolutionary blocks this contradiction by becoming a new separate power. There are several possible responses to life: suicide, anesthesia, experimentation and play. Suicide and anesthesia are the possibilities offered by the current society. Is it possible to bring about moments when the choice is open to experimentation and play? Which is to ask the question: how can a ludic revolution be made?

We are not against conditioning: some kinds of conditioning are inevitable. But from the institutions who work toward the impoverishment of humankind, we wish wrest the instruments of conditioning at their disposal. Indeed, the only possibility that exists for the liberation of our imprisoned dreams is our own appropriation of the factors of our conditioning. Only then can we explore the domains that we have previously only sensed. These explorations will also lead us to encounter some of the oldest known things: old forms recharged with new content, and old contents in new frameworks.

One of my friends used to receive his guests in completely empty rooms. Furthermore, he placed at their disposal a considerable assortment of "useful" fittings — lights, wardrobes, tables, chairs — as well as indefinable objects devoid of any utilitarian character. These guests could furnish their room as they pleased; they could even alter its structure if they so desired. This friend of mine is therefore one of those few hosts who remain outside Procustean tradition. (Besides, it is not difficult to see present society in its entirety as this paradoxical synthesis: Procuste was at once his own host and his own guest). He did not force us to accommodate ourselves in a space whose atmosphere may have been adapted to a strange or even hostile person. We weren't limited to an impersonal habitat like a hotel room; nor to a habitat designed for a certain category of men to function at their average capacities, as good hotel rooms are reputed to be.

An apartment, like a neighborhood, conditions its inhabitants. The decor of an apartment, however, can to some degree be determined by those who live there. It can be their imprint, their mirror, their echo. If today's apartments are considered as reflections of their inhabitants, then it must be said that something is very wrong with some of these people's personalities. And if they are regarded as the place where parts of the personality must develop, admiration is certainly due to those who can make it out of such a situation without going insane. The test of being given a space to transform in their own image, larger than that which they previously had at their disposal, could make it possible to measure the coefficient of mental instability attained in this sense by an individual.

We do not define ourselves as being against nature. In any case, we are against the modern city, inasmuch as it is the sum-total of different techniques of human impoverishment. What can be found there? The prefabricated apartment is the appearance of privacy in normalization. Television is the appearance of human contact in isolation. Magazines are the appearance of enrichment in uniformity. Amusement parks are the appearance of the realization of oneself in anesthesia. And the streets, with their apparent traffic, are channels of isolation. Nature was a vital space, and with our present powers, the city will now become just that. They say that nature satisfies basic needs, so they pretend prefabricated apartments are designed to satisfy superior needs, needs more subtle and diverse. Yet it is clear that this official model of humankind, recognized as the vital minimum of average faculties, and the apartments established to fulfill it, do nothing more than cut off all real individuality.

Once, people spoke of the "jungle of great cities." These days, amid the organized normalization and polychromatic boredom, these jungles are hard to find. Recently, I heard of an architect who had broken all the objects in his apartment in a fit of madness: his telephone, his camera — he didn't even stop at his refrigerator! This action is not so horrible, but it doesn't have any effect. We can't limit ourselves to fragmentary actions. One day, we will have the necessary games, and we will come across adventures in a new city, composed of jungles, steppes and labyrinths of an entirely new type.

The history books spoke of nations. Their language was charged with the promise that there would be a correspondence between every personality in geographical relation, in a milieu. They mobilized their thoughts and their dreams. The nation was presented as a collective space for ideas and actions, human contact on the ground of community. It is clear, nowadays, that such a nation is nowhere to be found. Or, more exactly, that such a nation has never been anywhere to found. But in experimenting with the foundations of unitary urbanism, the situationists represent the possibility of the realization of community. Alienation can only be fought one the plane of the rediscovery of self, of former self.

The situationists are not cosmopolitan, they are cosmonauts. They dare to launch into unknown spaces to build islands inhabitable to unreduced and irreducible human beings. Our nation is in time, in the possibilities of an era, ever-changing.

We are not making a return to nature, just as we have not laid waste to any nation, just as we do not want to restore old hospitality or naïve games. Rather, the situationists should be recognized as indispensable to the reproduction of life on a higher level.

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

Comments

From Internationale Situationniste #8.

Submitted by libcom on September 7, 2005

So you agree with the SI!

You want to join the SI!

We only ask of you a little preliminary work, to verify objectively (in your own interest as well as ours) how close you are to our concerns and your ability to participate fully in our undertaking. (The SI does not want mere disciples.)

1. Choose for yourself a point in the theses published by the SI that you consider important and develop some arguments and possible expansions of it. (Minimum one page typescript; no maximum.)

2. Choose for yourself, out of the same texts published by the SI, a point that can be criticized and destroy that position. (Same conditions.)

NOTE: This is not a meaningless game. The SI often proceeds like this in order to reexamine its own bases and develop new ideas. Perhaps you will chance on a point already criticized. But you might also initiate an appropriate critique of a position insufficiently questioned by us until now. Thus your critique, if it is well done, will be valid in any case; and it may even be useful in bringing up something new!

SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL (1963)

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

Comments

Several quotes about the SI from other publications. From Internationale Situationniste #8 (January 1963).

Submitted by Fozzie on February 8, 2023

This is not the place to explain what situationism is all about. It is enough, for now, to know that it is a movement in contemporary thought, in much the same way as surrealism, dadaism, existentialism, etc.

— Pierre Puttemans, La Gauche (12-10-62)

This movement, dedicated to revolutionizing our era, was born in 1959 in a cellar in Schwabing. . . . Their "ideas" (?) have crossed borders to find disciples, and situationist groups are soon to be created in Paris, Zurich, Brussels and Tel Aviv.

— M. Sch., Germinal (3-6-62)

Their principal activity is an extreme mental derangement that soars like a rocket. . . . In the maximum number of languages the Situationist International sends letters from foreign countries filled with the most filthy expressions. In our opinion the Munich court gave them too much credit in condemning them to fines and imprisonment.

Vernissage #9-10 (May-June 1962)

In foreign lands, (Debord) is still hawking his wares like Bernard Buffet...

Cahiers du Lettrisme #1 (December 1962)

With the same intransigence, Trocchi suicides his own talent... No doubt there are all sorts of hallucinations and fits of passion on this Raft of Medusa to which every son of Cain clings; but if humanism can survive amid the vacuum-packed barbarity this will probably be thanks to them... there is something pathetic and almost respectable about the clumsy but authentic effort of young American writers to stand by surrealism in spite of it all.

— Jacques Cabau, L'Express (7-6-62)

These quotes, nominated for the Oscar for Fantastic Confusionism, which the SI will get around to presenting one of these days, are drawn from contexts that don't even approach intentional humor.

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

Comments

cover of IS #9

August 1964

Director: Debord

Mail: B.P. 75-06 Paris

Editorial Committee: Michèle Bernstein, J.V. Martin, Jan Strijbosch, Raoul Vaneigem.

All texts published in Internationale Situationniste may be freely reproduced, translated or adapted, even without indication of origin.

Submitted by libcom on September 7, 2005

Announcement

As none of the Situationists have a taste for the gardens of the Palais Royal to the extent of promenading there each day between midday and one, editors, patrons, film producers etc., can contact us by writing to Post Office Box 75-06 in Paris.

Whether it is through pure selflessness, or in anticipation of super-profits related to certain smart investments, we do not see here an obstacle. Just know that we will not discuss in any way the content — or form — of our books, journals, films, or works of any kind, whose complete freedom only the S.I. can account for.

Comments

From Internationale Situationniste #9 (August 1964).

Submitted by libcom on September 7, 2005

"Each era forges its own human material, and if our era really needed theoretical works it would itself create the forces necessary for its satisfaction."

-Rosa Luxemburg, in Vorwärts (14 March 1903)

Now that the situationists already have a history and their activity has carved out a very particular but undeniably central role for itself in the cultural debates of the last few years, some people reproach the SI for having succeeded and others reproach it for having failed.

In order to understand the real significance of these terms, as well as almost all the intellectual establishment's judgments concerning the SI, it is first necessary to reverse them. The SI's element of failure is what is commonly considered to be its success -- the artistic value that is beginning to be appreciated in us; the fact that certain of our theses have come to be sociologically or urbanistically fashionable; or simply the personal success that is virtually guaranteed to any situationist the moment he is excluded from the SI. Our element of success, which is more profound, is the fact that we have resisted the mass of compromises that we have been offered; the fact that we have not clung to our original pilot program but have proved that its main avant-garde character, in spite of some other more apparent ones, lay in the fact that it had to lead further; and the fact that we have thus far been refused any recognition within the established framework of the present order.

We have undoubtedly made many mistakes. We have often corrected or abandoned them, although it was precisely among them that were found the elements which were succeeding or for which the greatest aid was offered to bring them to fruition. It is easy to note the shortcomings in our earliest publications -- the extravagant verbiage, the fantasies left over from the old artistic milieu, the holdovers from the old politics; it is, moreover, in the light of the SI's later conclusions that these earlier shortcomings are most easily criticizable. An inverse factor has naturally left less trace in our writings, but has weighed heavily on us: a nihilist abstentionism, a serious inability among many of us to think and act beyond the first stammerings of positive dialogue. This lack is almost always accompanied by the most abstract and pretentious insistence on a disembodied radicalism.

There is, however, a deviation that has threatened us more gravely than all the others: it was the risk of not differentiating ourselves clearly enough from the modern tendencies of explanations and proposals regarding the new society to which capitalism has brought us -- tendencies which, behind different masks, all lead to integration into this society. Since Constant's interpretation of unitary urbanism this tendency has been expressed within the SI, and it is incomparably more dangerous than the old artistic conception we have fought so much. It is more modern and therefore less obvious, and certainly has a more promising future. Our project has taken shape at the same time as the modern tendencies toward integration. There is thus not only a direct opposition between them but also an air of resemblance, since the two sides are really contemporaneous. We have not paid enough attention to this aspect, even recently. Thus, it is not impossible to interpret Alexander Trocchi's proposals in issue #8 of this journal1 2 as having some affinity -- despite their obviously completely contrary spirit -- with those poor attempts at a "psychodramatic" salvaging of decomposed art expressed for example by the ridiculous "Workshop of Free Expression" in Paris last May. But the point we have arrived at clarifies both our project and, inversely, the project of integration. All really modern nonrevolutionary ventures must now be recognized and treated as our number-one enemy. They are going to reinforce all existing controls.

We must not for all that abandon the extreme point of the modern world merely so as to avoid resembling it in any way, or even in order not to teach it anything that could be used against us. It is quite natural that our enemies succeed in partially using us. We are neither going to leave the present field of culture to them nor mix with them. The armchair advisors who want to admire and understand us from a respectful distance readily recommend to us the purity of the first attitude while they adopt the second one. We reject this suspect formalism: like the proletariat, we cannot claim to be unexploitable in the present conditions; the best we can do is to work to make any such exploitation entail the greatest possible risk for the exploiters. The SI has taken a clear stand as an alternative to the dominant culture, and particularly to its so-called avant-garde forms. The situationists consider that they must succeed to art -- which is dead -- and to separate philosophical reflection -- whose corpse no one, despite all the present efforts, will succeed in "reviving" -- because the spectacle that is replacing this art and this thought is itself the heir of religion. And just as was the "critique of religion" (a critique that the present Left abandoned at the same time it abandoned all thought and action), the critique of the spectacle is today the precondition for any critique.

The path of total police control over all human activities and the path of unlimited free creation of all human activities are one: it is the same path of modern discoveries. We are necessarily on the same path as our enemies -- most often preceding them -- but we must be there, without any confusion, as enemies. The best will win.

The present era can test innumerable innovations, but it is incapable of putting them to good use because it is chained to the fundamental conservation of an old order. Over and over, in all our innovating formulations, we must stress the need for a revolutionary transformation of society.

The revolutionary critique of all existing conditions does not, to be sure, have a monopoly on intelligence; it only has a monopoly on its use. In the present cultural and social crisis, those who do not know how to use their intelligence have in fact no discernable intelligence of any kind. Stop talking to us about unused intelligence and you'll make us happy. Poor Heidegger! Poor Lukács! Poor Sartre! Poor Barthes! Poor Lefebvre! Poor Cardan! Tics, tics, and tics. Lacking the method for using their intelligence, they end up with nothing but caricatural fragments of the innovating ideas that can simultaneously comprehend and contest the totality of our era. They are not only incapable of developing ideas, they don't even know how to skillfully plagiarize ideas developed by others. Once the specialized thinkers step out of their own domain, they can only be the dumbfounded spectators of some neighboring and equally bankrupt specialization of which they were previously ignorant but which has become fashionable. The former specialist of ultraleftist politics [Cornelius Castoriadis, aka Cardan] is awestruck at discovering, along with structuralism and social psychology, an ethnological ideology completely new to him: the fact that the Zuni Indians did not have any history appears to him as a luminous explanation for his own inability to act in our history. (Go laugh at the first twenty-five pages of Socialisme ou Barbarie #36.) The specialists of thought can no longer be anything but thinkers of specialization. We don't claim to have a monopoly on the dialectics that everyone talks about; we only claim to have a temporary monopoly on its use.

Some people still venture to object to our theories by gravely insisting on the necessity of practice, although those who speak at this level of methodological delirium have abundantly revealed their own inability to carry out the slightest practice. When revolutionary theory reappears in our time and can count only on itself to propagate itself through a new practice, it seems to us that this is already an important beginning of practice. This theory is at the outset caught in the framework of the new educated ignorance propagated by the present society, and is much more radically cut off from the masses than it was in the nineteenth century. We naturally share its isolation, its risks, and its fate.

To approach us one should therefore not already be compromised, and should be aware that even if we may be momentarily mistaken on many minor points, we will never admit having been mistaken in our negative judgment of persons. Our qualitative criteria are much too certain for us to debate them. There is no point in approaching us if one is not theoretically and practically in agreement with our condemnations of contemporary persons or currents. Some of the thinkers who are now going to plan and justify modern society have already justified and ultimately conserved more archaic forms of it when they were, for example, Stalinists. Now, without batting an eye, they are going to reenlist, just as coolly and cheerily as before, for a second debacle. Others, who fought them during the preceding phase, are now joining them in a common celebration of innovation. All the specializations of illusion can be taught and discussed by the tenured thinkers. But the situationists take their stand in the knowledge that is outside this spectacle: we are not thinkers sponsored by the state.

We have to organize a coherent encounter between the elements of critique and negation (whether as acts or as ideas) that are now scattered around the world; and between these critical and negative elements that have become conscious and the entire life of the bearers of them; and finally, between the people or the first groups that are at this level of intellectual knowledge and practical contestation. The coordination of these researches and struggles on the most practical plane (a new international linkup) is now inseparable from a coordination on the most theoretical plane (which will be expressed by several works presently being prepared by some of the situationists). For example, the present issue of this journal, in order to better explain aspects of our theses that have sometimes been presented too abstractly, gives a large place to a coherent presentation of items drawn from the ordinary daily news. The continuation of our projects will have to be expressed in fuller forms. This continuation will considerably exceed what we would have been able to undertake by ourselves.

While contemporary impotence blathers on about the belated project of "getting into the twentieth century," we think it is high time to eliminate the dead time that has dominated this century and to put an end to the Christian Era with the same stroke. Here as elsewhere, the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. Ours is the best effort so far toward getting out of the twentieth century.

SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL (1964)

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

  • 1Libcom note: A Revolutionary Proposal: Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds
  • 2Trocchi's article, which proposed an international linkup of countercultural artists and dissidents, is not included in the SI Anthology. The English version, "A Revolutionary Proposal" appeared in New Saltire #8 (London, June 1963) and City Lights Journal #2 (San Francisco, 1964), the latter also containing a subsequent more detailed program for his "Project Sigma." Internationale Situationniste #10 (p. 83) contains the following note: "Upon the appearance in London in fall 1964 of the first publications of the 'Project Sigma' initiated by Alexander Trocchi, it was mutually agreed that the SI could not involve itself in such a loose cultural venture, in spite of the interest we have in dialogue with certain of the individuals who may be drawn to it, notably in the United States and England. It is therefore no longer as a member of the SI that our friend Alexander Trocchi has since developed an activity of which we fully approve of several aspects."

Comments

photo of a number of vintage French print media publications

Introduction to a series of texts reproducing quotes from the media on a range to subjects. From Internationale Situationniste #9 (August 1964).

Submitted by Fozzie on February 9, 2023

The new theory that we are constructing, despite the unusual or mad appearance it takes on in the eyes of contemporary conformism, is nothing other than the theory of a new historical moment that is already the present reality, a reality that can only be transformed through the progressive articulation of a precise critique.

"Will theoretical needs be directly practical needs? It does not suffice for thought to reach its realization: reality must also seek thought."

(Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right [Marx]).

One need only begin to decipher the news such as it appears at any given moment in the popular press in order to obtain a quotidian X-ray of Situationist reality. The means of this deciphering lie essentially in the relationship to be established between the facts and the coherence of various themes that thoroughly illuminate them. The meaning of this deciphering can be verified a contrario by emphasizing the incoherence of various thinkers that are currently taken all the more seriously the more miserably they contradict themselves from one detail to another within the generalized fraud.

Translated by Thomas Y. Levin. From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/world.html

Comments

A white plastic helmet entirely obscures the head of a male. This is actually from 1967 but similar enough to the one mentioned in the article.

From Internationale Situationniste #9 (August 1964).

Submitted by Fozzie on February 9, 2023

In today's society, all aspects of technological development — and above all the means of so-called communication — serve to produce the greatest possible passive isolation of these individuals by a "direct and permanent contact" that operates in one direction only, that is, by incitements (to which one cannot respond) that are broadcast by all sorts of leaders. Some applications of this technology go so far as to offer paltry consolations for that which is fundamentally lacking or even at times testify to the pure condition of this lack.

If you are a TV fanatic, you will definitely be interested in the newest, most extraordinary television set in the world: a TV that can go with you everywhere. Thanks to a totally new shape designed by the Hughes Aircraft Corporation in the USA, this television set is meant to be worn on the head. Weighing in at a mere 950 grams, it is actually installed on the type of headgear worn by pilots and telephone operators. Thanks to a mount, its tiny round screen made of plastic and reminiscent of a monocle is kept at a distance of four centimeters from the eye . . . You use only one eye to watch the image. With the other eye, according to the manufacturer, you can continue to look elsewhere, read, or engage in manual labor.

Journal du Dimanche, 29-7-62.

The coal miner conflict has finally been resolved and work will probably resume again tomorrow. It is perhaps the feeling of having participated in the debate that explains the almost complete calm that has reigned continuously throughout the last thirty-four days in the miners' quarters and in the pitheads. In any case, television and transistor radios helped maintain this direct and permanent contact between the miners and their representatives. However, the same media also compelled everyone to go home at the decisive hours during which, on the contrary, only yesterday everyone would go out to meet at the union headquarters.

Le Monde, January 5-4-63.

A new cure for lonely travelers at the Chicago train station. For a "quarter" (1.25 francs) a wax automaton shakes your hand and says "Hello pal, how are you? It's been great to see you. Have a good trip."

Marie-Claire, January 1963.

"I have no more friends; no one will ever talk to me again." These are the opening lines of the confession left on his own tape recorder by a Polish worker who had just turned on the gas in his kitchen. "I am almost unconscious, no one will save me anymore, the end is near" — these were Joseph Czternastek's last words.
A.F.P. [Agence France Presse], London, 7-4-62.

Translated by Thomas Y. Levin. From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/isolation.html

Comments

A glass office door with the words "Welcome Home. Ooops, We Meant 'Welcome to Work'" printed on it.

From Internationale Situationniste #9 (August 1964).

Submitted by Fozzie on February 9, 2023

"Words work on behalf of the dominant organization of life . . . Power merely provides words with a false identity card . . . It creates nothing, it recuperates" (I.S. #8 1 ). The inversion of words is evidence of the disarming of the forces of the protest that depended on those words. The masters of the world thus seize signs, defuse them, and turn them upside down. Revolution, for instance, is a standard term in advertising vocabulary. This reaches its height in the formulation "Révolution en rouge — révolution avec Redflex" [Revolution in red — revolution with Redflex] cited by the journal Der Deutsche Gedanke. From Kruschev to the priests, socialism as a concept has been given the richest variety of contradictory meanings ever consolidated in one single word. Unions have undergone such transformations that at this point the most effective strikes are those organized by the members of the privileged classes, as evidenced by the Belgian doctors this year. Not even anarchy has been spared, as one can tell from the "anarchist opinions" of the pro-Chinese Mr Siné and, even more so, by the anarchist opinions of Le Monde libertaire.

The Duke of Edinburgh has just become a member of the Labour Party's Congress of British Unions (TUC). In fact, the Screenwriters Guild, one of whose members is Queen Elizabeth's husband, has also just become part of the TUC.

Reuters, 17-4-64.

Since in formal terms the Khmer regime draws upon socialist terminology, its republican sovereign is called "Samdech Sahachivin," which means "comrade-prince."

Le Monde, 27-5-64.

We need to move back from Roman law to Negro-African law, from the bourgeois concept of landed property to the socialist conception of property which is that of traditional black Africa.

Léopold Senghor, speech broadcast in Dakar, May 1964.

Some of the speakers could be heard expressing very serious reservations about the liberation of women. Others asserted in substance that the Algerian woman should be emancipated and reintroduced into the life of the nation, however, she must first be made to understand all of her duties and have a good knowledge of the Qu'ran and of all the religious rules. In the economic and social resolution, one then reads: "A family code consistent with our traditions and our socialist line must be developed as quickly as possible."

Le Monde, 22-4-64.

One will be better able to distinguish the different tendencies that make up the fraction of the "socialist family" brought together on the occasion of conventions. . . The militant Christians participate fully in this family, but not without manifesting some annoyance since, as one of them put it, "they are tired of having to beg endlessly for a certificate of socialist baptism."

France-Observateur, 13-2-64.

He is an anarchist, if one is to take him at his word. He will confide this to you in a whisper and will even add "this is common knowledge" . . . His name is Siné and he has just returned from Cuba . . . "Do the workers have an understanding of the revolution? — No, and it would be best if they never acquired one either . . . Not capitalist prisons but revolutionary prisons. In the latter one is happy, almost too happy and (he adds, speaking to one of his interviewers) it would do you extremely well to go there." These are the anarchist opinions of Mr Siné.

Le Monde libertaire, September 1963.

The inevitable accounts of Ravachol and the Bonnot gang, the standard fare of all the journalists that discovered anarchy in the Ambigu and the Grande-Guignol.

Le Monde libertaire, January 1964.

Translated by Thomas Y. Levin. From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/words.html

Comments

black and white photo of an idyllic white nuclear family watching televison in the 1950s

Selected quotes from the media on leisure - including technology, The Beatles and the Worlds Fair. From Internationale Situationniste #9 (August 1964).

Submitted by Fozzie on February 10, 2023

With the development of leisure and of forced consumption, pseudo-culture and pseudo-games not only become expanding sectors of the economy — betting on horse races has become the fifth largest business in France in terms of turnover — but tend to be what makes the entire economy run, by representing the very objective of that economy. The almost complete fusion within the cultural spectacle of what is ordinarily considered "the best and the worst" inevitably tends toward this "worst." This is what gives the cultural spectacle its only meaning: a consumption of survival that goes so far as to prefer a socially forecast, planned, and guaranteed death. The avant-garde of capitalism is already speculating on consumption during death itself and encourages everyone to establish pensions in order to finally be able to enjoy the absolute in survival.

The Young Musicians Club of France, Club Med, the Friends of the Book Club, and the journal Planète have just joined together to form the Association of Frenchmen of the Twentieth Century. This association — constituted according to the Law of 1901 as not-for-profit and without religious or political affiliation — is open not to individuals but to groups wishing to participate in organized exchanges between different types of leisure organizations. In listening to the organizers of the four founding organizations, one might ask oneself what unites them besides strictly commercial interests. One of the four gave the following explanation: "We all work in a realm that is little known but continuously expanding, the realm of popular culture and leisure."

Le Monde, 22-2-64.

In the latest issue of the journal published by the Barclay Bank, one reads that the Beatles represent "an invisible export that contributes significantly towards the equalization of the balance of payments in Great Britain."

Reuters, 25-2-64.

Many people like the Beatles because, so it is claimed, they express the authentic voice of the working class masses in Liverpool . . . But is the "Mersey sound" really what the Communist Daily Worker claims it to be, that is, a cry of revolt emanating from the eighty thousand slum dwellings housing three hundred thousand unemployed workers? . . . Even if they have retained and even emphasized the popular accent of their origins, the Beatles today speak to a much wider audience composed not only of the new working class, but also of the middle classes and all the beneficiaries of the society of adundance. And it is because they have clearly understood this evolution that their impresarios have advised them to wear clean clothes and to wash their hair.

Henri Pierre, Le Monde, 12-12-63.

The largest spectacle the world has ever seen, an investment of one billion dollars (of which ninety percent will have disappeared two years later without a trace), a fantastic collection of objects and living beings: from the Watutsi dancers that comprise the personal ballet of his majesty, the King of Burundi (whose sacred drum has never before left its native land) to the most complicated electronic machines, from Michelangelo's Pietà to the capsule in which men are preparing to land on the moon. "Peace through Understanding" is the motto of the New York [World's Fair] that opens its doors on Wednesday . . .

Visitors to the fair will travel into the future in tiny cars. They will drive through the city of the future in which all traffic problems will be resolved, highways will be tunneled underground, the parking lots located on the ground floor, the stores on the first floor, the residential houses on the second, and the parks, wooded areas, and spaces laden with plants on the third. A mere fantasy? The advertising agents of the powerful company retort that at the 1939 New York Exhibition, General Motors had already sketched a vision of highways, bridges and underground passages that seemed fantastic at the time and have since become a part of American life . . .

Coca-Cola . . . will offer the curious a "round-world-tour" of a very special sort. Visitors will be able "to feel, touch, and taste the most far-away places of the earth," and, what is more, they will be able to hear the most exquisite music and song as well as experiencing a multitude of other emotions. Of course, all these smells and all these tastes will be "synthesized" and controlled automatically by electronic brains . . .

The UAR will try to gain the sympathies of the Americans by showing them the gold objects of the Pharoahs. General Franco will attempt to do the same by presenting paintings by old and modern masters from Vélasquez to Goya and from Picasso to Miró . . .

For art lovers there will be a huge exhibit of modern art and for the more scientifically minded there will be a pavilion housing recent discoveries. Nor have the female visitors been forgotten: in the Clairol pavilion every woman will be able to decide what she will look like in the following season — blonde, redhead, chestnut, brunette, and so on. Thanks to "practical beauty" machines they will be able to try on clothes "in color." The pavilion will also be equipped with an electronic brain that will give good tips based on the physical data of each individual: what color she should choose for her powder, her lipstick, her eyeliner, her eyebrow pencil, her nail polish, and so on.

Le Monde, 22-4-64.

Visit "Technology for Living." "Come see how you will be living in fifteen years." In the great room at Harrods, one of the most famous stores in London . . . "Why waste your time bringing wine to room temperature? Buy an 'electronic room-temperaturizer' : the button on the left for Bordeaux, the button on the right for Burgundy. The price: seven pounds" . . . "Technology for Living" is anticipation within hand's reach; an anticipation that one buys on credit with payments spread over twelve or twenty-four months . . . "Why have wallpaper on the walls?" the female vendor continues. "Hang up heliorama instead (an electric painting with moving colors)."

France-Soir, 28-2-64.

Six prisoners in the Harris county jail in Texas, quite impressed by the official report on the ill effects of tobacco, announced yesterday that they had decided to quit smoking because they were determined not to die of lung cancer. The six men, imprisoned for various crimes, are all condemned to die in the electric chair.

U.P.I., Houston, 13-2-64.

[quote]Ettinger describes the refrigeration of the body as "the greatest promise — and perhaps the greatest problem — of history." Whatever may eventually happen — one should be practical — the American expert advises all those human beings who think ahead toward the future to specify in their wills if they want to be frozen, and to put aside money for their temporary death and for their second life. According to Ettinger's estimation, the sojourn in the refrigerated "dormitories" where cadavers will be stacked (in the United States there will be fifteen million tons of them) will cost about two hundred dollars a year.

France-Soir, 17-6-64.

Translated by Thomas Y. Levin. From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/leisure.html

Comments

a white man sits at a table. On the table is a small box with LED lights on it. The Nothing Box.

Selected quotes from the media on art and culture, from International Situationniste #9 (August 1964).

Submitted by Fozzie on February 10, 2023

As modern art increasingly tends toward a radical reduction of its means, towards silence, the products of this decomposition are required to be increasingly useful, are put on display and are "communicated" everywhere. This is due to the fact that this development in modern art expressed — and opposed — the noncommunication that has effectively established itself everywhere in society. The emptiness of life must now be furnished with the emptiness of culture. This is done using all the possible sales strategies, particularly those that also serve almost everywhere else to pass off half-empty goods. To this end it is necessary to mask the real dialectic of modern art by reducing everything to a satisfying positivity of nothingness that justifies its own existence tautologically by the mere fact that it exists, which is to say that it is granted recognition within the spectacle. Moreover, this self-proclaimed new art, down to its very details, turns out to be unabashedly the art of open plagiarism. The fundamental difference between an inventive modern art and the current generation is that what was previously anti-spectacular is now reiterated in a form both integrated into, and accepted within, the spectacle. This preference for repetition serves to eliminate all historical evaluation: now that neo-dadaism has become the official art of the United States, one goes so far as to repraoch the dadaist Schwitters for recalling his own epoch. Indeed, even the critical form of writing known as détournement is subjected to a number of literary popularizations, with "references at the end of the volume." But the volume of cultural nothingness today guarantees a totally different end.

Long live nothing! You've perhaps heard of this gadget that caused a sensation in the United States last month, and which had the peculiarity of being useless. Well, you will be interested to learn that this extraordinary object — a cubicle box encrusted with electric lightbulbs that can light up in any direction — was such a success that it sold out completely and is impossible to find anymore. And yet the "Nothing Box" cost nearly forty dollars (more than 200 francs).

Elle, 8-2-63.

After each play, and particularly after this year's discovery Oh! les beaux jours, one wondered what new means or words Beckett could possibly still invent in order to materialize the nothingness and approach the silence that fascinates him. Yet the text of Comédie displays the very increase in sobriety that one no longer thought was possible.

Le Monde, 13-6-64.

One should know better: to buy a painting when it is love at first sight is dangerous. For a beginner, it is the worst way to start a collection. A battery of psychological tests has recently proven this: you can only become attached to a painting if it resembles you. In the Culture Boutique that puts these theories into practice, Marie-France Pisier, star of François Reichenbach's next film, was subjected to a barrage of questions posed by a psychologist: "Are you a glutton? Do you wear red? Do you sleep well?" and so on. The test is so convincing that Marie-France, at first attracted to a canvas by Singier, ultimately walked out of the boutique with a Soulages.

Marie-Claire, July 1963.

Mukaï, an important Japanese sculptor. His most famous work: a compressed Renault 4 CV car that now adorns one of Tokyo's train stations.

Elle, 9-8-63.

The organizer of a vaction club proposes the following quite seductive package for the month of January: "Eight days in the mountains for three hundred and fifty francs, everything included." When I first read this advertisement I did not find it very striking, It is the details of the "everything included" that make it extraordinary. The price not only includes air fare, a comfortable chalet, free stay for children under ten, and a kindergarten, but also "an encounter with a celebrity." For starters: Le Clézio.

Alfred Fabre-Luce, Arts, 1-1-64.

In large housing projects the theatrical space takes on a different meaning. It can no longer be a space and a stage constructed exclusively for dramatic performances. Formerly a total art form involving literature, painting, music, and architecture (not to mention lighting techniques), the theater is now considered as a space adaptable to the entire range of cultural presentations of the small town: dramatic art, cinema, television, lectures, dance . . . something like what the architect P. Nelson calls poetically a "leisure garden." This is what is at the root of the tendency, both in France and in the entire world, to build cultural centres.

Le Monde, 12-10-62.

The last four years have witnessed a veritable blossoming of a generation of musician-mathematicians throughout the entire world. Here in France research in this domain is refused substantive government subsidy, and is therefore reduced to the level of industrious craftsmanship more or less supported by the major producers of electronic machines . . .

The fruits of this research include, among others, the compositions Variations triangulaires by Michel Philippot and the Nonetto in forma in triangulo by Pierre Barbaud. The latter was also asked to provide music for the film Les abysses. Without taking the slightest account of the images, he calculated the music on his Gamma 60, transcribed it in traditional notation, handed it over to the musicians, and recorded it. The reviews subsequently applauded the beauty of the score and its considerable contribution to the film's success.

In this manner the Gamma 60 today produces kilometers of harmonic exercises that are neither more ugly nor more beautiful than those produce in the conservatories, but infinitely more perfect in terms of their strict obedience to the rules! One can, by the way, even program the "tics" of past composers...

The imprecision of the stroke of a bow, indeed the instability of the sound emitted by the majority of today's instruments is not ideally suited to "realizing" the implacable logic generated by the machine. It seems that the supplementary use of an acoustic synthesizer is virtually indespensable in order to make the results of this research a true means of acoustic information.

It is clear, however, that "calculated" music has opened up a new era in terms of artistic creation. Our musician-researchers are already envisaging applying the best data provided by the electronic brains simultaneously to both music and the plastic arts. They are already living the (hopefully furtile) marriage of man and machine in the realm of the spirit. They affirm loudly that the machine helps them "to better conceive new structures." Let us here salute, together with Abraham Moles, the advent of the technological age.

France-Observateur, 21-5-64.

An agitated audience at the Théâtre de France the other night for a concert of the "Domaine"...

Next on the program was Karlheinz Stockhausen's Klavierstück X, the performance of which, by the same artist, looked like true forced labor. The soloist, armed with gloves, engaged in hand to hand combat combat with his Steinway for a number of rounds, some of them extremely short — a single chord, played very powerfully — and each separated by numberous and interminable silences, such that this Klavierstück really looked like a boxing match...

And yet behind all this experimentation there is nothing really new. The piano abused by punches? Already seen around 1926-1928 at a concert by the Revue musicale. And Kurt Schwitter's dadaism recalls that there were beautiful scandals provoked by Tristan Tzara around 1920.

Le Monde, 25-3-64.

This American presentation, an annex geographically outside the Biennale, is entirely devoted to the neo-dada protest movement known by the name of "Pop Art"; its appearance is a bit like that of an American festival on the margins of the official show.

Le Monde, 19-6-64.

I have not forgotten that I must discuss Jean-Pierre Faye's Anthologues — a book that, it is true, does not call itself a novel... Nevertheless, what he wants to tell us is a story, even several stories. And I am perfectly willing to accept the fact that he embellishes his text with camouflaged citations from writers of the past, the references to which one only finds at the end of the volume.

Guy Dumur, France-Observateur, 18-6-64.

Translated by Thomas Y. Levin. From: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/costumers.html

Comments

a wooden architects model of a large city

From Internationale Situationniste #9 (August 1964).

Submitted by Fozzie on February 13, 2023

Modern capitalism — concentrated and highly developed capitalism — inscribes onto the scenery of life the fusion of what used to be opposed as the positive and negative poles of alienation: a sort of equalizer of alienation. One's obligatory stay there is supervised by an increasingly preventative police. The new cities are laboratories of this stifling society: from Vällingby in Sweden to Bessor in Israel where all forms of leisure are to be united in one single center, without forgetting the housing project in Avilés that signals the neo-capitalist development now reaching Spain. Simultaneously, the disappearance of the "urban jungle" that corresponded to free market capitalism — in all its lack of comfort, its luxury, and its adventures — continues apace. The center of Paris is radically restructured by the organization of automobile traffic: the quays transformed into highways, place Dauphine into an underground parking garage. this in no way precludes the complementary tendency to restore a few old urban spots as sites of touristic spectacle, a simple extension of the principle of the classical museum by means of which an entire neighborhood can become a monument. Administrative bureaucracies of all sorts construct everywhere buildings suited to their taste. At Canisy, this even includes the administration of a new activity that, despite its enormity, can be sold at a premium like all the charlatanry that responds to real lacks: the specialists of generalization.

In order to buy all this, one depends on one's credit; the monthly bills are sometimes a burden, but one pays them: the Frenchman — this is a new development — is willing to make sacrifices for his housing. Where do you live? In Paris, Marseille, Lille, Nantes, Toulouse? It makes little difference since wherever you are you will find the same lodgings, equally well equipped and well decorated. Whose home are you in? Whether it is the home of an office worker, a mason, a judge, or a skilled worker: the difference is imperceptible . . . In this way a style of life can be imposed that is clear, happy, uniform, and common to all social classes. I am conveying the things as they are without adding any political exegesis whatsoever. However, allow me to recall that in the previous century an abyss separated the bourgeois from the worker . . . Today, the salary of a skilled worker is close to that of a professor, and all of them end up on middle-income housing projects. Is this good? Is this bad? I leave the judgment up to you. But it is a fact that a leveling is underway, neither from above, nor from below, but at the middle.

Jean Duché, Elle, 10-5-63.

The 32nd conference of the International Organization of Criminal Police (Interpol) began Wednesday morning in Helsinki, in the large amphitheater of the Economic Sciences Building . . . There are plans to create during the course of the conference a "bureau of criminal prevention" in each of the member countries similar to the one that has been in operation for a number of years in Stockholm. The purpose of this bureau is to provide architects, engineers, builders, and other specialists with the wide range of techniques developed and endorsed by the police in order to prevent criminal offenses.

Le Monde, 22-8-63.

The city of Canisy: an ideal thirty billion franc observatory for market of gray matter... On a huge billboard located in a place called La Croix-Solier: 'International Center of Generalization. The first experimental scientific city, site of synthesis and generalization between men of all disciplines.' 'All this comes from semantics,' the mailman explains with a large sweeping gesture across the countryside.

L'Express, 22-8-63.

Translated by Thomas Y. Levin. From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/urbanism.html

Comments

0_Mods-v-Rockers-The-scene-at-Margate-North-East-Kent-in-May-1964.jpg

From Internationale Situationniste #9 (August 1964).

Submitted by Fozzie on February 13, 2023

The revolt against existing conditions is manifest everywhere. It has not yet taken the form of an explicit project or an organization because the position is still occupied at the moment by the old, mystified, and mendacious revolutionary politics. This politics has failed — and has inverted its own repressive opposite — because it was incapable of grasping the unacceptable and the possible in their totality. As evidenced by its contemporary ruins, revolutionary politics has been equally unable to define either the unacceptable or the possible because its practice failed and transformed itself into a lie. The revolutionary project can only be realized once again by means of excess; it needs a new maximalism that demands a total transformation of society. Kowa Shoitani's gesture is not absurd: a society can choose to invest its resources in the development of television stations, in medical research, or in other types of more unexpected research. "The eye has become the human eye just as the object has become a social, human object, which is to say produced by men for men . . . The development of the five senses is the work of all of past history" (Marx, 1844 Manuscripts).

Today sports and idols draw the crowds that the political parties can no longer even dream of attracting. This is because for quite some time now the masses gathered together by politics were nothing but masses of passive spectators gaping at deceptive idols. However, these spectators that have succumbed to the contemplation of futile competitions also bring their dissatisfaction with them. In Lima, a mere falsification of the superficial spectacle was enough to awaken a radical refusal that revolted against the totality of spectacular falsification. This is what assures that the psychodrama will go bankrupt before it has fulfilled the stultifying function that its administrators expect of it.

In Clacton, gangs had it in for the local population, above all, the world of the adults. This manifested itself in the form of gratuitous acts of vandalism. In Margate and Brighton they fought each other for various, obscure reasons... The presence of an "audience" — beginning with the mass of reporters and television cameramen, and also including the respectable adult tourists both terrified and attracted by the much reported violence — without a doubt played a role. As others have already observed, the youths presented themselves as spectacle...

Le Monde, 20-5-64.

A year ago, the black-jacket toughs of Serinette, a neighborhood in the suburbs of Toulon, decided to terrorize a seventy-year-old lady, Madame Hervé Conneau. A widow for quite a number of years, she lived alone in a comfortable house located in the middle of a park, a residence that everyone in the area called "the castle." It was the park that first caught the attention of the young gang, since the foliage lent itself well for meetings and semi-clandestine gatherings . . . Once they had occupied the park, the young thugs began to attack the castle itself. "One morning," the old lady recounts, "I noticed that they had leveled the chapel." There had been, in fact, a small, half-ruined chapel near the house: the "black jackets" had demolished it stone by stone during the night.

Le Monde, 10-5-64.

Jean-Marie Launay, born in Dreux (Eure-et-Loir), a young soldier from the 735th Munitions Company that guards a major depot near Thouars, had conceived of a plan to blow up the depot together with its thousands of tons of ammunition. Some friends who were supposed to come from Chartres in a stolen car would then have taken advantage of the ensuing panic to rob the vaults of the Place Lavault branch of the Banque Populaire, in the very center of Thouars.

Le Monde, 20-1-62.

Large numbers of arrests during the last few days. The Caen fair. Endless Brigitte Bardot films. The gangs from La Guérinière and Grâce-de-Dieu. The bus station. Girls doing strip-tease in basements. Delinquent minors turn up in court at age 20 . . . The V. family . . . occupy four rooms — three bedrooms and a salon with built-in kitchen — at La Guérinière. Mrs. V. . . . shows me the room: "You see, it has all the amenities: refrigerator, television, but he always insists on going out with his friends. Recently, they have been at the fair. I did not think that they would raise any trouble."

7 Jours de Caen, April 1964.

Around noon on Wednesday, the US ambassador to Japan, Mr Edwin Reischauer, was stabbed in the right leg by a young nineteen-year-old Japanese man in the embassy courtyard. Although seriously wounded, the ambassador's life is not in danger . . . According to the Japanese police, the aggressor is an unstable youth whose action was not politically motivated. The nineteen-year-old, whose name is Kowa Shoitani, lives in Numazu, one-hundred-fifty kilometers southwest of Tokyo. By means of his action he wanted to call attention to the inadequate medical aid given to those suffering eye illnesses. According to the police report he is said to have declared: "I am short-sighted and it is because of the bad political situation caused by the American occupation that Japan does not provide facilities for people who suffer from problems of vision."

Le Monde, 25-3-64.

In Algiers at night, groups of slightly drunk men occasionally roam through the former rue d'Isly shouting out their list of demands: "Wine! Women!"

Daniel Guérin, Combat, 16-1-64.

The authorities are preparing to launch an operation against the young "black sheep" that are becoming increasingly numerous in the streets of the larger Algerian cities. On 1 December last year, president Ben Bella already alluded to this "social blight." "We are going to take care of them," he announced. "The FLN is going to undertake a large operation to break their necks. We will make the necessary arrangements to send them to camps in the Sahara where they will break stones."

Le Monde, 18-12-63.

A young twenty-one-year-old man, Ryszard Bucholz, was condemned to death on Saturday by the Warsaw court for having assaulted and seriously wounded a police officer together with two of his friends in Polish capital last October 12... The same day, Tadeusz Walcak, from the Wroclow region, was also sentenced to death for using a hunting rifle to shoot and seriously wound two police officers and an army officer who had surprised him as he was in the process of robbing a store. The same sentence was handed down for Julian Krol, a resident of Warsaw, who had already previously been indicted for armed assault, this time for having seriously wounded with a pistol a police officer who had asked to see his identity papers... The extreme severity of these judgments seems to be due to the wave of gang violence and juvenile delinquency now raging in Poland.

A.F.P., Warsaw, 18-11-63.

Three "sadistic hooligans" were shot to death according to a communiqué from the attorney general of the Republic of Bulgaria. The statement emphasizes the extremely brutal manner in which the three thugs "attracted by the bourgeois mode of life" had accomplished their crimes.

A.F.P., Sofia, 11-4-64.

Three hundred and fifty dead and more than eight hundred wounded: this is the outcome of the soccer game in Lima yesterday in which Peu faced Argentina. The match, which was part of the pre-Olympic South American tournament, suddenly degenerated into a riot when the Uruguayan referee, Mr. Eduardo Pazos, in front of the forty-five thousand people that had gathered in the national stadium, disqualified the goal scored against his own team by the Argentinean Moralès... In the stands, the tension mounted by the second. Shortly thereafter, in view of the increasingly threatening crowd, the referee decided to stop the match, thereby giving the victory to the Argentineans by a score of 1 to 0.

Breaking down all the fences, hundreds of people then rushed onto the field. The police, completely overwhelmed, threw tear-gas grenades and fired shots into the air...

The real tragedy began, however, when the gates of the stadium were violently burst open. This caused a terrible and murderous crush. Thousands of people rushed out into the streets, smashing and trampling women and children. This human tide demolished everything in its way: cars were overturned and then set on fire and a number of buildings close to the stadium were invaded. A tire factory and the "Jockey Club" were set on fire as were two other houses and three buses... Soon thereafter, in the center of the city, groups of crazed fanatics began to pelt store windows with stones and set cars on fire.

France-Soir, 26-5-64.

Translated by Thomas Y. Levin. From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/violence.html

Comments

photo of French maoist

From Internationale Situationniste #9 (August 1964).

Submitted by Fozzie on February 14, 2023

Now that Stalinism has split into several rival currents that express the interests of bureaucracies at very different stages of economic and political development (Khrushchev, Mao, Togliatti), the reciprocal accusation are sufficiently revealing — both about those who formulate them and about those they are directed against — to render seemingly impossible any reference to old positions (leftist, revisionist, and so on) of what was formerly the workers' movement because the minimum of cohesion necessary even within a mystification has been lost for too long. China wants atomic weapons, initiates a border conflict with Russia, vies with others for the destruction of Israel, flirts with Pakistan, France, and an Iraq that is simultaneously massacring those sympathetic to Moscow; most incredible, however, is that it has come to terms with the journal Révolution run by Vergès. Russia has already proven itself, as has Togliatti-Ercoli. The equilibrium between all these contenders is in the end the equilibrium of revolutionary falsification extablished for forty years and maintained by the common interests of the two camps. In the same fashion, the falsification was maintained during the era of monolithic Stalinism by the common interest of both the West and the East in proclaiming the East as the only known example of socialist revolution. The West manifested no weakness for the Stalinist revolution except perhaps the fact that it preferred it all the same to true revolution.

The new accusatory article published in Peking to denounce what it calls the "infamous deeds" of the Soviet leaders claims to be the first in a series that will be continued... "And at the critical moment when the Hungarian counter-revolutionaries had occupied Budapest, it (the leadership of the Russian Communist Party) had had the intention, for a while, to adopt a strategy of capitulation and to abandon socialist Hungary to the counter-revolution." If one is to believe the Chinese document it is thanks to the intervention of Peking that the situation in Hungary was rectified and the harder line adopted.

Le Monde, 7-9-63.

At the conference of Afro-Asian solidarity in Algiers... the Chinese diatribe met with the approval of well over one-third of the participants... However, everyone had noticed the absence of any reference to France, whose activity in Gabon was not cited among the recent instances of imperialism in Africa.

Le Monde, 25-3-64.

In an article published by the Communist weekly Rinascita, Mr. [Palmiro] Togliatti writes that Mr. [Pietro] Nenni claims that everything will change in this country [Italy] when the Socialists come to power. "This is a crass and primitive argument," he asserts, "We would go so far as to call such a vision of power 'Stalinist.'"

A.P., Rome, 16-11-63.

Translated by Thomas Levin. From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/choice.html

Comments

black and white photo of a priest delivering a sermon to leather clad bikers

From Internationale Situationniste #9 (August 1964).

Submitted by Fozzie on February 14, 2023

The Church, having fought for so long against "spectacles" even as it maintained monopoly on the social spectacle based on the divine otherworld, is struggling today for a place — limited but still important — within the spectacle of the century. It makes useful concessions, puts its pope-stars on center stage, and recuperates the lost architects of abandoned experiments in concentration-camp primitivism. The Priests' International is capable of making itself heard everywhere and in every sort of tone, be it as survivors of the inquisition or as parachutists into the wilderness of youth. This International also produces the frightening thalidomide thinkers of "red Christianity," Teilhardian mutants who can only live in incubators under a glass bell in the super-vacuum of contemporary leftist thought (see the examples in the sections "Words and Those Who Use Them"1 and "Critique in Shreds"2 ). It is surely obvious that there cannot have been any nonorthodox Christians since the end of those centuries during which the critique of the world had to be posed primarily in religious terms. Even before its ecumenical unification, all of Christianity is already unified on a theoretical level. The renunciation of the critique of religion is necessarily the culmination of the renunciation of all critique.

According to Mr. Simon Wiesenthal (the former director of the Documentation Center of the Association of Jews Persecuted by the Nazis) currently attending the Auschwitz trial, "the constructor of the cremation ovens in the camps is still alive in Austria and has recently built a church."

Le Monde, 7-3-64.

Burger met a guy in a bar who offered him a drink and got him to talk about problems in his life. When he finally discovered that he had been duped by a priest dressed to look like a normal person, Robert Burger killed him on the spot. The police are still puzzled as to the possible meaning of this exemplary act.

New York, 11-8-63.

It was a big surprise when the pope announced on 4 December 1963, during the closing ceremonies of the second session of Vatican II, that he planned to travel to Palestine . . . Some Catholic circles and the entire Protestant world deplored the fact that this trip had had, here and there, some unexpected and annoying aspects. Could it not have been possible to avoid the many disorderly demonstrations and the excessive American-style publicity campaign? And even if one acknowledges the importance of structuring the festivities in a popular fashion, could these not have been protected from the barrage of publicity technology? Too many photographers, too many filmmakers.

Le Monde, 20-6-64.

Ermanno Olmi plans to make a film about Pope John XXIII. The filming is set to start at the end of the summer. To show the pope, the director plans to use images from documentaries as he is reluctant to confide the role to an actor.

A.F.P., Rome, 9-5-64.

In France, the churches are careful to delay the religious services on Sundays so as not to overlap with the horse races . . . since between 10 and 12 a.m. three million Frenchmen are holding their betting tickets in hand.

Week-End, 22-2-64.

"God, who created our beaches, did not intend for them to become sites of orgies, where half-naked men and women in bikinis, lacking both morality and prudery, offend our children's innocent gaze, igniting the flames of their sexual instinct." So writes the Honorable Antonio, the bishop of the Canary Islands, in a thundering pastoral letter.

France-Soir, 10-5-62.

One of the nuns of the Holy Family who witnessed the massacre of the three oblate monks in the Kilembe mission arrived in Léopoldville Friday during the course of the afternoon. It was with tears in her eyes that she responded to the questions posed to her. "The villagers of Kilembe attacked the mission, armed with machetes, knives and guns. Some of them wore helmets painted red like those worn in Stanleyville by the Gizenguist forces. The monks were killed with the machetes. Following the departure of the villagers, we buried their remains."

Le Soir, 26-1-64.

Time is pressing . . . there are 142 churches to be built. This immense project is due solely to the generosity of the Parisians. May everyone also boldly add their efforts to those of our "church builders." Who could refuse to carry their stone to the cardinal's construction sites?

Appeal by Cardinal Feltin, on 23-4-64.

In numerous cities in central England and in the suburbs of London there were renewed skirmishes Saturday between the two rival gangs of English thugs: the "Mods" and the "Rockers." Nearly 100 arrests were made. On the other hand, the "Rockers" helped a pastor dressed in a leather jacket and motorcycle gear to distribute posters for the campaign against hunger; on Trafalgar square they received the blessing of brother Austen Williams, the vicar of the local church.

France-Soir, 26-5-64.

Translated by Thomas Y. Levin. From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/lastshow.html

Comments

an-elderly-parisian-reads-06-march-1953-in-paris-the-communique-announcing-death of soviet-leader

From Internationale Situationniste #9 (August 1964).

Submitted by Fozzie on February 15, 2023

An entire generation of leftist thinkers forced into retreat can only conceive of exhibiting itself as the caricatural image of submission. This takes one of two forms: either they offer themselves up to some promising reheated Stalinism (usually of a Chinese sort) in order to satisfy some religious masochism of the martyr delightfully ridiculed and rejected by what he worships and is not meant to understand. Otherwise they marvel at the splendors of the technocratic success offered them, a success all the more merited and quickly achieved the more subtle and detailed their critique of the dominant social order. In order to improve and render eternal its own operation, this dominant order will then extract the best part of the critique that will modify it step by step in both a revisionist and revolutionary manner. The wages of idiocy immediately exhibited by these managers of criticism, of a gimmick-critique, are themselves already the best victory of the oppressive and stultifying system. [Serge] Mallet, the eulogist of the Loire-Atlantic, is totally moved to discover in the most recent compilation of mush by André Gorz a number of banal truths that have been expressed for years by all the avant-garde movements — or perhaps simply by [John Kenneth] Galbraith. His technocratic pride then swells so far that he publicly praises participation in the leading economic spheres, and loudly faults the primitivism on the part of Engels who supposedly did not dare to acknowledge his well-being. And [Paul] Cardan, when he is not organizing votes for or against the meaning of the Realm of God, presents to his movement (whose mission is to "recommence the revolution") the same anti-Marxist and grossly falsifying platform that was proclaimed by the professors of philosophy in 1910.

Although the members of the A.F.P.C. [Franco-Chinese People's Association] cannot but hope for recognition from the representatives of China, they are sufficiently lucid not to get annoyed if and when the answer is "no." They are also big enough not to plunge into despair if Peking, like l'Humanité, drags them into the mud. What is most important for them is less the success of their little project of a Franco-Chinese People's Association, but rather some kind of Franco-Chinese association of some sort.

Claude Cadart, France-Observateur, 13-2-64.

Influenced by the theories of "group dynamics" in modern sociology, the directors of associations in Paris and Lyons perceive these as means of reducing the isolation of students that is particularly severe during the first year of study. By organizing themselves on their own, the students would be led to an awareness of their problems and also their demands . . . Congress has approved the creation of research centers, both on the national level and within local associations, that will bring to gather the members of the UNEF [National Association of French Students] and of the Support Organization of French Students for the purpose of "studying the possibility of rendering students more sensitive to their problems by means of a study carried out in the form of participant observers."

Le Monde, 13-4-63.

In 1958, Gorz still knew nothing about the reality of the world of today's worker or indeed of economic reality as such . . . Luckily for him, and for us, he had to earn his living, which he did by writing a financial column for a major weekly paper, something which, I imagine, did not correspond whit his initial aspirations.

But after all, if Engels had not been forced in 1844 to give up his life as a freelance civil intellectual in order to devote himself to "the birth of commerce," he would certainly never have gained the slightest understanding of political economy and would never have helped the young Hegelian, his friend Marx, discover it.

Philosophical analysis, once it has rediscovered the purposivity of labor relations, helps the political theorist free himself from false dilemmas of the sort "reform or revolution"...

To struggle against integration means to struggle "to get control of the data that form the basis of administrative politics, to anticipate the decisions of employers and propose at every step one's own alternative solution." Through such means one criticizes capitalist administration much more effectively than by any "protest speeches" . . . The struggle to create a new model of consumption, which starts by making capitalism pay the price of social facilities, strikes Gorz as one of the most important links in the chain of revolutionary reformism that he advocates, a reformism that aims at depriving capital little by little of its economic power.

Serge Mallet, France-Observateur, 21-5-64.

Editorial note: it is hardly necessary to point out that for almost all of the members of Socialisme ou Barbarie the "Realm of God" is effectively meaningless, but that they do not consider this a reason to prevent another comrade who is of a different opinion from expressing himself on this issue.

Socialisme ou Barbarie, no. 36, April 1964 (p.85).

The Marxist theory of history . . . is ultimately based on the hidden postulate of an essentially unchangeable human nature whose overriding motivation is an economic one.

Paul Cardan, Socialisme ou Barbarie, no. 37, July 1964.

Translated by Thomas Y, Levin. From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/inshreds.html

Comments

A policeman assesses the swimsuits of female bathers to see if they are moral.

From Internationale Situationniste #9 (August 1964).

Submitted by Fozzie on February 15, 2023

"The only primary material that has not been subjected to experiments in our experimental epoch is the freedom of spirit and of action" (I.S. #81 ). The unity of the world manifests itself in the unity of today's oppressive conditions: its crisis is also a unitary crisis. This fundamental unity of alienation is expressed in segregations, in divisions, in incoherences, and in exacting surveillance (to the extent that ideologies are becoming weaker and must "program" every detail of life in increasingly greater doses, the surveillance of art simultaneously and necessarily becomes part of the general surveillance of power). The coherence of freedom and the coherence of oppression both require as the first step the unmasking of all personal incoherence since the latter functions as the shelter and the technology of the enemies of freedom. One example: the five loves of the Chinese student clearly convey the message of "work-family-country," here supplemented with the love of the boss (called "the people"). Raymond Borde, for years the "good Stalinist" protected by the surrealists, has now de-Stalinized himself to such an extent that he has published a pamphlet (L'Extricable) that mixes surrealism and rather conventional literary humor with a few more contemporary remarks. Borde makes no secret of the fact that work and family make him vomit and that he places his hopes solely in the simultaneous realization of revolution and eroticism. The same Borde is simultaneously a militant supporter of China. So who is the idiot? Who draws conclusions from this?

The Cape Town tribunal has issued warrants for the arrest of a thirty-five-year-old white South African musician, Stanley Glasser, and a twenty-six-year-old mulatto singer, Maud Damons charged for infringing the Immorality Act that forbids sexual relations between whites and blacks or mulattos. The accused couple have fled into the British protectorate of Bechuanaland from which they will be able to reach Tanganyika.

Le Monde, 6-1-63.

As of recently, the youth in Denmark have their own bars, off-limits to adults, which are called "Pops," a variation on the English word "pub." One can drink cocktails there, but all of them consist primarily of milk. A discotheque plays the latest hits. The young Danes can hang out there from ten in the morning until ten at night. There are already three such establishments in Copenhagen, all of them extremely successful. Boys and girls meet there to talk, do their homework, and above all just enjoy being among themselves.

France-Soir, 6-5-64.

I am not only qualified to answer questions concerning industry and agriculture; I am also qualified to answer questions about culture because I am the president of the Republic and the general secretary of the Communist League.

Tito, Nasa Stempa, February 1963.

The Soviet literary press recently had to protest against the invocation of Law No. 273 against a would-be [Eugene] Yevtushenko, the poet [Joseph] Brodsky, who was accused of leading a bohemian life. The law was adopted in 1961 by the Supreme Soviet in order to combat social parasitism and idleness.

L'Express, 25-6-64.

The proposition to replace the current identity card (incorrectly called a "passport" as it is only valid within the USSR) with a work ledger, encountered a wide response in the Soviet press, which has republished a number of readers' letters supporting the project. The new work ledger, which has become a "work passport" that everyone will have to carry with them, will contain much more detailed information than the older card. This data will include the bearer's diplomas, the stages of his career as a worker, his movements from one firm to another, his moral and professional conduct, his "social activities" during his leisure time, etc.

Such discrimination seems to have met with the sincere approval of an important category of readers who write to newspapers: elderly and middle aged workers, particularly those who have been working for a long time in the same firm. For them the project has its advantages. According to the commentaries in the press those workers with good passports would have priority over others for housing, the best vacations, the best social security rates, in trials and other sorts of disputes, and so on. A reader of Troud writes: "It would not be a bad idea for engaged women to cast a glance at the work passport of their future husbands. Good workers also make good heads of families."

France-Observateur, 12-3-64.

A number of these activities are not essentially different from those classically organized by the administrative machinery of the Komsomol. According to the Soviet press, they are characterized by the fact that the young "communards" themselves determine the rules. Moreover, the "young communard clubs" organize "open heart meetings" where they discuss the attitude of each of the participants toward the group...

These initial steps toward self-government are somewhat reminiscent — at least superficially — of certain explorations in the same direction undertaken by Western "psychosociologists."

France-Observateur, 4-6-64.

A Chinese peasant who had himself sterilized "in order devote all his energies toward the construction of socialism in China," was warmly congratulated in public by Mr. Chou En-lai — so reports the 1 September issue of the bimonthly Jeunesse communiste, the organ of the League of Young Communists . . . In general both Jeunesse communiste and Le journal de la jeunesse, the other organ of the League of Young Communists, devote a rather considerable amount of space to the issue of birth control and advise their readers who absolutely do not want to remain single to get married as late as possible . . . The League of Young Communists also publishes large numbers of letters from young people of both sexes announcing their decision to remain single and chaste.

Le Monde, 18-9-63.

Moral, civic, and political education is irregular in primary schools. It arises from the example of the teachers, from the lifestyle of the school (that is, an environment devoid of punishment), from a sort of religion of work through which politeness and morality are continuously conveyed by a without any explicit lessons on the subject. The task of the primary school teacher is to instil in a practical manner "the five loves": love of the people, of the country, of work, of national property, and of parents.

Désiré Tits, Lettre de Chine (distributed by the Belgium-China Association, 1963).

The Minister of the Interior has asked the police chiefs to remind the mayors that they do not have the right to authorize the wearing of the "monokini." The bathing suit, Mr. Frey went on to say, constituted a public offense against the sense of decency, punishable according to article 330 of the penal code. Consequently, the police chiefs must employ the services of the police so that the women who wear this bathing suit in public places are prosecuted.

Le Monde, 25-7-64.

Translated by Thomas Y Levin. From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/sketch.html

Comments

Zengakuren protestor challenges a riot cop with a wooden pole

A selction of quotes from the media about uprisings, mutinies and rebellions. From Internationale Situationniste #9 (August 1964).

Submitted by Fozzie on February 16, 2023

The refusal of life in its present arrangement characterizes, to different degrees, the blacks in Africa and the rebellious youth "without a cause" in Scandinavia; the Austrian miners who have effectively been on strike almost continuously for two years, and the Czechoslovakian workers. The "festive atmosphere" of the strike in Lagos was also evident in January 1961 in southern Belgium or in Budapest. Everywhere one hears posed the obscure question of a new revolutionary organisation that has a sufficient grasp of the dominant society for it to be able to function effectively and at all levels against the dominant society: to be able to detourn it in its entirety without reproducing it in any form, "a sunrise that, in a flash, depicts all at once the form of the new world."

A commando of young Argentine Communists made a breakthrough in the realm of pirate broadcasting: the first pirating of an electronic billboard advertisement! Armed with revolvers, five young men burst into the offices of the Argentine electronic billboard company yesterday and forced the operators to broadcast Communist propaganda in the heart of downtown Buenos Aires.

Paris-Presse, 10-1-63.

Three young French students, accused of acts of terrorism, were condemned by a military tribunal this Thursday in Madrid to prison terms ranging from fifteen years and one day to thirty years. The young Frenchmen had been arrested last April. Mr Alain Pecunia, a seventeen-year-old graduate and former student at the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly, was sentenced to two prison terms of twelve years and one day each for having placed a small bomb on the boat Ciudad-de-Ibiza in Barcelona. Bernard Ferry, a twenty-year-old student at the art academy in Aubervilliers, was sentenced to thirty years in prison for having placed an explosive in front of the airline offices of Iberia in Valencia, slightly injuring two children. Guy Batous, a twenty-three-year-old student of philosophy from Villefranche-sur-Saône, who had been arrested in Madrid and found to be in possession of a bomb, was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

Le Monde, 14-8-63.

A detachment of two hundred marine soldiers had taken up position toady in front of the Union of Metalworkers in Rio de Janeiro in order to evict 1500 mutinous sailors and leading seamen. After the minute of silence that followed their arrival, the leader of the "mutineers," a small, twenty-five-year-old sailor, called out from the top of the barricades: "Comrades, I know you. I know your greatest desire is to come and join us." He then gave a signal with his hand and the 1500 rebels began to sing as a chorus "The White Swan," the national marine anthem. One soldier with a very striking northeastern appearance broke ranks, undid his belt, threw down his weapons, and entered the building. One hundred and ninety-four of his colleagues went on to repeat the gesture. At this point is became clear that the rebellion of the sailors would have grave consequences.

Le Monde, 3-4-64.

Since last Spring Zengakuren has organized a series of demonstrations against the stationing in Japanese ports of American atomic submarines armed with Polaris missiles. The protests were also directed at the same time against the Japanese government, which had decided to tolerate the Polaris missiles as part of a strategy aimed at providing Japan with nuclear arms. One of the most serious difficulties of this struggle stems from the fact that the Japanese Communist party tries to seize every opportunity to transform the struggle into an anti-American movement, which is to say a nationalist and patriotic campaign against "the occupation and the domination of Japan by the United States."

Another difflculty arises from the worker's movement, whose leadership, controlled as it is by the Socialist party, always transforms the objectives of other protests into the current struggles of the workers. Despite these difficulties, demonstrations were held throughout Japan by the students of Zengakuren, who had also protested against the Japanese-Korean negotiations, The Chinese preparations for a nuclear explosion and the French experiments in Tahiti . . . On 13 September in Tokyo, a few hundred students protested in front of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Toru Tagaki, the vice-president of Zengakuren, was arrested during the demonstration.

Zenshin (International Edition), November 1963.

In the Congo, Hell's Angel types are burning the missions . . . These groups have from three to seventy members whose ages range from fourteen to twenty. They are dressed in shorts and are armed with bow and arrows, machetes, and sometimes spears. They sleep during the day in the forest and meet at twilight at a previously arranged point. They move around by foot, running at moderate speeds, and can strike at places very distant from each other. Each group has its own president, sectretary, and leading officer . . . Their leader, Pierre Mulele, is said to have studied guerilla warfare in Egypt and China. He used ot be close to Patrice Lumumba, the head of the Congolese government who was assassinated in 1961. The group of youths are profoundly superstitious. They speal constantly of miniature airplanes in which their leaders travel at night and which can instantaneously transport a man from one location to another. The groups can often cover a distance of thirty to fifty kilometers in one night. They largely exaggerate their mobility . . . Amongst themselves, they call each other "comrade," and are continuously proclaiming their own honesty: "We are not thieves" . . . This seems to merit comparison with the discomfort that afflicts youths under twenty all over the world.

Observer, 19-4-64.

On the first of May students demonstrated in Prague . . . The events that took place of Friday were the result, according to official accounts, of significant factors and were not due to politics. Some people with nothing to do , "hooligans," wanted to sing, and honest passersby, having overheard the noise, observed them with curiosity or expressed their reprobation. The dispatches of Western press agencies, on the other hand, claim that the demonstrations were directed by college and high school students who were protesting against party politics . . . The Czechoslovak press aganecy C.T.K. confirmed that the incidents had taken place but did everything it could to play down the importance: ". . . At the two sites mentioned, the crowd did not exceed 1500 people. The security forces were able to re-establish order with the help of the spectators. A total of thirty-one demonstrators were arrested, among them five young women."

Le Monde, 5-5-64.

Particularly in Lagos there reigned a very curious atmosphere, very different from the atmosphere of a European city on strike. The dominant emotion was one of joy, a feeling of festivity. The employees that earn seven pounds a month (a police dog costs fifteen pounds) discovered all that they were capable of. This gave them such a sense of satisfaction that the entire movement took place in an extraordinarily good mood . . .

E.-R. Braundi, France-Observateur, 9-7-64.


The blacks are getting organized on their own. According to a detective, certain rioters are carrying small portable radio transmitters that enable them to convey information about the movements of the police forces. M. Epton, president of the Harlem "defense council" that was created two weeks ago, revealed that his organization is divided into cells. This grid pattern is designed to "help people defend themselves against the police." The "defense council" had posters printed on which the phrase "Wanted for Murder" is placed below a photograph of the police officer Gilligan who recently shot a young black man.

Le Monde, 26-7-64.

Monkey skin, duck feathers, palm leaves and fake flowers taken from cemeteries seem to me to constitute the principle elements of the uniform of the Mulelists. Fantasy is not excluded, however, and so Brillo pads, typewriter ribbons, and Christmas tree balls can also make for elegant finery . . .

At this moment, one of the "Simbas" [simba: Swahili, "lion"] standing guard spies two Europeans taking a bit of fresh air on the second floor balcony. He shouts at them in French, carried away by his own power:

"Don't you know that you have been summoned? All right then, come down here or else I'll shoot! Brothers, this is the revolution!"

The two whites obey. We all look at each other: the light-hearted tone of an urbane conversation which we had effected had suddenly peeled off like varnish, leaving behind only a permanent, insidious unease similar to a depression.

"They are playing," someone tells me sadly, "they are constantly playing, even when they kill."

Y.-G. Bergès, "8 Jours chez les étranges rebelles du Congo," France-Soir, 4-8-64.

Translated by Thomas Y. Levin. From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/hegel.html

Attachments

Comments

Poster for Alain Resnais film Je t'aime, je t'aime

The SI's criticisms of the films of Alain Resnais and the journal Planète. From Internationale Situationniste #9 (August 1964).

Submitted by Fozzie on February 17, 2023

“This dose of pretentious errors obliges us to make a re-examination of [Alain] Resnais… Despite the references he made to André Breton around the time of the release of Hiroshima [mon amour], Resnais has shown his stature by depending on [Alain] Robbe-Grillet… Robbe-Grillet, arrived much too late to destroy the novel, has destroyed Resnais… With the fall of Resnais into the most redundant and shabbiest of spectacles, one is forced to conclude… there is no longer a modern artist conceivable outside of us.”

Michèle Bernstein, Situationist International #7, April 19621

“I totally like the first film entirely conceived and realized by Alain [Robbe-Grillet]. And it is perfectly vain to oppose it to [L’Année dernière à] Marienbad, or to suggest that L’Immortelle was a sort of by-product of Marienbad… Whatever may be said about L’Immortelle, it is a film and can only be a film. Robbe-Grillet will realize other films, and in particular with me.”

Alain Resnais, L’Express, 4 April 1962

“If you read Planète aloud, your breath will stink!”

Situationist International #7, April 1962

“He is the uncontested and incontestable leader of the New Wave… this boy, who has passed his 40th year but still looks like an eternal student, makes his films unobtrusively, by respecting the scenarios that he demands from writers he esteems… This Harry Dickson will live on the screen in adventures more delirious than Fantomas or Rocambole.2 ‘But there will be no winking at the public,’ says the serious Resnais. He will surely make us penetrate into the domain of the dream and surrealism. Frédéric de Tovarniki [sic], journalist at the futuristic journal Planète, works on the scenario.3 It is right that science-fiction will furnish the theme of Resnais’ next film, Je t’aime, je t’aime.4 The author is Jacques Sternberg, science fiction novelist and journalist at the same journal Planète.”5

France-Soir, 23 January 1963

First published in Internationale Situationniste #9, August 1964, p. 23. Translated from the French by Anthony Hayes, June 2013. Thanks to Miranda Lello for proofing. Translator's notes below.

From https://thesinisterquarter.wordpress.com/2013/06/11/well-said-s-i/

  • 1The translation of this passage, a quote of Bernstein’s article Sunset Boulevard from I.S. no. 7, is a slightly amended version of the translation made by NOT BORED! In Bernstein’s article there is a reference to the earlier Situationist article Cinema After Alain Resnais, in which Resnais was more favourably treated by the S.I. It is in the movement from his 1959 collaboration with Marguerite Duras to his 1961 collaboration with Alain Robbe-Grillet that Bernstein tracks the collapse of Resnais’ insight into both art and the possibility of artistic creation in capitalist societies. Unlike Resnais, Robbe-Grillet had never been considered capable of anything more than the conventional simulation of earlier artistic avant-gardist production – for an earlier Situationist perspective on him see Guy Debord’s article from 1957: One More Try if you Want to be Situationists (the SI In and Against Decomposition.
  • 2Harry Dickson was a fictional character, the ‘American Sherlock Holmes’ who appeared in a series of pulp adventures. Originating in Germany in 1907, Dickson is perhaps best known in his French iteration, appearing in over 170 stories between 1929 and 1938.
  • 3In the 1960s Resnais and Towarnicki tried and failed to develop a film version of Harry Dickson. The scenario from this venture was published in 2007 by Éditions Capricci as Les aventures de Harry Dickson: Scénario de Frederic de Towarnicki pour un film (non réalisé) d’Alain Resnais.
  • 4Je t’aime, je t’aime, written by Sternberg and Resnais, and directed by Resnais, was released in 1968.
  • 5The journal Planète often incurred the criticism of the S.I. For instance there is the brief parody of Planète from I.S. no. 7 whose title is quoted in this article, i.e. ‘If you read Planète aloud, your breath will stink!’ (we will endeavor to publish a translation of this soon). Planète, a magazine that combined science fiction stories with articles on speculative ‘science’, is perhaps the progenitor of such English language magazines as Omni and Wired, and is indeed the forerunner of the ideological function of such magazines. In their article Ideologies, Classes, and the Domination of Nature from I.S. no. 8, the Situationists compared Planète’s function to that of the journal Arguments. Whereas Arguments, under the guise of being a journal of ‘eclectic’ and ‘critical’ Marxist theory, was criticized for producing ‘the futile questioning of pure speculation’ (and thus played an important role in the spectacle of criticism), Planète was criticized for haranguing ‘ordinary people with the message that henceforth everything must be changed — while at the same time taking for granted 99% of the life really lived in our era.’ Thus the similarity of function – both journals were mouthpieces of the ideology of ‘progressive’ change (a central tenant of bourgeois ideology in its ‘free market’ and ‘state capitalist’ variants), whilst operating within and by virtue of the parameters of the bourgeois market. Their function as commodities that offered non-threatening change was central to the Situationist critique of them. Thus it was this appearance of modernity that was effectively non-threatening vis-à-vis capitalist modernity that was most egregious in the eyes of the Situationists, whose alternative was encapsulated in their conception of a coherent revolutionary project. Such an appearance would soon be shifted into the spectacle of post-modernism; the babble of ultra-modern theoretical radicalism that apparently interrogated everything all the better to hide the unitary nature of capitalist exploitation and alienation.

Comments

From Internationale Situationniste #9 (August 1964).

Submitted by libcom on September 7, 2005

1. What does the word "situationist" mean?

It denotes an activity aimed at creating situations, as opposed to passively recognizing them in academic or other separate terms. At all levels of social practice or individual history. We replace existential passivity with the construction of moments of life, and doubt with playful affirmation. Up till now philosophers and artists have only interpreted situations; the point now is to transform them. Since human beings are molded by the situations they go through, it is essential to create human situations. Since individuals are defined by their situation, they need the power to create situations worthy of their desires. This is the perspective in which poetry (communication fulfilled in concrete situations), the appropriation of nature, and complete social liberation must all merge and be realized. Our era is going to replace the fixed frontier of the extreme situations that phenomenology has limited itself to describing with the practical creation of situations; it is going to continually shift this frontier with the development of our realization. We want a phenomeno-praxis. We have no doubt that this will be the first banality of the movement toward the liberation that is now possible.What situations are to be transformed? At different levels it could be the whole planet, or an era (a civilization in Burckhardt's sense, for example), or a moment of individual life. On with the show! It is only in this way that the values of past culture and the hopes of realizing reason in history can find their true fulfillment. Everything else is in decay. The term situationist in the SI's sense is the total opposite of the current usage in Portugal, where "situationists" refer to supporters of the existing situation (i.e. supporters of Salazar's dictatorship).

2. Is the Situationist International a political movement?

The words "political movement" today connote the specialized activity of group and party bosses who derive the oppressive force of their future power from the organized passivity of their militants. The SI wants nothing to do with any form of hierarchical power whatsoever. The SI is neither a political movement nor a sociology of political mystification. The SI aims to represent the highest degree of international revolutionary consciousness. This is why it strives to illuminate and coordinate the gestures of refusal and the signs of creativity that are defining the new contours of the proletariat, the irreducible desire for freedom. Centered on the spontaneity of the masses, such activity is undeniably "political" in the sense that those rebellious masses are themselves political. Whenever new radical currents appear -- as recently in Japan (the extremist wing of the Zengakuren), in the Congo, and in the Spanish underground1 -- the SI gives them critical support and thereby aids them practically. But in contrast to all the "transitional programs" of specialized politics, the SI insists on a permanent revolution of everyday life.

3. Is the SI an artistic movement?

A large part of the situationist critique of consumer society consists in showing to what extent contemporary artists, by abandoning the richness of supersession implicitly present (though not fully realized) in the 1910-1925 period, have condemned themselves to doing art as one does business. Since that time artistic movements have only been imaginary repercussions from an explosion that never took place, an explosion that threatened and still threatens the structures of this society. The SI's awareness of this abandonment and of its contradictory implications (emptiness and a desire to return to the initial violence) makes the SI the only movement able, by incorporating the survival of art into the art of life, to speak to the project of the authentic artist. We are artists only insofar as we are no longer artists: we come to fulfill art.

4. Is the SI an expression of nihilism?

The SI refuses the role that would be readily granted it in the spectacle of decomposition. The supersession of nihilism is reached by way of the decomposition of the spectacle; which is precisely what the SI is working on. Whatever is elaborated and constructed outside such a perspective will collapse of its own weight without needing any help from the SI. But it is also true that everywhere in consumer society wastelands of spontaneous collapse are offering a terrain of experimentation for new values that the SI cannot do without. We can build only on the ruins of the spectacle. Moreover, the fully justified anticipation of a total destruction precludes any construction that is not carried out in the perspective of the totality.

5. Are the situationist positions utopian?

Reality is superseding utopia. There is no longer any point in projecting imaginary bridges between the wealth of present technological potentials and the poverty of their use by the rulers of every variety. We want to put the material equipment at the service of everyone's creativity, as the masses themselves always strive to do in revolutionary situations. It's simply a matter of coordination or tactics. Everything we deal with is realizable, either immediately or in the short term, once our methods of research and activity begin to be put in practice.

6. Do you consider it necessary to call yourselves "situationists"?

In the existing order, where things take the place of people, any label is compromising. The one we have chosen, however, embodies its own critique, in that it is automatically opposed any "situationism," the label that others would like to saddle us with. Moreover, it will disappear when all of us have become fully situationist and are no longer proletarians struggling for the end of the proletariat. For the moment, however ridiculous a label may be, ours has the merit of drawing a sharp line between the previous incoherence and a new rigorousness. Such incisiveness is just what has been most lacking in the thought of the last few decades.

7. What is original about the situationists considered as a distinct group?

It seems to us that three notable points justify the importance that we attribute to ourselves as an organized group of theorists and experimenters. First, we are developing for the first time, from a revolutionary perspective, a new, coherent critique of this society as it is developing now. This critique is deeply anchored in the culture and art of our time, which can in fact be truly grasped only by means of such a critique (this work is obviously a long way from completion). Second, we make a practice of breaking completely and definitively with all those who oblige us to do so, and in many cases with anyone else who remains in solidarity with them. Such polarization is vital in a time when the diverse forms of resignation are so subtly intertwined and interdependent. Third, we are initiating a new style of relation with our "partisans": we absolutely refuse disciples. We are interested only in participation at the highest level, and in setting autonomous people loose in the world.

8. Why don't people talk about the SI?

The SI is talked about often enough among the specialized owners of decomposing modern thought; but they write about it very little. In the broadest sense this is because we refuse the term "situationism," which would be the only pigeonhole enabling us to be introduced into the reigning spectacle, incorporated in the form of a doctrine petrified against us, in the form of an ideology in Marx's sense. It is natural that the spectacle we reject rejects us in turn. Situationists are more readily discussed as individuals in an effort to separate them from the collective contestation, although this collective contestation is the only thing that makes them "interesting" individuals. Situationists are talked about the moment they cease to be situationists (as with the rival varieties of "Nashism" in several countries, whose only common claim to fame is that they lyingly pretend to have some sort of relationship with the SI). The spectacle's watchdogs appropriate fragments of situationist theory without acknowledgment in order to turn it against us. It is quite natural that they get ideas from us in their struggle for the survival of the spectacle. But they have to conceal their source, not merely to protect their reputation for originality from charges of plagiarism, but because this source implies the broader, coherent context of these "ideas." Moreover, many hesitant intellectuals do not dare to speak openly of the SI because to speak of it entails taking a minimum position -- saying what one rejects of it and what one accepts of it. Many of them believe, quite mistakenly, that to feign ignorance of it in the meantime will suffice to clear them of responsibility later.

9. What support do you give to the revolutionary movement?

Unfortunately there isn't one. The society certainly contains contradictions and is undergoing changes; this is what, in continually new ways, is making revolutionary activity possible and necessary. But such activity no longer exists -- or does not yet exist -- in the form of an organized movement. It is therefore not a matter of "supporting" such a movement, but of creating it: of inseparably defining it and experimenting with it. Admitting that there is no revolutionary movement is the first precondition for developing such a movement. Anything else is a ridiculous patching up of the past.

10. Are you Marxists?

Just as much as Marx was when he said, "I am not a Marxist."

11. Is there a relation between your theories and your actual way of life?

Our theories are nothing other than the theory of our real life and of the possibilities experienced or perceived in it. As fragmented as the available terrains of activity may be for the moment, we make the most of them. We treat enemies as enemies, a first step we recommend to everyone as an accelerated apprenticeship in learning how to think. It also goes without saying that we unconditionally support all forms of liberated behavior, everything that the bourgeois and bureaucratic scum call debauchery. It is obviously out of the question that we should pave the way for the revolution of everyday life with asceticism.

12. Are the situationists in the vanguard of leisure society?

Leisure society is an appearance that veils a particular type of production/consumption of social space-time. If the time of productive work in the strict sense is reduced, the reserve army of industrial life works in consumption. Everyone is successively worker and raw material in the industry of vacations, of leisure, of spectacles. Present work is the alpha and omega of present life. The organization of consumption plus the organization of leisure must exactly counterbalance the organization of work. "Free time" is a most ironic quantity in the context of the flow of a prefabricated time. Alienated work can only produce alienated leisure, for the idle (increasingly, in fact, merely semi-idle) elite as well as for the masses who are obtaining access to momentary leisure. No lead shielding can insulate either a fragment of time or the entire time of a fragment of society from the radiation of alienated labor -- if for no other reason than the fact that it is that labor which shapes the totality of products and of social life in its own image.

13. Who finances you?

We have never been able to be financed except, in a very precarious manner, by working in the present cultural economy. This employment is subject to this contradiction: we have such creative abilities that we can be virtually assured of "success" in any field; yet we have such a rigorous insistence on independence and complete consistency between our project and each of our present creations (see our definition of antisituationist artistic production) that we are almost totally unacceptable to the dominant cultural organization, even in the most secondary activities. The state of our resources follows from these conditions. In this connection, see what we wrote in issue #8 of this journal (p.26) about "the capital that is never lacking for Nashist enterprises" and, in contrast, our conditions (on the last page of this issue).2

14. How many of you are there?

A few more than the original guerrilla nucleus in the Sierra Madre, but with fewer weapons. A few less than the delegates in London in 1864 who founded the International Working Men's Association, but with a more coherent program. As unyielding as the Greeks at Thermopylae ("Passerby, go tell them at Lacedaemon..."), but with a brighter future.

15. What value can you attribute to a questionnaire? To this one?

Questionnaires are an obvious form of the pseudodialogue that is becoming obsessively used in all the psychotechniques of integration into the spectacle so as to elicit people's happy acceptance of passivity under the crude guise of "participation" and pseudoactivity. Taking such an incoherent, reified form of questioning as a point of departure, however, enables us to express precise positions. These positions are not really "answers," because they don't stick to the questions; they reply by posing new questions that supersede the old ones. Thus, real dialogue could begin after these responses. In the present questionnaire all the questions are false; our responses, however, are true.

SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL (1964)

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

  • 1See, for example, the SI's critique of the Spanish Acción Comunista Comunista group in "Contribution au programme des conseils ouvriers en Espagne" (Internationale Situationniste #10, pp. 27-32).
  • 2The reference is to Jørgen Nash and others who had recently been excluded from the SI and who were trying to cash in on the situationists' notoriety by producing "situationist art" and founding a "Second Situationist International" (see The Counter-Situationist Campaign in Various Countries). As for the situationists' own conditions, they stated that they had no objection to publishers, film producers, patrons, etc., interested in financing situationist projects, whether disinterestedly or in the hope of making profits, as long as it was understood that the situationists would retain total control over the form and content of the projects. Regarding the publication of radical texts, Internationale Situationniste #10 (p. 70) has the following note: "It is clear that there are presently only four possible types of publishing: state-bureaucratic; bourgeois semicompetitive (though subject to a tendency toward economic concentration); independent (wherever radical theory can be legally self-published); and clandestine. The SI -- and any critical current anywhere -- uses and will continue to use the latter two methods; it may in many cases use the second one (to obtain a qualitatively different level of distribution) because of the contradictions left open by anarchic competition and the lack of enforced ideological orthodoxy; and it is of course totally incompatible only with the first one. The reason is very simple: the competitive bourgeois type of publishing does not claim to guarantee any consistency between itself and its different authors; the authors are not responsible for a publishing firm's operation and, conversely, the publisher has no direct responsibility for their life or ideas. Only state-bureaucratic publishing (or that of parties representing such a bureaucracy in formation) is in complete solidarity with its authors: it has to endorse its authors in everything and its authors also have to endorse it. Thus it represents a double impossibility for any revolutionary expression."

Comments

newspaper adevert text "“controlled froth”  With the controlled froth of PAX-OMATIC, more of  the froth-overflow deteriorates your machine."

From Internationale Situationniste #9 (August 1964).

Submitted by Fozzie on February 17, 2023

“controlled froth”

With the controlled froth of PAX-OMATIC, more of

the froth-overflow deteriorates your machine.

The extracts which follow are a good example – inscribed in the ridiculous jargon of the specialists of conditioning and [hierarchical] power – of attempts to reverse our perspectives, and sometimes even our formulas.1 The qualitative is very evidently missing here! All the psycho-technique of stupidity applied here to recuperate the refuse of the post-Dadaist era (or of a post-Pirandellian theatre).2 It is about integrating people into the system of submission at all costs, which could be made via the demand for an abstract “participation” which does not deny the spectacle but supports it. Thus, for the delicate, we can foresee a made-to-measure integration in the psychodramas3 of the pasteurised political neo-organisation (Socialisme ou Barbarie, this year), or in the dehydrated artistic scandal.4 The modern spectacle never ceases to create new employment: the greatest refinement of participation in the spectacle is actually offered by these cretins who stage the spectacle of participation.

“The Play-Girls constitutes a semi-improvised spectacle of a quite singular interest.5 Due to a very flexible scenario, Marc’O, author and director, manages to play an active role to the spectators through [the] intrusion into their ranks of a huge cake that is offered by the actors.”

Marc Pierret, France-Observateur,

30 January 1964.6

“It is not the place, here and now, to look for the sufficient conditions to found a truly revolutionary theatre. Nor if it would still be theatre, nor how to show today the plays which are not made tasteless by their preserved cultural setting…

“The institutional directionality of spectacles is the true problem, and there are few chances that it will be resolved through setting out from the simple use of formal avant-garde processes or not…

“The spectacles of participation, on an experimental basis, can be organised from the present by teams made up of dramaturges, certainly, but also psycho-sociologists, artists having an experience of ‘happenings’, comedians or anyone looking to make the theatre the place of a living experience and emancipation.”

Marc Pierret, France-Observateur,

5 March 1964.

“The question of self-management is at the centre of the ideological problematic of the U.N.E.F.7 In the course of these debates, it will act to clarify the actual meaning of the relation actor-spectator and from there found the critique in the perspective of a true dis-alienation.

“The question will be in effect of knowing if the cultural politics of the U.N.E.F. will consist of continuing to distribute tickets at a reduced rate permitting students to access use of the theatre, or if it will orient itself on the contrary toward initiatives in the style of some extremely passionate investigations [recherches] which have been undertaken by the students of Nice concerning a theatre of managed participation with the mise-en-scène elaborated collectively, the representation of the spectacle only constituting itself in the final result before the commencement of another work of collective elucidation.

“Second [piece of] important news: the First Conference of Psychodrama will take place at the Faculty of Medicine from the 31st of August to the 3rd of September under the honorary presidency of [Jacob L.] Moreno, who in the United States, well before the war, was the first psychodramatist. Self-management and psychodrama appears to me to be the most solid platform serving to set out an elaboration of revolutionary dramaturgy.”

Marc Pierret, France-Observateur,

26 March 1964.

MR. GEORGES

LAPASSADE

IS A CUNT8

First published in Internationale Situationniste #9, August 1964, pp. 28-29. Translated from the French by Anthony Hayes, May 2013. Thanks to Alastair Hemmens for help with the translation. Translator's notes below. From https://thesinisterquarter.wordpress.com/2013/05/26/controlled-froth/

  • 1I have inserted ‘[hierarchical]’ here in translating ‘le pouvoir’. The Situationist International (S.I.) distinguished between the alienated ‘hierarchical power’ of the capitalist spectacle and the ‘power’ or capacities of people, which become alienated as hierarchical power under conditions of capitalist social relations. They most often used the noun, ‘le pouvoir’, to denoted ‘hierarchical power’, whereas the often used the verb ‘pouvoir’ to denote the general and historically conditioned ‘powers’ of people to act and transform their world and conditions of existence. The S.I.’s use of these terms is both a recovery, and their own formalisation, of Marx’s conception of alienation (see in particular The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844). More on this distinction can be found here: Power (Notes toward a Situationist Dictionary).
  • 2‘Psychotechique’, also known as ‘theatre language’, is a theatrical rehearsal method developed by Constantin Stanislavsky, the inventor of ‘method acting.’ Also see footnote 3 below.
  • 3‘Psychodrama’ is a theatrically influenced psycho-therapeutic technique developed by Jacob L. Moreno. However the S.I. appears to also be using ‘psychodrama’ ironically, with reference to the film and literary criticisms which speak of the ‘psychodramas of narratives’ which focus on the so-called psychological events and developments of characters. No doubt words such as ‘psychodrama’, ‘psycho-sociologists’ and ‘revolutionary dramaturgy’ in the hands of Marc Pierret, constitute some of ‘the ridiculous jargon of the specialists of conditioning and [hierarchical] power’ the S.I. refer to.
  • 4‘the psychodramas of […] Socialisme ou Barbarie’ in 1964. In 1963 the Socialisme ou Barbarie group split, between the ‘modernists’ led by Cornelius Castoriadis (then known under the pseudonym Paul Cardan), and the more ‘orthodox’ Marxists grouped around the magazine Pouvoir Ouvrier. Castoriadis’ group essentially abandoned any attachment to Marx’s conception of class struggle as the constitutive antagonism of capitalist societies; indeed Castoriadis went further, blaming Marx for the sins of Marxism, something roundly condemned by the S.I. – see, in particular, the following entries from the 9th number of their journal: Now, the S.I., and The Longest Months. From the latter article: “Since the split of 1963, the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie has struggled to follow in the footsteps of Arguments (cf. ‘We know that your subscription to Arguments testifies to similar preoccupations,’ in the circular of 20 January 1964 addressed by the new editorial committee to the public they want to recover.) But this comes too late, and it is clearly weaker and insignificant. Politically, it is the expression of the furthest left and most fanciful fringe of those managers and mid-level functionaries of the Left who want to have a revolutionary theory of their actual career in society, and also the overtly social career of such a ‘revolutionary theory.’ But whereas [Serge] Mallet and [André] Gorz are professionals at this sort of activity, the people at Socialisme ou Barbarie are visibly amateurs: a relaxing weekend for managers whose real career is elsewhere. The minority which split in fidelity with Marxism accepted the debate on the most false terrain: the ‘modern’ was the privilege of the Cardanists [i.e. followers of Cornelius Castoriadis], and ‘revolution’ the banner of the minority. But in fact, these notions are represented by neither camp, because there cannot be revolution without the modern or modern thought without the reinvention of revolutionary critique. The minority (Pouvoir Ouvrier) is so detached from the trivialities of the era that it has not judged it useful to explain the meaning of the dissolution of Socialisme ou Barbarie, a phenomenon too modern for its taste—not even to inform its few readers (no matter how fervent) of workers’ democracy. In Socialisme ou Barbarie there remains only a few traces of the useful theoretical work made on a number of points over the years. All is drowned in an extraordinary atmosphere of escalating resignation, as everyone rushes to abandon all critical thought. In this shipwreck it seems that the captain alone can spout off euphorically. [Paul] Cardan [i.e. Cornelius Castoriadis], after fifteen years of useless effort to get the dialectic— if only for a brief instant —decides that it is a fruit too immature, and proclaims that ‘we cannot be immediately given a dialectic, for a dialectic postulates the rationality of the world and of history, and this rationality is problematic, as theory and as practice.’ (Socialisme ou Barbarie, no 37, page 27). From this, he can attach with the greatest pride his long disguised inability to grasp the play of contradictions: ‘At the base of this (Marxist) theory of history, there is woven profoundly and contradictorily a philosophy of history, itself contradictory, as will be seen.’ Setting out from such a good foundation one will see everything; and even [Georges] Lapassade can direct psychodramatically such an avant-garde of revolutionary ‘questioning.’” (Note that my translation of this passage differs markedly from Reuben Keehan’s linked above).
  • 5Les Playsgirls, a play written by Marc’O, aka Marc-Gilbert Guillaumin, onetime collaborator of Isidore Isou’s Lettrist movement between 1950 and 1953.
  • 6Marc Pierret, journalist and collaborator with Georges Lapassade and Socialism ou Barbarie. See Guy Debord, letter To René Lourau, 13 January 1966.
  • 7U.N.E.F. L’Union Nationale des Etudiants de France. The National Union of French Students, is a union which represents French undergraduate university students. Notably the S.I. played a decisive role two years later in the Strasbourg university students’ diversion of funds from the local branch of the U.N.E.F. in order to produce the pamphlet On the Poverty of Student Life
  • 8Georges Lapassade was a Marxist academic and collaborator with Arguments – a journal boycotted by the S.I. from early 1961. In particular he was an advocate of ‘participatory’ spectacles. Note the reference to Lapassade in the quote reproduced in footnote 4 above. Also worth noting is this reference to Lapassade from Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Daily Life: “When the most advanced sociologists finally understood how the art-object became a market-value, by what means the famous creativity of the artist yielded to the norms of profitability, it appeared to them that it was necessary to return to the source of art in everyday life, not in order to change it (because this is not their function), but rather to make it the raw material of a new aesthetic which would resist its packaging and thus escape the mechanism of buying and selling. As if there was no way to consume on the spot! We know the result: socio-dramas and happenings through which the claim to organise an immediate participation of spectators results only in their participation in the aesthetic of nothingness. Via the method of the spectacle it is only possible to express the emptiness of everyday life. In terms of consumption, what is better than an aesthetic of emptiness? As it accelerates, does not the decomposition of value itself become the sole form of possible entertainment? The trick is to convert the spectators of the cultural and ideological vacuum into its organisers; to fill the inanity of the spectacle by the obligatory participation of the spectator – the passive agent par excellence. The happening and its derivatives have some chance of furnishing the society of slaves without masters – which the cyberneticians are preparing – with what it requires: the spectacle without spectators. For the artists, in the strict sense of the term, the way of absolute recuperation [récupération] is all mapped out. They will join with [Georges] Lapassade and consorts in the great corporation of specialists. [Hierarchical] power will reward them by deploying their talent to dress up in new and seductive colours the old conditioning to passivity.” Words in bold are in English in the original. From chapter 12, section 2, Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes generations; in English: The Revolution of Everyday Life. The above passage, translated by me, differs markedly from the Donald Nicholson-Smith translation.

Attachments

Comments

Audience members aim rifles at artworks in the Destruction of RSG-6 exhibiton

The recent activities of the SI, and some of its disagreements with others. The exclusion of Attila Kotányi and the death of Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio. From Internationale Situationniste #9 (August 1964).

Submitted by Fozzie on February 16, 2023

In February 1963, the SI published a document entitled Into the Trashcan of History, regarding the dissolution of the journal Arguments. This document featured a reproduction of the situationist text Theses on the Paris Commune1 alongside the watered-down copy that Henri Lefebvre had slyly published under his own name in the final issue of Arguments, paraphrasing in the most outrageous manner the fraudulent carnival of modern thought of which Arguments has been France's purest expression.

*

The following is a list of names of the Arguments collaborators: J.-M. Albertini, Kostas Axelos, Roland Barthes, Abel Benssi, Jacques Berque, Yvon Bourdet, Pierre Broué, T. Caplow, Bernard Cazes, François Châtelet, Jean Choay, Choh-Ming-Li, Michel Colinet, Lewis Coser, Michel Crozier, Michel Deguy, Gilles Deleuze, Romain Denis, Albert Détraz, Manuel de Diégez, Jean Duvignaud, Claude Faucheux, F. Fejtö, Léopold Flam, J.-C. Filloux, P. Fougeyrollas, Jean Fourastié, André Frankin, F. François, G. Friedmann, J. Gabel, P. Gaudibert, Daniel Guérin, Roberto Guiducci, Luc de Heusch, Roman Jakobsen, K.A. Jelenski, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Georges Lapassade, Henri Lefebvre, O. Loras, Stéphane Lupasco, Tibor Mende, Meng-Yu-Ku, Robert Misrahi, Abraham Moles, Jacques Monbartm Edgar Morin, V. Morin, Serge Moscovici, Roger Munier, Pierre Naville, Max Pagès, R. Pagès, Robert Paris, François Perroux, A. Phillip, André Pidival, Alexandre Pizzorno, David Rousset, Maximillien Rubel, Otto Schiller, Walter Schultz, H.F. Schurmann, M. Sheppard, Jean Starobinski, A. Stawar, Jan Tin Bergen, Jean Touchard, Alain Touraine, Bernard Ullman, Aimé Valdor.

*

In view of their plundering at the hands of Lefebvre, the situationist theses on the commune were translated into Italian and published in issue #9 of the journal Nuova Presenza (Spring 1963). Though varying opinions are expressed in the articles of the journal's two directors, it should be noted that both of them mistakenly believe the essence of the SI's theory and its presence in our time to be our interpretation of the 1871 Commune; moreover, neither of them points out that the publication of these theses is but a single detail of a document concerning the SI's practical struggle against the spectacular disguise hiding the really subversive questions (in this case, the demonstration of the complete success of our boycott of Arguments). It is therefore easy for them to speak of "practical weakness" and "lack of historical perspective." This is indeed the question.

Specifically, Internationale Situationniste is the organ of a group of youths who have placed themselves in a position of radical critique of the "society of the spectacle," that is to say modern technological and technocratic organization that manipulates all manifestations of human creativity toward the ends of the consumption industry . . . It continues a theoretical movement that has its roots in early romanticism, developing through Rimbaud, the surrealists, Bataille and Klossowski; beyond its practical weakness, condemned as it is by its lack of historical perspective to succumb to the apparatus of domination and frustration utilized by modern bureaucrats, this movement represents the refusal of the new generations, who find themselves faced with a society founded on mystification and lies.

— Franco Floreanini (The Values of the Commune in the Struggle Against the Totalitarianism of Technocrats and the Ideological Petrifaction of Stalinists and Socialist Bureaucrats).

A few lines do not seem enough for a thorough examination of Lefebvre's interpretation of the Commune, especially if these lines are exclusively devoted to confronting the theses of Situationist International, its point of critical departure. It is now possible to consider their theses, and the critical reexamination of them undertaken by Lefebvre; and in our opinion, the judgment on the former and the latter alike can only be resolutely negative. Attacking the complex historical phenomenon of Stalinism, still not overcome in the Soviet Union or the French Communist elite, both propose a mystical historical form: in the "dictatorship of the proletariat" they seek the autonomy of proletarian forces and the direct and indirect participation of such forms in power, which is lacking in the inflexible bureaucracy and its antihumanism of Stalinism. But without real ideological terms, such a participation finds itself growing into a confused and irrational aspiration, separated completely from its historical and structural problematic. The autonomy of proletarian forces, the principle historical problem of their participation in power, is reduced to the suggestive and transcendent myth of an "everyday game with power," of a popular "festival," of the "autonomy" of popular armed groups. And they don't hesitate to mix this utopian elan with formulas which, quite frankly, seem mediocre and almost superstitious: thus, the so-called originality of a "revolutionary urbanism" which "refuses to accept the innocence of a single monument"; the anti-humanist apology of those who wanted to destroy Notre-Dame, thereby "making this destruction symbolize their absolute defiance of society"; or finally the no less anti-humanist regret concerning the remaining "unaccomplished" acts that were later viewed as "atrocities." A substantial part of this irrational knot, whose natural base is a distant and fictitious historical experience, remains in Lefebvre's consideration, which succeeds only in excluding a few of the most abstract formulas . . . This protest is completely and voluntarily out of touch with today's historical reality. Stalinism . . . is an irrational mystification, a projection of abstract aspirations onto proletarian forces, with a schema similar to that found in the Situationist International's theses on the Commune. It is time for communists to pose the problem of the supersession of Stalinism through a rationalization of political and ideological life by institutionalized forms that will guarantee the dialectic between the forces of the working class and those who will assume the conduct of social revolution.

— Marcello Gentili (Two Irrational Protests Against Stalinism).

*

Under the pretext of a completely imaginary anti-fascism, a few fragments of surrealism's Stalinist tendency attempted to join the situationists in Anvers. Their inevitable ejection was reported by a tract issued in Dutch and French on 27 February 1963: No Dialogue with Suspects! No Dialogue with Morons!

*

The first issue of the German language SI journal Der Deutsche Gedanke appeared in April 1963, under the direction of Raoul Vaneigem. On account of various practical conditions, its address has finally been established: Boîte postale 155, Brussels 31.

*

In June 1963 the SI organized a ‘Destruction of RSG-6’ demonstration in Denmark, under the direction of J.V. Martin. On this occasion the situationists distributed a clandestine reissue of the English tract Danger: Official Secret—RSG 62 , signed ‘Spies for Peace,’ which revealed the plan and function of ‘Regional Seat of Government #6.’ A theoretical text, The Situationists and the New Forms of Action in Politics and Art, was also issued in Danish, English and French. In one area an ugly reconstruction of a bomb shelter was set up; in another were exhibited Martin’s ‘Thermonuclear Maps’ (détournements of Pop Art representing various regions of the globe during World War III).

The situationist movement presents an exhibition — if you could call it that — with an idea. It demonstrates, with the aid of chaotic productions in plaster of Paris, paint splattered tin horses and soldiers bearing slogans demanding the destruction of the RSG6 shelter, which was built as a defense for the English government in case of nuclear war. Of course, their protest is against the world itself and the totalitarian State: they would probably be flattered by people saying that this is not art. Whatever the case, I fail to see how this could be a compliment.
— Pierre Lübecker, Politiken, 3 July 1963.

A more intelligent report by Else Steen Hansen entitled "Homo Ludens" appeared in number 5-6 of the Swedish journal Konstrevy (December 1963).

*

The Situationist Rudi Renson was stopped for no reason at the Danish border while traveling to the above exhibition. Influenced by the scandal evoked for several days by the press all over the country, the border police successively pretended that he had no passport; that he had no money; and that he needed a bath.

While last point was obviously open to conjecture, the falseness of the other two was quickly demonstrated (nevertheless, situationist publications continue to be seized at this border). Renson is currently preparing a collection of SI studies on Architecture and Détournement.

*

In Spring 1963, T. Kurokawa and Toru Tagaki, European delegates of the Japanese Zengakuren movement, made an invaluable contribution to the discussion of new departures for revolutionary organizations. Their address is Zenshinsha, 1-50 Ikebukurohigashi, Toshima-ku, Tokyo.

*

As with all intellectual specializations, poetry must disappear as a practice particular to a class of "technicians" and literary virtuosos in order to manifest itself directly in all creative human acts — including the act of writing; this point is completely missed by the lettrists and the situationists, for whom the abolition pure and simple of grammatical writing and artistic expression is the miracle cure to the crisis of poetic expression.

Front Noir #1 (June 1963)

*

Aside from a few facts and notions that will undoubtedly become fashionable, discussed with the most vulgar humor, Raymond Borde's book L'Extricable contains the following strange confession: "The heady ideas of surrealism have been reprised by the situationists, but in an uncertain context. They might even provide — who can ever be sure? — the key to revolutionary theory . . ." One can be sure that Raymond Bourde has always been able to place his stylistic exercises in the most certain of contexts (see page 19 of this issue 3 ): the only thing he has ever changed is his delivery.

*

France-Observateur was completely mistaken in writing on 7 February 1963 that Robert Dehoux's brochure Teilhard is an Idiot (even if we completely approve of the title) reveals "an acquaintence with the situationists." Robert Dehoux's autonomy is still demonstrable, and was recently confirmed by his second work, Ecce Ego. It seems that certain critics are so used to seeing copyists feigning ignorance of the SI that anyone who has the good faith to cite the situationists to strengthen their argument is immediately lumped in with us.

*

Attila Kotányi was excluded from the SI on 27 October 1963. Three weeks earlier, he had submitted a text to the situationists that demanded a fundamental theoretical reorientation. This reorientation was extremely retrograde, up to and including mysticism. Its author was unanimously rejected. Only the Danish situationist Peter Laugesen declared that he was not particularly shocked by it. He was therefore excluded at the same time (see the circular On the Exclusion of Attila Kotànyi, distributed in December). Since then, Laugesen has recited the same old story to the Scandinavian press: "They're awful; I know what I'm on about; I was in the wrong place at the wrong time." Kotànyi made at least one step towards Nashism when he tried to spread the rumor that all this was a dreadful misunderstanding, and that he would soon be back in touch with the SI. To that we say no: his text was perfectly clear. And so was ours.

*

In Le Mouvement du Signe, Robert Estivals persists beyond all semblance of reason in trying to understand the SI. Among thousands of other foolish things, he has "predicted and explained its inevitable explosion." For him, this centrifugal motion is revealed by Ralph Rumney's exclusion before we had even published a line. Perhaps it is because he is certainly of those who have "not even had the chance to exclude anyone" (IS #8) that he closes his eyes to the real significance of these exclusions. Does he think that the shockwave produced by the SI's explosion has already reached certain mentally underprivileged zones while he was sleeping? It is always what he presented in a few Parisian publications — at least those in Lettres Nouvelles and France-Observateur — in pretending to have something in common with the situationists. It is clear that the only people who can be misled by this imposture are those who want to be: not only because the situationists are intelligent, or because Estivals, even as a researcher in the CNRS, appears to be unusually weak; but because the situationists do not practice this sort of procedure, as is well known.

*

Nashism has been torn and frayed in two main directions: the Dutch review Situationist Times4 has turned into a marginally less academic art journal, combining high quality illustrations with sometimes very carefully selected themes (such as the labyrinth). The tiny portion allotted to commentary in each issue is unfortunately not on par with this historico-academic effort. In one instance, famous museologist Dr H.L.C. Jaffé gives an Italian quotation of three preliminaries on The Divine Comedy, accumulating no less than six errors in the process (misinterpretations or nonsense).

On this account, it doesn't matter what it shows; maybe even that the journal's unexplained title has a meaning? Elsewhere, Nash and his Swedish friends have mounted a group show on a public highway, showing flaming bears and sword swallowers in a pop art peppered with Scandinavian mysticism. In a recent tract, Nash ambitiously proclaimed himself "the son of God." Like father, like son.

*

At the threshold of an era when science and technology play an occasionally demented role, it must be made clear that the cybernetic and remote controlled games, and the adult activities, that the Groupe de recherches d'art visuel has introduced to the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris on the ocassion of the 3rd Biennale are closer to Luddism than art. These are games worthy of some kind of mathematical fun park. While pretending to modify the work-spectator relationship, the Groupe advocates participation. By throwing the balls, by manipulating various elements, the visitor creates multiple situations. . . .

— Rabecq-Maillard ('Le jeu et l'actualité,' La Nef #16-17, January 1964).

*

Since the split of 1963, the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie has tried to follow in the footsteps of Arguments (cf. "We know that your subscription to Arguments testifies to similar preoccupations," in the circular of 20 January 1964 addressed by the new editorial committee to their desired audience.) But this comes too late, and it is clearly weaker and insignificant. Politically, it is the expression of the furthest left and most deluded fringe of those managers and mid-level functionaries of the Left who want to have a revolutionary theory of their own actual career in society, and also the overtly social career of such a "revolutionary theory." But whereas Mallet and Gorz are professionals at this sort of activity, the people at Socialisme ou Barbarie are visibly amateurs: a weekend away for managers whose real career is elsewhere. The breakaway Marxist minority has accepted the debate on the falsest terrain: the "modern" was the privilege of the Cardanists, and "revolution" the flag of the minority. But in fact, these notions are represented by neither camp, because revolution cannot be separated from the modern, nor can modern thought exist outside of the reinvention of revolutionary critique. The minority (Pouvoir Ouvrier) is so detached from the trifles of the era that it has not found it useful to explain the meaning of Socialisme ou Barbarie's dissolution, too modern a phenomenon for its taste, not even to educate its few fervent readers about workers democracy. There were only very few traces left of the useful theoretical work on numerous points made by Socialisme ou Barbarie over the years. All of it has drowned in an extraordinary atmosphere of bitterness and recrimination, as everyone rushes to the lifeboats of critical thought. In this shipwreck, it seems that only the captain can spout off euphorically. Cardan, after fifteen years of useless efforts, finally masters the dialectic — if only for a brief instant — and decides that it is not ripe enough a fruit, proclaiming that "we cannot give ourselves over to any sort of dialectic, for a dialectic postulates the rationality of the world and of history, and this rationality is problematic, as theory and as practice." (Socialisme ou Barbarie, no 37, page 27). From this, he can attach with the greatest pride his long disguised inability to grasp the play of contradictions: "On the base of this (Marxist) theory of history, there is profoundly and contradictorily interwoven a philosophy of history, itself contradictory, as will be seen." With such a good base, all will indeed be seen, and even [Georges] Lapassade can psychodramatically direct such an avant-garde of the revolution of the "questioning."

*

The SI chose to respond, in December 1963, to an inquiry from the Center of Experimental Art, on the relationship between art and society; but, obviously, refused all participation in the discussions opened between different artistic currents for a "union of artists." More generally, there is even an appeal to the union of all honest people to carry out the hunt for the situationists currently launched by Isou with a proclamation posted at the premises of the Center (and reprised in L'avant-garde lettriste et esthapeïriste):

As certain reactionary groups affirm that machines must be destroyed, other reactionary groups — like the situationists, based on a poorly managed ersatz sub-sub-sub-Marxism — troglodyte, as Lenin put it — affirm that art, as a whole, will be eliminated in the near future . . . In an era when neo-Nazi movements in America and England have revived the swastika and the Sieg Heil, at the same time as the appearance of groupuscules that attack formal and material artistic experiments, as in the most sinister anti-formalist periods of Hitler and Stalin, people concerned with a renewed blossoming of humanity must unite to repel the efforts of vile cretinization of obscurantist nullities of the détourning-troglodyte type.

Résponse aux déchets obscurantistes "situationnistes"

The people concerned are well and truly unified, because in March 1964, the International Center of Aesthetic Research in Turin, directed by Piero Simondo (excluded from the SI shortly after its formation for crypto-catholicism), presented Isou's pictorial work, prefaced enthusiastically by the Jesuit Tapié, who everyone thought was dead. What beautiful children this lot will bear!

*

A book by Guy Debord has been featured without his permission, and without any warning, in the exhibition Schrift und Bild, in Baden-Baden, then Amsterdam. After an initial protest addressed to the organizers when this maneuver was finally pointed out to us, the Germans in Baden-Baden claimed that it was the responsibility of the Dutch Ad. Petersen, of Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum, while the museum asserted, at the same time, that the choice was that of the German Mahlow, director of the Kunsthalle in Baden-Baden (to be continued).

*

What is necessary in anarchist society is that it awakens everyday in a new, unknown world offering possibilities unlike those of the day before . . . The situationists seem to have understood this and propose, for example, an architectural revolution (the appearance of the city changing daily) that puts people in new situations daily. This is only one aspect, but it makes sense to us that all of life that must be overthrown . . .

Jeunes Libertaires (March 1964)

*

After the publication in the English journal Tamesis (March 1964) of the text All the King's Men5 (cf. IS #8), translated by David Arnott, two professors from Reading University commented in the same issue on clearly distinct levels of incomprehension.

. . . these people who, in some of their manifestations, appear rather like the anarchists of the 19th century. I think they number around 70, and are spread over thirty different countries. Three members have already been excluded for deviationist measures or otherwise . . . And this, from a certain point of view, will be the most original thing, that the revolution must take place without authority (not only without the authority that the linguistic authorities and the experts have established, but also without the authority of government — with hardly any political organization at all). It is thus that one can see that this pamphlet has been conceived in a completely anarchist way.

— Prof. Lucas

But the phrase what is permitted implies that there is someone who permits, and the author obviously wants to reject even this center of power. And this is why he is anarchistic in a way that has not, as far as I know, been formulated for a very long time . . . Is this gentleman on a collision course with the Marxist view of social revolution, trying to introduce the next stage in the present, by a conscious effort, trying to make modern poetry useful again, for example, from a 21st century perspective? I think so . . . It is only in a superficial way that the article advances an entire series of arguments. It is simultaneously a manifesto and an example of what the manifesto seeks to accomplish. It needs to be grasped in its own terms or not at all.

— Prof. Bolton

*

Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, one of the founders of the SI, who was present at the Cosio d'Arroscia Conference, and who was excluded in 1960, died suddenly in Alba on 12 February 1964. Experimental in every discipline, Gallizio was one of the artists who best represented the furthest point reached by modern art in its creative period. He was torn between the research of its supersession, and a certain attachment to the tastes of this earlier period. Some of these tastes, mainly by peer pressure, eventually made his participation in the SI somewhat difficult; as a result of this, he was better suited to staying independent. Personally incredibly inventive, he was the complete opposite of the falsifying Nashists. The birth of the situationist movement owes him a great debt.

*

In May, students were expelled from the Danish Communist Party for alleged Maoism. In reality, they were reproached for their interest in the theses of the SI.

*

According to Professor Guy Atkins' book Asger Jorn (London: Methuen, 1964):

After Cobra, the most important movement in which Jorn took part was the international situationist movement, which began in 1957. It is interesting to compare two such different movements . . . Each effectively existed for around three years. Cobra was an avalanche that grew until it became monstrous. The SI was exactly the opposite. When it first appeared, it was solid and coherent. It shattered into fragments of marble. Towards the middle of 1962, everyone was being "excluded" by Guy Debord, although Jorn had the good sense to resign in 1961. Cobra produced a common imagery. The SI created a spirit and an attitude, and carried out experimental activity with curious and subtle ideas. Cobra, with its Danish gregariousness, had too little discipline. The situationist were made and then broken by their own discipline.

With the realism of this conclusion, our readers are invited judge the value of attributing other terms to this comparison (Cobra painted men as they are, and the SI, as they should be?).

*

In July 1964, the SI published the tract España en el corazón (Spain in the Heart) in Spanish and French, bringing attention to a new form of propaganda currently being experimented with in Spain.

All SI publications mentioned here may be passed on to anyone who can provide a good reason for wanting them.

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

Comments

A black and white still from a film of Ivan Chtcheglov "made after his institutionalisation"

Chtcheglov writes to Michèle Bernstein and Guy Debord from a psychiatric clinic. From Internationale Situationniste #9 (August 1964).

Submitted by Fozzie on February 16, 2023

Ivan Chtcheglov participated in the ventures that were at the origin of the situationist movement, and his role in it has been irreplaceable, both in its theoretical endeavors and in its practical activity (the dérive experiments). In 1953, at the age of 19, he had already drafted — under the pseudonym Gilles Ivain — the text entitled “Formulary for a New Urbanism,”1 which was later published in the first issue of Internationale Situationniste.

Having spent the last five years in a psychiatric clinic, where he still is, he reestablished contact with us only long after the formation of the SI. He is currently working on a revised edition of his 1953 writing on architecture and urbanism. The letters from which the following lines have been excerpted were addressed to Michèle Bernstein and Guy Debord over the last year. The plight to which Ivan Chtcheglov is being subjected can be considered as one of modern society’s increasingly sophisticated methods of control over people’s lives, a control that in previous times was expressed in atheists being condemned to the Bastille, for example, or political opponents to exile.

I am in a good position to study the group and the role of the individual in the group.

The dérive (with its flow of acts, its gestures, its strolls, and 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 he rejects or modifies (one could say détourns) a word, an expression or a definition. The dérive is certainly a technique, almost a therapeutic one. But just as analysis unaccompanied by 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, or disintegration. And thus the relapse into what is termed ‘ordinary life,’ that is to say, in reality, into ‘petrified life.’ In this regard I now take back 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. We had a constitution — a bad constitution — of iron.

One factor — which verifies our basic theories only too well — has played an enormous part: for several years, the clinic was installed in a castle with gargoyles, a portcullis, thick, reinforced wooden doors, floors (and not tiled floors: most hygienic), a high tower, antique furniture, fireplaces, coats of arms, etc. Since then, however, they have moved us to a modern clinic. Of course, this is easier to maintain, but at such a price! It is practically impossible to struggle against architecture. More and more, they're saying "clinic" instead of "castle" and "patients" in place of "guests." And so on . . . The words work.

On a whim, I accepted the role of the butcher in Audiberti's "L'Ampelour." It's a small role, but it's exhausting! Nothing is more tiring than taking the stage when one isn't well.

In my good moments, when I remember the insufficiency — and yet the perfection — of the Formulary, I pull in my horses. And as much for the each issue of I.S. So much could be made of so little:

Of time — of chance — of health — of money — of thought.

(And also) of good humor — of our hearts in our work — of love — and of precaution.

But the entourage! The standards! The others! The splits! It's complicated.

And this is always the insane demand of the world: be possessed of genius, yes, but live as we do. It's madness. And still they want me to conform to a new label on their files.

Since we are involved in a sumptuous potlatch, here is a title: "Des êtres se recontrent" by J.A. Schade, by far the greatest novel of the twentieth century, unfortunately very hard to come by. Maybe if you look in the classifieds . . . It ends with the little song "that we sang when we were children":

The rich, they go to market by carriage,
The poor, they go by foot.
Us, we amuse ourselves.

It's tough being in this dump and knowing the stakes. I too am becoming a symbol, and even here they agree. Will I stay, will I go, will my speech return or will I lose my memory again?

But I've had enough of angst. I want to change the topic of my text to the meaning of happiness; de Chirico is certainly a precursor from an architectural point of view, but an anxious architectural point of view. We will discover more cheerful things. Or we might demonstrate and denounce de Chirico's angst. In any case, my text wasn't clear enough.

There is nothing left for me to do but to get over this illness, seeing the impossibility of looking after yourself in the clinic . . . It's doubtful; it's been ten years. We are never really animals, not animals at all. Regardless of whether the impossibility of looking after yourself in the clinic is the indefensible opinion of the boss, I nevertheless maintain, absolutely in accord with K., that it is impossible to look after oneself in here. Which one of us the home destroys is not an issue to them. Not on purpose, of course. But who will it be?

I engage in situationist propaganda with one or two of the members of staff. Why not?

And how do I get over this thing? How can I trust anyone enough to get me out? It's virtually impossible.

Getting over it! They scare me! I'm happy to fantasize: they found a way to panic me so they could cart me off. In 1959, two busloads of cops were called (as far as I can remember). In all, 24 cops for your comrade. . . . But you don't think I could be that bad, do you? No one would send 24 cops. Besides, it never happened!

What else can I write, my dear Guy? I am ill. I am complaining: the 400 wishes, the loathing, the delirium, the curses, the "fatal and jealous love," the dangers, the childish impulses, L's2 prophecies of misfortune, and W's3 "listen to your mother."

Now the festivals are a sorry sight. I don't think you'll miss your chance. It's nowhere near as dreadful as everyone else's festivals. Festivals are the best thing here.

On the exclusion of AK4 , what more can I say? . . . These exclusions have to stop. I know it isn't easy: developments have to be foreseen, suspicious characters ought to be rejected in advance. That would be ideal, right? These exclusions have become part of the situationist mythology.

Edited from translations by Ken Knabb abd Reuben Keehan. From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/letters.html

Comments

Victory of the Paris Commune - a painting by Michèle Bernstein

SI Response to a Questionnaire from the Center for Socio-Experimental Art. From Internationale Situationniste #9 (August 1964).

1. Why are the masses not concerned with art? Why does art remain the privilege of certain educated sectors of the bourgeois class?

The importance of the theme of the present questionnaire and the limited space allotted for answers oblige us to be somewhat schematic. The situationists' positions on these topics have been elaborated in more detail in the SI's journals (Internationale Situationniste, Der Deutsche Gedanke and Situationistisk Revolution1 ) and in the catalog [The Situationists and the New Forms of Action in Politics and Art] published on the occasion of the "Destruction of RSG 6" demonstration in Denmark last June.

The masses, i.e. the nonruling classes, have no reason to feel concerned with any aspects of a culture or an organization of social life that have not only been developed without their participation or their control, but that have in fact been deliberately designed to prevent such participation and control. They are concerned (illusorily) only with the by-products specifically produced for their consumption: the diverse forms of spectacular publicity and propaganda in favor of various products or role models.

This does not mean, however, that art subsists merely as a "privilege" of the bourgeois class. In the past every dominant class had its own art -- for the same reasons that a classless society will have none, will be beyond artistic practice. But the historical conditions of our time, associated with a major breakthrough in man's appropriation of nature and thus bearing the concrete project of a classless society, are such that major art in this period has necessarily been revolutionary. What has been called modern art, from its origins in the nineteenth century to its full development in the first third of the twentieth, has been an anti-bourgeois art. The present crisis of art is linked to the crisis of the workers movement since the defeat of the Russian revolution and the modernization of capitalism.

Today a fake continuation of modern art (formal repetitions attractively packaged and publicized, completely divorced from the original combativeness of their models) along with a voracious consumption of bits and pieces of previous cultures completely divorced from their real meaning (Malraux2 , previously their most ludicrous salesman in the realm of "theory," is now exhibiting them in his "Culture Centers") are what actually constitute the dubious "privilege" of the new stratum of intellectual workers that proliferates with the development of the "tertiary sector" of the economy. This sector is closely connected to that of the social spectacle: this intellectual stratum (the requirements of whose training and employment explain both the quantitative extension of education and its qualitative degradation) is both the most direct producer of the spectacle and the most direct consumer of its specifically cultural elements.

Two tendencies seem to us to typify the contemporary cultural consumption offered to this public of alienated intellectual workers:

On one hand, endeavors such as the "Visual Art Research Group" clearly tend toward the integration of the population into the dominant socioeconomic system, along the lines currently being worked out by repressive urbanism and the theorists of cybernetic control. Through a veritable parody of the revolutionary theses on putting an end to the passivity of separated spectators through the construction of situations, this "Visual Art" group strives to make the spectator participate in his own misery -- taking its lack of dialectics to the point of "freeing" the spectator by announcing that it is "forbidden not to participate" (tract at the Third Paris Biennial).

On the other hand, "New Realism," drawing heavily on the form of dadaism (but not its spirit), is an apologetic junk art. It fits quite well in the margin of pseudofreedom offered by a society of gadgets and waste.

But the importance of such artists remains very secondary, even in comparison with advertising. Thus, paradoxically, the "Socialist Realism" of the Eastern bloc, which is not art at all, nevertheless has a more decisive social function. This is because in the East power is maintained primarily by selling ideology (i.e. mystifying justifications), while in the West it is maintained by selling consumer goods. The fact that the Eastern bureaucracy has proved incapable of developing its own art, and has been forced to adapt the forms of the pseudoartistic vision of petty-bourgeois conformists of the last century (in spite of the inherent ineffectuality of those forms), confirms the present impossibility of any art as a ruling-class "privilege."

Nevertheless, all art is "social" in the sense that it has its roots in a given society and even despite itself must have some relation to the prevailing conditions, or to their negation. Former moments of opposition survive fragmentarily and lose their artistic (or postartistic) value to the precise extent they have lost the heart of opposition. With their loss of this heart they have also lost any reference to the mass of postartistic acts (of revolt and of free reconstruction of life) that already exist in the world and that are tending to replace art. This fragmentary opposition can then only withdraw to an aesthetic position and harden rapidly into a dated and ineffectual aesthetic in a world where it is already too late for aesthetics -- as has happened with surrealism, for example. Other movements are typical of degraded bourgeois mysticism (art as substitute for religion). They reproduce -- but only in the form of solitary fantasy or idealist pretension -- the forces that dominate present social life both officially and in fact: noncommunication, bluff, frantic desire for novelty as such, for the rapid turnover of arbitrary and uninteresting gadgets -- lettrism, for example, on which subject we remarked that "Isou, product of an era of unconsumable art, has suppressed the very idea of its consumption" and that he has "proposed the first art of solipsism" (Internationale Situationniste #4).

Finally, the very proliferation of would-be artistic movements that are essentially indistinguishable from one another can be seen as an application of the modern sales technique of marketing the same product under rival trademarks.

2. How can art be really "social"?

The time for art is over. The point now is to realize art, to really create on every level of life everything that hitherto could only be an artistic memory or an illusion, dreamed and preserved unilaterally. Art can be realized only by being suppressed. However, in contrast to the present society, which suppresses art by replacing it with the automatic functioning of an even more passive and hierarchical spectacle, we maintain that art can really be suppressed only by being realized.

2. (cont.) Does the political society in which you live encourage or discourage your social function as an artist?

This society has suppressed what you call the social function of the artist.

If this question refers to the function of employees in the reigning spectacle, it is obvious that the number of jobs to be had there expands as the spectacle does. The situationists, however, do not find this employment opportunity the least bit attractive.

If, on the other hand, we take this question as referring to the inheriting of previous art through new types of activity, beginning with contestation of the whole society, the society in question naturally discourages such a practice.

3. Do you think your aesthetics would be different if you lived in a socially, politically or economically different society?

Certainly. When our perspectives are realized, aesthetics (as well as its negation) will be superseded.

If we were presently living in an underdeveloped country or in one subjected to archaic forms of domination (colonialism or a Franco-type dictatorship), we would agree that artists can to a certain extent participate as such in popular struggles. In a context of general social and cultural backwardness the social function of the artist still retains a certain significance, and a not entirely sham communication is still possible within the traditional forms.

If we were living in a country governed by a "socialist" bureaucracy, where information about cultural and other experimentation in advanced industrialized countries over the last fifty years is systematically suppressed, we would certainly support the minimum demand for dissemination of truth, including the truth about contemporary Western art. We would do this despite the inevitable ambiguity of such a demand, since the history of modern art, though already accessible and even glorified in the West, is nonetheless still profoundly falsified; and its importation into the Eastern bloc would first of all be exploited by hacks like Yevtushenko in their modernization of official art.

4. Do you participate in politics or not? Why?

Yes, but in only one kind: together with various other forces in the world, we are working toward the linkup and the theoretical and practical organization of a new revolutionary movement.

All the considerations we are developing here simultaneously demonstrate the need to go beyond the failures of previous specialized politics.

5. Does an association of artists seem necessary to you? What would be its objectives?

There are already numerous associations of artists, either without principles or based on one or another extravagant absurdity -- mutual aid unions, mutual congratulation societies, alliances for collective careerism. Works that on the slightest pretext are proclaimed "collective projects" are fashionable at the moment, and are even put in the limelight at the pitiful Paris biennials, thus diverting attention from the real problems of the supersession of art. We regard all these associations with equal contempt and accept no contact whatsoever with this milieu.

We do believe that a coherent and disciplined association for the realization of a common program is possible on the bases worked out by the Situationist International, provided that the participants are so rigorously selected that they all demonstrate a high degree of creative originality, and that in a sense they cease to be "artists" or to consider themselves as artists in the old sense of the word.

It could in fact be questioned whether the situationists are artists at all, even avant-garde ones. Not only because almost everyone in the cultural scene resists acknowledging them as such (at least once the whole of the situationist program is involved) or because their interests extend far beyond the former scope of art. Their nature as artists is even more problematic on the socioeconomic level. Many situationists support themselves by rather dubious methods, ranging from historical research to poker, from bartending to running puppet theaters. It is striking that of the 28 members of the Situationist International whom we have had to exclude so far, 23 personally had a socially recognized and increasingly profitable role as artists: they were known as artists despite their membership in the SI. But as such they were tending to reinforce the position of our enemies, who want to invent a "situationism" so as to finish with us by integrating us into the spectacle as just one more doomsday aesthetic. Yet while doing this, these artists wanted to remain in the SI. This was unacceptable for us. The figures speak for themselves.

It goes without saying that any other "objectives" of any association of artists are of no interest to us, since we regard them as no longer having any point whatsoever.

6. How is the work you are presenting here related to these statements?

The enclosed work obviously cannot represent a "situationist art." Under the present distinctly antisituationist cultural conditions we have to resort to "communication containing its own critique," which we have experimented with in every accessible medium, from film to writing, and which we have theorized under the name of détournement. Since the Center for Socio-Experimental Art has limited its survey to the plastic arts, we have selected, from among the numerous possibilities of détournement as a means of agitation, Michèle Bernstein's antipainting Victory of the Bonnot Gang3 . It forms part of a series including Victory of the Paris Commune, Victory of the Great Jacquerie of 1358, Victory of the Spanish Republicans, Victory of the Workers Councils of Budapest and several other victories. Such paintings attempt to negate "Pop Art" (which is materially and "ideologically" characterized by indifference and dull complacency) by incorporating only toy objects and by making them meaningful in as heavy-handed a way as possible. In a sense this series carries on the tradition of the painting of battles; and also rectifies the history of revolts (which is not over) in a way that pleases us. It seems that each new attempt to transform the world is forced to start out with the appearance of a new unrealism.

We hope that our remarks here, both humorous and serious, will help to clarify our position on the present relationship between art and society.

For the Situationist International:

J.V. Martin, Jan Strijbosch, Raoul Vaneigem, René Vienet (6 December 1963)

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

  • 1Der Deutsche Gedanke: German-language journal: the only issue (1963) consisted mostly of translations of French SI articles. Situationistisk Revolution: Danish journal edited by J.V. Martin.
  • 2André Malraux: French novelist and critic who became Minister of Culture under de Gaulle.
  • 3Bonnot Gang: French anarchist bandit gang (1911-1912). See https://libcom.org/tags/bonnot-gang

Comments

Abraham Moles photograph

From Internationale Situationniste #9 (August 1964).

Author
Submitted by Fozzie on February 17, 2023

Abraham A. MOLES – judging by his letterhead: Doctor of Letters (Phil.), Doctor of Science (Phys.), engineer, assistant professor (University of Strasbourg), Professor of the E.O.S.T.1 – has addressed, on the 16th of December, 1963, this Open Letter to the Situationist Group:

Sir,

I learned about the Situationist Group through my friend and colleague Henri Lefebvre.2 The significance of the term “situationist” therefore comes largely from what he has told me and from reading a number of your bulletins, to which I ask you subscribe me.

The interpretation I have here adopted of the word “situation” is purely personal and may not agree with yours. It seems to me that, faced with the personal drama of technological alienation that we perceive on our own account; with the unbridled consumption of the work of art that destroys the very meaning of the term; with a certain number of concepts, such as anesthetic happiness or the planned obsolescence dear to Vance Packard; individuals may ask where can we locate creative originality in a refrigerated society – with or without the mystique of the vacuum clearer, according to Mr. Goldman[n].3 Freedom within society is rolled back little by little to zero, as and when the technocratic cyberneticians – to which I belong – progressively record three billion insects.4

Daily life is a series of situations; these situations belong to a very limited repertoire. Can we extend this repertoire, can we find new situations? It seems to me that this is where the word “situationist” makes sense. A situation seems to me [to be] a system of perceptions linked to a reaction system in the short term. I certainly would like to see in your publications a study on what you call “situation”: [for example] an individual who, for some reason, walks on the ceiling rather than the floor, is he in a new situation? A tightrope walker, is he in a rare situation?

It seems to me that two characters can appreciate this concept. First there is the novelty of a given situation in relation to the complete set of those that we know. For a traveler, a foreign language brings a great many new situations and there is, obviously, a grand metric: the “quantity of strangeness” that he perceives in the exterior world. We currently live in slightly new situations for which we need to create behavior. Here this term has a simple statistical character: that which is the value of X is not the value of Y, but there may be a “marginal situationism” in which individuals systematically search for “slightly queer” perceptions or behaviors.5

An important source of new situations will come from the extraordinary assembly of a large number of ordinary micro-situations; it this which creates the value of Graham Greene’s editorial technique, assembling in a gathered together sequence a great number of banal acts which are found to be extraordinary through their assembly. Each of these elementary situations [positions], correctly, rationally or conventionally linked to the exterior world, appeared perfectly normal: thousands of bourgeois find themselves here at every moment. The particular set of situations is, for him, extraordinary because it is not “customary” that they succeed each other in this order (Ministry of Fear, Stamboul Train, The Third Man).6 I would point out to you that the theoreticians of Information are capable (in pure theory) of measuring the quantity of novelty that such a system brings.

There are, moreover, intrinsically rare situations: for example, homosexuality is statistically less frequent than juvenile and conventional sexuality; the threesome is less [frequent] than lawful copulation. To kill a man – or a woman – is a rare situation, and thus, all the more interesting: the amount attached to the situation, as measured by a certain excursion outside the field of social freedom, is greater than a series of petty traffic violations (see Dostoevsky, because I think that detective fiction only brings, in this domain, a situational statistic (!) – fictitious what’s more). It is here that our freedom within society will soon be reduced to zero, from the moment where technology brings us the control of everyone by everyone, the matrix of elementary acts, and the machine to inventory the content of [the] thoughts of everyone at every moment.

To rarely break out of many norms, or to break a few very often. On this point we see appear thus two “dimensions” of situations: their intrinsic novelty or the rarity of their assembly.

Society controls more and more the first with the combined weapons of social morality, files and cards, medical prescriptions of the pharmacist, etc. It still controls the second badly and it seems to me that we can still live an “original” life in the Situationist sense, through a new pattern of small [and] mundane deviations.7 In their everyday life, the Surrealists had already sensed it although they had discovered that the worst enemy of Surrealism could be physical fatigue or the exhaustion of reserves of intellectual courage.

But it seems to me that – unless [we are] inconsistent vis-à-vis our own acceptance of the automobile, the refrigerator and the telephone, that is to say of the technological civilization in which we live – it is in the axis of technology that we need to look for new situations; and I ask in what way your movement accepts this. It seems to me extremely easy to define new situations based on a technical change; the physical conditions are already realised, or realisable, or reasonably conceivable. For example, living without gravity, living under water, walking on the ceiling, in a general way to live in strange environments are situations with which we are furnished by technology [la technique], in the classic sense of the term.

One might think that technology is far from our daily lives. But I think that would be to ignore that the household possessing a stove thermostat experiences a new situation. It is evident, from these examples, that it is the psychological impact of a situation which creates its value for a Situationist philosophy.

Here a politics takes shape: to ask the sociologists where are the social sources of convention [conventionalisme]. Most obviously, there is sexuality which is certainly open to a great number of new situations. The manufacture, biologically conceivable, of women with two pairs of breasts is, without any doubt, a proposition from biology to tradition. The invention, in addition to the two traditional sexes of one, two, three, n different sexes, offers a sexual combination which follows the theory of permutations and suggests rapidly an immense number of amorous situations (n factorial).

Another source of variation – thus of situations – could be based on the use of our senses. For example the “olfactory” arts have only developed an exclusive and highly sexualized rating system, and rather as an instrument of struggle between the sexes but never as an abstract art. In the artistic domain, a very large number of other situations will follow in the near future from technical capacities – and if American film directors only know how to make Cinerama (even more so Circlorama), perhaps it is legitimate to hope for here a source of new arts.8 The dream of Total Art is conditioned by the poverty of the artistic imagination.

What would become of a society made up of social strata based on those Michael Young calls the “Meritocracy” where they would be inscribed in the laws of the State? This is certainly the function of sociological fiction to prefigure. In fact, everyday life, as we know it, is capable of offering infinitely new situations through differences [écarts] which can appear negligible. I think, for example, of the great rift between men and women based on a random but definitive a priori categorization. It is no longer inconceivable that human beings change sex over the course of their life, and new situations, initially of an individual character and then a social one, are here perfectly conceivable. It seems to me that this would be one of the roles of the Situationist International: to explore them. If we simply assume that the vectors of attraction of men for women, women for men, become symmetrical instead of the temporal asymmetry which is the current statistical rule, we can assume that 90% of Theatre, Film, Literature and figurative art must be replaced.

We could continue this enumeration indefinitely, but it seems to me, in short, that the search for new situations which appears to me, if I understand correctly, one of the objects that Situationism could settle, is relatively easy and should be linked, among other things, to a study of what biological techniques bring, that various taboos leave virtually untouched.

In summary:

1. My interest in your movement comes from the basic idea of research for new situations, in a society constrained by technological happiness,

2. It seems to me that the term “situation” should be better defined or redefined from your own perspective and that a doctrinal report from you on this term would be necessary. In particular, the extent of the novelty value of a situation seems to me an indispensable criterion.

3. It is not difficult to find a great number of new situations – I have listed a dozen above – but we can push the reasoning further. These can be derived:

a) from the transgression of taboos which, within the field of legal freedom, still restrict our practical freedom, in particular in the sexual and biological domain;

b) from “crime” in the sense of the sociology of Durkheim;

c) from numerous strange deviations, but of a small magnitude around the norm;

d) finally, from technology, which is to say from the power of man over the laws of nature.

I pray that you accept, sir, the expression of my best sentiments.

Response to Moles, 26 December 1963.

Little head,

It was useless to write to us. We had already noted, like everyone, that the ambition which incites you to depart from your immediate functional use is always unfortunate, because the capacity to think of anything else does not enter into your programming.

Scarcely is it necessary, therefore, to point out that you have understood nothing in any of the situationist materials you have read (in which, evidently, you missed all the basics). Tilt. Redo your calculations, Moles, redo your calculations: here is a satisfaction that no positive result will ever rob you of.

If we looked for your “open letter” – which was lost to us, but which various people have read – it is because we thought that, coming from a being of your type and addressed to us, it could only be a letter of insults.9 Not even! We have no need of knowing if your letter truly reflects the average level of your clumsiness, or if you aimed sometimes at a joke. False problem, because all that you can ever do, in our eyes, is contained in the redundant and coarse joke that constitutes your existence.

Knowing the human appearance which your programmers have cloaked you in, one can appreciate that you dream of the production of women with n series of breasts. One supposes that you have difficultly having sex with less. Your personal circumstances aside, your pornographic dreams seem as ill-informed as your philosophical and artistic pretensions.

Yet there is a point where you were more lost still: despite your letterhead, you are a robot too rustic to make believe that you can take up the role of a university professor. Despite many deficiencies, the bourgeois university – before the cybernetic bureaucratisation that you so elegantly represent – leaves a certain margin of professional objectivity for its teachers. In the case where brilliant students have an opinion opposed to their examiner, sometimes the reality of their studies is recognised all the same; and above all, it should not be possible that extra-curricular grievances held against them are artlessly proclaimed in advance, with the results that can follow. But you, awe-stricken manager of the dusty authority which falls upon you, you cannot let pass the first opportunity to get even. This is how miserably (in the sense “like a coward” and in the sense “this was disastrous”; meditate on the anti-combinatorial value of a word), running at full speed on your little legs, you tried to remove one of our comrades from an examination last June, whose intelligence and humanity you probably envy. You think that we will forget your behaviour because of your failed blow? Error, Moles.

That machines like you are in the end, by way of official channels, superior to someone; that they have power to enforce their inept decisions, and thus the ones who unleash the stimulus. But such power is still fragile after so much ambition! We laugh at you.

Believe, nevertheless, that we will observe all that follows from your career with the attention it deserves.

[signed] Guy DEBORD

First published in Internationale Situationniste no. 9, August 1964, pp. 44-48. The letter from Guy Debord to Nicole Beaurain first published in Guy Debord, Correspondance, volume II, septembre 1960 – décembre 1964, Librairie Arthème Fayard, Paris, 14 février 2001. Translated from the French by Anthony Hayes, June 2013. Thanks to Alastair Hemmens for help with the translation. Translator's notes below. https://thesinisterquarter.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/correspondence-with-a-cybernetician/

  • 1L’école et observatoire des sciences de la Terre: School and Observatory for Earth Sciences. A French Grande École associated with the University of Strasbourg.
  • 2To understand the S.I.’s ‘relations’ with Henri Lefebvre at this time, late 1963, see their circular Into the Trashcan of History!
  • 3Vance Packard, an American writer whose three most famous books, The Hidden Persuaders (1957 ), The Status Seekers (1959), The Waste Makers (1960), respectively criticised the advertising industry, social stratification and planned obsolescence. Packard’s arguments, in essence liberal and non-revolutionary, were nonetheless important insights into the changing nature of modern capitalism in the two decades after World War II. Lucien Goldmann was a Marxist academic who had, by turns, influenced and incurred the wrath of the Situationist International. See, in particular, The Avant-Garde of Presence, I.S. no 8 – we hope to present a more accurate version of this translation in the near future.
  • 4‘les trois milliards d’insectes’: no doubt Moles deploys this term with some irony, and yet it appears to reveal also his attitude, i.e. to deal with the human race as mere objects of enquiry.
  • 5‘slightly queer’: English in the original.
  • 6All works of Graham Greene’s. The first are two novels, whereas the third is best known as the screenplay Greene wrote for Carol Reed’s 1949 film, The Third Man, starring Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles. Greene later turned his screenplay into a novella.
  • 7‘pattern’: English in the original.
  • 8In 1963 Cinerama and Circlorama were two technically advanced film shooting and projection systems. The latter projected onto a fully circular screen, i.e. a 360° view. It is perhaps better known in its iteration as a system used by the Disney Corporation: Circle-Vision 360°. The Situationists had already written on a similar process known as ‘Circarama’ in a 1958 article criticising the tendency of new cinema techniques (and technology tout court) being presented “as a passive substitute for the unitary artistic activity that is now possible” (In and Against Cinema, I.S. no. 1). It is worth noting that the 1960s saw the highpoint of big budget Hollywood films using Cinerama or related systems.
  • 9Letter from Guy Debord to Nicole Beaurain, November 29, 1963:

    Dear Nicole,

    We have not received any letter from Moles. As our address has long been changed, the choice of posting to the old one has everything of the pretense.

    The most probable is that he prefers only to use copies – perhaps to avoid an ear bashing? – without having ever posted the original.

    This type of excess [franchise] is not uncommon among such thinkers.

    Sincerely,

    [signed] Guy

Comments

IS10-cov.jpeg

Issue ten of the journal of the Situationist International.

March 1966
Director: Debord
Mail: B.P. 307-03 Paris
Editorial Committee: Michèle Bernstein, Théo Frey, Mustapha Khayati, J.V. Martin, Raoul Vaneigem.

All texts published in Internationale Situationniste may be freely reproduced, translated or adapted, even without indication of origin.

Submitted by libcom on September 5, 2005

watts-riots-1965.png

Debord on the Watts riots in LA. From International Situationniste #10 (March 1966).

Author
Submitted by libcom on September 5, 2005

August 13-­16, 1965, the blacks of Los Angeles revolted. An incident between traffic police and pedestrians developed into two days of spontaneous riots. Despite increasing reinforcements, the forces of order were unable to regain control of the streets. By the third day the blacks had armed themselves by looting accessible gun stores, enabling them to fire even on police helicopters. It took thousands of police and soldiers, including an entire infantry division supported by tanks, to confine the riot to the Watts area, and several more days of street fighting to finally bring it under control. Stores were massively plundered and many were burned. Official sources listed 32 dead (including 27 blacks), more than 800 wounded and 3000 arrests.

Reactions from all sides were most revealing: a revolutionary event, by bringing existing problems into the open, provokes its opponents into an unhabitual lucidity. Police Chief William Parker, for example, rejected all the major black organizations' offers of mediation, correctly asserting: "These rioters don't have any leaders." Since the blacks no longer had any leaders, it was the moment of truth for both sides. What did one of those unemployed leaders, NAACP general secretary Roy Wilkins, have to say? He declared that the riot "should be put down with all necessary force." And Los Angeles Cardinal McIntyre, who protested loudly, did not protest against the violence of the repression, which one might have supposed the most tactful policy at a time when the Roman Church is modernizing its image; he denounced "this premeditated revolt against the rights of one's neighbor and against respect for law and order," calling on Catholics to oppose the looting and "this violence without any apparent justification." And all those who went so far as to recognize the "apparent justifications" of the rage of the Los Angeles blacks (but never their real ones), all the ideologists and "spokesmen" of the vacuous international Left, deplored the irresponsibility, the disorder, the looting (especially the fact that arms and alcohol were the first targets) and the 2000 fires with which the blacks lit up their battle and their ball. But who has defended the Los Angeles rioters in the terms they deserve? We will. Let the economists fret over the $27 million lost, and the city planners sigh over one of their most beautiful supermarkets gone up in smoke, and McIntyre blubber over his slain deputy sheriff. Let the sociologists bemoan the absurdity and intoxication of this rebellion. The role of a revolutionary publication is not only to justify the Los Angeles insurgents, but to help elucidate their perspectives, to explain theoretically the truth for which such practical action expresses the search.

In Algiers in July 1965, following Boumédienne's coup d'état, the situationists issued an Address to the Algerians and to revolutionaries all over the world which interpreted conditions in Algeria and the rest of the world as a whole. Among other examples we mentioned the movement of the American blacks, stating that if it could "assert itself incisively" it would unmask the contradictions of the most advanced capitalist system. Five weeks later this incisiveness was in the streets. Modern theoretical criticism of modern society and criticism in acts of the same society already coexist; still separated but both advancing toward the same realities, both talking about the same thing. These two critiques are mutually explanatory, and neither can be understood without the other. Our theory of "survival" and of "the spectacle" is illuminated and verified by these actions which are so incomprehensible to American false consciousness. One day these actions will in turn be illuminated by this theory.

Until the Watts explosion, black civil rights demonstrations had been kept by their leaders within the limits of a legal system that tolerates the most appalling violence on the part of the police and the racists -- as in last March's march on Montgomery, Alabama. Even after the latter scandal, a discreet agreement between the federal government, Governor Wallace and Martin Luther King led the Selma marchers on March 10 to stand back at the first police warning, in dignity and prayer. The confrontation expected by the demonstrators was reduced to a mere spectacle of a potential confrontation. In that moment nonviolence reached the pitiful limit of its courage: first you expose yourself to the enemy's blows, then you push your moral nobility to the point of sparing him the trouble of using any more force. But the main point is that the civil rights movement only addressed legal problems by legal means. It is logical to make legal appeals regarding legal questions. What is irrational is to appeal legally against a blatant illegality as if it was a mere oversight that would be corrected if pointed out. It is obvious that the crude and glaring illegality from which blacks still suffer in many American states has its roots in a socioeconomic contradiction that is not within the scope of existing laws, and that no future judicial law will be able to get rid of this contradiction in the face of the more fundamental laws of this society. What American blacks are really daring to demand is the right to really live, and in the final analysis this requires nothing less than the total subversion of this society. This becomes increasingly evident as blacks in their everyday lives find themselves forced to use increasingly subversive methods. The issue is no longer the condition of American blacks, but the condition of America, which merely happens to find its first expression among the blacks. The Watts riot was not a racial conflict: the rioters left alone the whites that were in their path, attacking only the white policemen, while on the other hand black solidarity did not extend to black store-owners or even to black car-drivers. Martin Luther King himself had to admit that the revolt went beyond the limits of his specialty. Speaking in Paris last October, he said: "This was not a race riot. It was a class riot."

The Los Angeles rebellion was a rebellion against the commodity, against the world of the commodity in which worker-consumers are hierarchically subordinated to commodity standards. Like the young delinquents of all the advanced countries, but more radically because they are part of a class without a future, a sector of the proletariat unable to believe in any significant chance of integration or promotion, the Los Angeles blacks take modern capitalist propaganda, its publicity of abundance, literally. They want to possess now all the objects shown and abstractly accessible, because they want to use them. In this way they are challenging their exchange-value, the commodity reality which molds them and marshals them to its own ends, and which has preselected everything. Through theft and gift they rediscover a use that immediately refutes the oppressive rationality of the commodity, revealing its relations and even its production to be arbitrary and unnecessary. The looting of the Watts district was the most direct realization of the distorted principle: "To each according to their false needs" -- needs determined and produced by the economic system which the very act of looting rejects. But once the vaunted abundance is taken at face value and directly seized, instead of being eternally pursued in the rat-race of alienated labor and increasing unmet social needs, real desires begin to be expressed in festive celebration, in playful self-assertion, in the potlatch of destruction. People who destroy commodities show their human superiority over commodities. They stop submitting to the arbitrary forms that distortedly reflect their real needs. The flames of Watts consummated the system of consumption. The theft of large refrigerators by people with no electricity, or with their electricity cut off, is the best image of the lie of affluence transformed into a truth in play. Once it is no longer bought, the commodity lies open to criticism and alteration, whatever particular form it may take. Only when it is paid for with money is it respected as an admirable fetish, as a symbol of status within the world of survival.

Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state's monopoly of armed violence. What is a policeman? He is the active servant of the commodity, the man in complete submission to the commodity, whose job it is to ensure that a given product of human labor remains a commodity, with the magical property of having to be paid for, instead of becoming a mere refrigerator or rifle -- a passive, inanimate object, subject to anyone who comes along to make use of it. In rejecting the humiliation of being subject to police, the blacks are at the same time rejecting the humiliation of being subject to commodities. The Watts youth, having no future in market terms, grasped another quality of the present, and that quality was so incontestable and irresistible that it drew in the whole population -- women, children, and even sociologists who happened to be on the scene. Bobbi Hollon, a young black sociologist of the neighborhood, had this to say to the Herald Tribune in October: "Before, people were ashamed to say they came from Watts. They'd mumble it. Now they say it with pride. Boys who used to go around with their shirts open to the waist, and who'd have cut you to pieces in half a second, showed up here every morning at seven o'clock to organize the distribution of food. Of course, it's no use pretending that food wasn't looted. . . . All that Christian blah has been used too long against blacks. These people could loot for ten years and they wouldn't get back half the money those stores have stolen from them over all these years. . . . Me, I'm only a little black girl." Bobbi Hollon, who has sworn never to wash off the blood that splashed on her sandals during the rioting, adds: "Now the whole world is watching Watts."

How do people make history under conditions designed to dissuade them from intervening in it? Los Angeles blacks are better paid than any others in the United States, but they are also the most separated from the California superopulence that is flaunted all around them. Hollywood, the pole of the global spectacle, is right next door. They are promised that, with patience, they will join in America's prosperity, but they come to see that this prosperity is not a fixed state but an endless ladder. The higher they climb, the farther they get from the top, because they start off disadvantaged, because they are less qualified and thus more numerous among the unemployed, and finally because the hierarchy that crushes them is not based on economic buying power alone: they are also treated as inherently inferior in every area of daily life by the customs and prejudices of a society in which all human power is based on buying power. Just as the human riches of the American blacks are despised and treated as criminal, monetary riches will never make them completely acceptable in America's alienated society: individual wealth will only make a rich nigger because blacks as a whole must represent poverty in a society of hierarchized wealth. Every witness noted the cry proclaiming the global significance of the uprising: "This is a black revolution and we want the world to know it!" Freedom Now is the password of all the revolutions of history, but now for the first time the problem is not to overcome scarcity, but to master material abundance according to new principles. Mastering abundance is not just changing the way it is shared out, but totally reorienting it. This is the first step of a vast, all-embracing struggle.

The blacks are not alone in their struggle, because a new proletarian consciousness (the consciousness that they are not at all the masters of their own activities, of their own lives) is developing in America among strata which in their rejection of modern capitalism resemble the blacks. It was, in fact, the first phase of the black struggle which happened to be the signal for the more general movement of contestation that is now spreading. In December 1964 the students of Berkeley, harassed for their participation in the civil rights movement, initiated a strike [the FSM] challenging the functioning of California's "multiversity" and ultimately calling into question the entire American social system in which they are being programmed to play such a passive role. The spectacle promptly responded with exposés of widespread student drinking, drug use and sexual immorality -- the same activities for which blacks have long been reproached. This generation of students has gone on to invent a new form of struggle against the dominant spectacle, the teach-in, a form taken up October 20 in Great Britain at the University of Edinburgh during the Rhodesian crisis. This obviously primitive and imperfect form represents the stage at which people refuse to confine their discussion of problems within academic limits or fixed time periods; the stage when they strive to pursue issues to their ultimate consequences and are thus led to practical activity. The same month tens of thousands of anti­Vietnam war demonstrators appeared in the streets of Berkeley and New York, their cries echoing those of the Watts rioters: "Get out of our district and out of Vietnam!" Becoming more radical, many of the whites are finally going outside the law: "courses" are given on how to hoodwink army recruiting boards (Le Monde, 19 October 1965) and draft cards are burned in front of television cameras. In the affluent society disgust is being expressed for this affluence and for its price. The spectacle is being spat on by an advanced sector whose autonomous activity denies its values. The classical proletariat, to the very extent to which it had been provisionally integrated into the capitalist system, had itself failed to integrate the blacks (several Los Angeles unions refused blacks until 1959); now the blacks are the rallying point for all those who refuse the logic of this integration into capitalism, which is all that the promise of racial integration amounts to. Comfort will never be comfortable enough for those who seek what is not on the market, what in fact the market specifically eliminates. The level attained by the technology of the most privileged becomes an insult, and one more easily grasped and resented than is that most fundamental insult: reification. The Los Angeles rebellion is the first in history to justify itself with the argument that there was no air conditioning during a heat wave.

The American blacks have their own particular spectacle, their own black newspapers, magazines and stars, and if they are rejecting it in disgust as a fraud and as an expression of their humiliation, it is because they see it as a minority spectacle, a mere appendage of a general spectacle. Recognizing that their own spectacle of desirable consumption is a colony of the white one enables them to see more quickly through the falsehood of the whole economic-cultural spectacle. By wanting to participate really and immediately in the affluence that is the official value of every American, they are really demanding the egalitarian actualization of the American spectacle of everyday life -- they are demanding that the half-heavenly, half-earthly values of the spectacle be put to the test. But it is in the nature of the spectacle that it cannot be actualized either immediately or equally, not even for the whites. (The blacks in fact function as a perfect spectacular object-lesson: the threat of falling into such wretchedness spurs others on in the rat-race.) In taking the capitalist spectacle at its face value, the blacks are already rejecting the spectacle itself. The spectacle is a drug for slaves. It is designed not to be taken literally, but to be followed from just out of reach; when this separation is eliminated, the hoax is revealed. In the United States today the whites are enslaved to the commodity while the blacks are negating it. The blacks are asking for more than the whites -- this is the core of a problem that has no solution except the dissolution of the white social system. This is why those whites who want to escape their own slavery must first of all rally to the black revolt -- not, obviously, in racial solidarity, but in a joint global rejection of the commodity and of the state. The economic and psychological distance between blacks and whites enables blacks to see white consumers for what they are, and their justified contempt for whites develops into a contempt for passive consumers in general. The whites who reject this role have no chance unless they link their struggle more and more to that of the blacks, uncovering its most fundamental implications and supporting them all the way. If, with the radicalization of the struggle, such a convergence is not sustained, black nationalist tendencies will be reinforced, leading to the futile interethnic antagonism so characteristic of the old society. Mutual slaughter is the other possible outcome of the present situation, once resignation is no longer tolerable.

The attempts to build a separatist or pro-African black nationalism are dreams giving no answer to the real oppression. The American blacks have no fatherland. They are in their own country and they are alienated. So are the rest of the population, but the blacks are aware of it. In this sense they are not the most backward sector of American society, but the most advanced. They are the negation at work, "the bad aspect that makes history by setting the struggle in motion" (The Poverty of Philosophy). Africa has no special monopoly on that.

The American blacks are a product of modern industry, just like electronics or advertising or the cyclotron. And they embody its contradictions. They are the people that the spectacle paradise must simultaneously integrate and reject, with the result that the antagonism between the spectacle and human activity is totally revealed through them. The spectacle is universal, it pervades the globe just as the commodity does. But since the world of the commodity is based on class conflict, the commodity itself is hierarchical. The necessity for the commodity (and hence for the spectacle, whose role is to inform the commodity world) to be both universal and hierarchical leads to a universal hierarchization. But because this hierarchization must remain unavowed, it is expressed in the form of unavowable, because irrational, hierarchical value judgments in a world of irrational rationalization. It is this hierarchization that creates racisms everywhere. The British Labour government has come to the point of restricting nonwhite immigration, while the industrially advanced countries of Europe are once again becoming racist as they import their subproletariat from the Mediterranean area, developing a colonial exploitation within their own borders. And if Russia continues to be anti-Semitic it is because it continues to be a hierarchical society in which labor must be bought and sold as a commodity. The commodity is constantly extending its domain and engendering new forms of hierarchy, whether between labor leader and worker or between two car-owners with artificially distinguished models. This is the original flaw in commodity rationality, the sickness of bourgeois reason, a sickness which has been inherited by the bureaucratic class. But the repulsive absurdity of certain hierarchies, and the fact that the entire commodity world is directed blindly and automatically to their protection, leads people to see -- the moment they engage in a negating practice -- that every hierarchy is absurd.

The rational world produced by the Industrial Revolution has rationally liberated individuals from their local and national limitations and linked them on a global scale; but it irrationally separates them once again, in accordance with a hidden logic that finds its expression in insane ideas and grotesque values. Estranged from their own world, people are everywhere surrounded by strangers. The barbarians are no longer at the ends of the earth, they are among the general population, made into barbarians by their forced participation in the worldwide system of hierarchical consumption. The veneer of humanism that camouflages all this is inhuman, it is the negation of human activities and desires; it is the humanism of the commodity, the solicitous care of the parasitical commodity for its human host. For those who reduce people to objects, objects seem to acquire human qualities and truly human manifestations appear as unconscious "animal behavior." Thus the chief humanist of Los Angeles, William Parker, could say: "They started acting like a bunch of monkeys in a zoo."

When California authorities declared a "state of insurrection," the insurance companies recalled that they do not cover risks at that level -- they guarantee nothing beyond survival. The American blacks can rest assured that as long as they keep quiet they will in most cases be allowed to survive. Capitalism has become sufficiently concentrated and interlinked with the state to distribute "welfare" to the poorest. But by the very fact that they lag behind in the advance of socially organized survival, the blacks pose the problems of life; what they are really demanding is not to survive but to live. The blacks have nothing of their own to insure; their mission is to destroy all previous forms of private insurance and security. They appear as what they really are: the irreconcilable enemies, not of the great majority of Americans, but of the alienated way of life of the entire modern society. The most industrially advanced country only shows us the road that will be followed everywhere unless the system is overthrown.

Certain black nationalist extremists, to show why they can accept nothing less than a separate nation, have argued that even if American society someday concedes total civil and economic equality, it will never, on a personal level, come around to accepting interracial marriage. This is why this American society itself must disappear -- in America and everywhere else in the world. The end of all racial prejudice, like the end of so many other prejudices related to sexual inhibitions, can only lie beyond "marriage" itself, that is, beyond the bourgeois family (which has largely fallen apart among American blacks) -- the bourgeois family which prevails as much in Russia as in the United States, both as a model of hierarchical relations and as a structure for a stable inheritance of power (whether in the form of money or of social-bureaucratic status). It is now often said that American youth, after thirty years of silence, are rising again as a force of contestation, and that the black revolt is their Spanish Civil War. This time their "Lincoln Brigades" must understand the full significance of the struggle in which they are engaging and totally support its universal aspects. The Watts "excesses" are no more a political error in the black revolt than the POUM's May 1937 armed resistance in Barcelona was a betrayal of the anti-Franco war. A revolt against the spectacle -- even if limited to a single district such as Watts -- calls everything into question because it is a human protest against a dehumanized life, a protest of real individuals against their separation from a community that would fulfill their true human and social nature and transcend the spectacle.

SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL (December 1965)

Newly translated and reissued July 1992 (in the aftermath of the second Los Angeles riot) by Ken Knabb. Reprinted from Public Secrets (1997). This translation supersedes the version in the Situationist International Anthology (1981).

Comments

One might almost think that the new Algerian regime's sole aim has been to confirm the brief analysis the SI made of it in the Address to Revolutionaries that we issued in Algiers soon after its inaugural putsch.

Submitted by libcom on September 5, 2005

Liquidating self-management is the total content of Boumédienne's regime, its only real activity; and that project began the very moment the state, through the deployment of the military force that was the only crystallization it achieved under Ben Bella, its only solid structure, declared its independence vis-Ã -vis Algerian society. The state's other projects -- the technocratic reorganization of the economy, the social and juridical extension of its power base -- are beyond the capacities of the present ruling class in the real conditions of the country. The mass of undecided, who had not been enemies of Ben Bella but who were disappointed by him and who waited to judge the new regime by its actions, can now see that it is ultimately doing nothing but establishing an autonomous state dictatorship and thereby declaring war on self-management. Even to formulate specific accusations against Ben Bella or to destroy him publicly seems to be beyond its power for a long time to come. The only remnant of "socialism" professed in Algeria is precisely that core of inverted socialism, that product of the general reaction within the workers movement itself which the defeat of the Russian revolution bequeathed as a positive model to the rest of the world, including Ben Bella's Algeria: the big lie of the police state. Under such a regime the political enemy is not condemned for his real positions, but for the opposite of what he was; or else he suddenly fades into an organized silence -- he never existed, either for the tribunal or for the historian. And Boumédienne, from the beginning one of those most responsible for the fact that Algerian self-management is only a caricature of what it needs to be, officially calls it "a caricature" in order to reorganize it authoritarianly. In the name of an essence of self-management ideologically backed by the state, Boumédienne rejects self-management's actual fledgling manifestations.

The same inversion of reality determines the Boumediennist critique of the past. What Ben Bella is reproached for having done, or for having gone too far in, is precisely what he did not do and what he scarcely pretended to strive for -- the liberation of the women or real support for the liberation struggles in Africa, for example. The present regime lies about the past because of its own profound unity with that past. The Algerian ruling class has not changed, it is reinforcing itself. It reproaches Ben Bella for having done poorly what he had in fact only pretended to do; for a revolutionariness that it itself has now ceased even simulating. The Algerian ruling class, before June 19 as well as after, is a bureaucracy in formation. It is pursuing its consolidation by partially changing the way its political power is shared out. Certain strata of this bureaucracy (military and technocratic) are predominating over others (political and unionist). The basic conditions remain the weakness of the national bourgeoisie and the pressure from the poverty-stricken peasant and worker masses, a part of which took over the self-managed sector when the former (European) ruling class fled the country. The merging of the Algerian bourgeoisie with the state bureaucracy is easier with the new ruling strata that Boumédienne represents; moreover, this evolution harmonizes better with the region of the global capitalist market to which Algeria is linked. In addition, the bureaucratic strata that ruled with Ben Bella were less capable of an open struggle against the demands of the masses. Ben Bella and the unstable social balance of power, which was the temporary result of the struggle against France and the colonists, were overthrown at the same time. When they saw themselves supplanted, the previously predominant bureaucratic strata (the leaders of the FLN Federation of Greater Algiers and the General Union of Algerian Workers) hesitated, then rallied to the new regime because their solidarity with the state bureaucracy as a whole was naturally stronger than their ties to the mass of workers. The agricultural workers union, whose congress six months before had adopted the most radical positions on self-management, was the first to come over.

Among the bureaucratic forces in the lobbies of power around Ben Bella, two mutually antagonistic but related groupings had a special status: the Algerian Communist Party and the foreign leftists -- nicknamed "pieds-rouges" -- who had put themselves at the service of the Algerian state. They were not so much in power as pretenders to power. Poor relative of power, waiting to inherit it, this extreme left wing of the bureaucracy acquired its credentials as representative of the masses through its connection with Ben Bella: it drew its mandate not from the masses but from him. It dreamed of one day getting a monopoly on this power over the masses, this power that Ben Bella still shared on all sides. Since Ben Bella was personally its only access to present power and its main promise for the future, its only guarantee of being tolerated (its Sukarno),1 the bureaucratic left demonstrated in his defense, but in an uncertain manner. Just as it respectfully flocked around the state, it placed itself on the terrain of the state to oppose the unfavorable shift of the relation of forces within the state. Here again the Boumediennist critique of these elements, lumped together as "foreigners," in the name of a specifically Algerian Socialism, is entirely false. Far from "making theory for theory's sake" (El Moudjahid, 22 September 1965), the pieds-rouges represented an exhausted mixture of complete theoretical nullity and of unconscious or consciously hidden counterrevolutionary tendencies. Far from wanting to make adventurous utopian "experiments" in Algeria, they possessed nothing but mistakes or lies that had been revealed as such a thousand times. The best revolutionary ideas of the pieds-rouges were unsuitable not because they came from too far away, but because they were repeated much too late. It was a matter of history, not geography.

More radical and more isolated, at the extreme left of the Ben Bella regime, Mohammed Harbi was the thinker of self-management, but only by grace of the prince, in the bureaus of power. Harbi rose to the highest point reached by Algerian revolutionary thought: up to the idea of self-management, but not at all up to its consistent, effective practice. He understood its notion, but not its being. He occupied the self-contradictory position of governmental theorist of self-management. More accurately, he might be considered its court poet: soaring above practice, he eulogized self-management more than he theorized it. The self-management state, that logical monstrosity, had in Harbi its celebrator and its guilty conscience. Boumédienne's tanks in the streets meant a rationalization of the state, a state that wanted henceforth to free itself from the ridiculous self-contradictions of the Ben-Bellaist balance of power and from any guilty conscience and to simply be a state. It then became clear that Harbi, the unarmed prophet of self-management, had not envisaged self-management's self-defense, its defense on its own terrain, but only its defense through the mediation of Ben Bella. But if Harbi counted on Ben Bella alone to defend self-management, who did he count on to defend Ben Bella? The thinker of self-management was protected by Ben Bella, but who was going to protect his protector? He believed that Ben Bella, the incarnation of the state, would remain universally accepted in Algeria, although Harbi himself only accepted his "good side" (his token recognition of self-management). But the real process advanced by way of his bad side: the forces that followed the opposite line of argument on Ben Bella were more capable of intervention. Ben Bella was not the resolution of the Algerian contradictions, he was only their temporary cover. History has shown that Harbi and those who thought like him were mistaken. They will now have to radicalize their ideas if they want to effectively fight the Boumediennist dictatorship and realize self-management.

The fall of Ben Bella is a landmark in the collapse of global illusions regarding the "underdeveloped" version of pseudosocialism. Castro remains its last star, but he, who could previously argue with some plausibility that elections were unnecessary because the people were armed, is now demanding that all arms be turned in, and his police are rounding them up (Reuters, 14 August 1965). His second in command, Guevara, has already disappeared without any explanation being given to the masses from whom these leaders had demanded a blind personal confidence. Meanwhile the Algerians who are experiencing the fragility of Ben-Bellaist socialism are also discovering the value of all the so-called socialist camp's concern for their cause: the Chinese, Russian and Cuban states, along with Nasser, are naturally rushing to outdo each other in fraternal greetings to Boumédienne's regime. Revolutions in the underdeveloped countries will continue to fail miserably as long as they recognize and emulate any existing model of socialist power, since they are all manifestly false ones. The disintegrated official Sino-Soviet version of this socialism and the "underdeveloped" version of it mutually admire and reinforce each other and both lead to the same outcome. The first underdevelopment we have to get beyond is the worldwide underdevelopment of revolutionary theory.

The internal struggles of the Algerian bureaucracy, both during the war of independence and in the postwar 1962-1965 period, took the form of clan struggles, personal rivalries, inexplicable disputes among the leaders, obscure shifts of alliances. This was a direct continuation of the conditions prevailing around Messali Hadj since before the Algerian revolt. Not only was all theory absent, even ideology was only summarily improvised and confused; everything remained centered around superficial, abstract political questions. Since June 19 another period has begun: that of the confrontation between the ruling class and the workers, and this is the real movement that creates the conditions and need for a theory. As early as July 9, at a meeting of delegates from 2500 self-managed enterprises held at Algiers and chaired by Minister of Industry Boumaza, the delegates expressed to the latter their insistence on self-management as an inviolable principle and made a series of critiques concerning the state's role in limiting this principle. The delegates "questioned the multiplicity of overseers (prefectures, ministries, party) and denounced the heavy taxation and the state's nonpayment of debts; some delegates also brought up the problem of layoffs, the 'draconian' demands of the foreign suppliers and the paralyzing role of the customs department" (Le Monde, 10 July 1965).

Those delegates knew what they were talking about. Since [Boumédienne's] June 19th Declaration -- in which the term "self-management" is not even mentioned once -- the regime has been preparing the "stabilization" of the economic situation through the strengthening of state control and the accelerated training of "cadres." It aimed to start collecting installment payments as soon as possible for the more than 100,000 squatted lodgings; to recover money "stolen from the state" in the self-managed enterprises; to reduce the wearing out of poorly maintained equipment; and to regularize all the illegal seizures carried out by the masses upon the departure of the French. Since then, in spite of the fact that self-management is the very form through which the paralyzing respect for property (private or state), which has been such an obstacle in the workers movement, can be overcome, the workers in the self-managed sector, awaiting their several-months-overdue wages, are continually reproached for having stolen a large part of what they have produced. The most urgent goal of the Algerian state, which already has enough soldiers and police, is to train 20,000 accountants a year.

The central struggle, veiled and open, immediately broke out between the ruling class representatives and the workers precisely over the issue of self-management. The "reassuring" declarations of Boumaza and Boumédienne didn't fool anyone. The "labor unrest" alluded to by Le Monde on October 3 is a euphemism for the resistance of the sole bastion of socialist revolution in Algeria -- the self-managed sector -- against the most recent maneuvers of the ruling bureaucratic-bourgeois coalition. The union leaders themselves could not remain silent: their official status as representatives of the workers vis-Ã -vis the state and their social status as left wing of the ruling class were at stake. The September articles in Révolution et Travail -- in which genuine workers' demands ("when workers are reduced to poverty, self-management is violated") are mixed with expressions of the union leaders' increasing alarm ("agreement with the June 19th Declaration's analyses," but denunciation of the technocrats and economists) -- exactly reflect this situation of overlapping vertical and horizontal struggles. The increasing reference to "economic anarchy" (which always really means self-management), the judicial measures against the self-managed sector (e.g. forcing the self-managed enterprises to pay back-taxes), which the newspapers talk about less, and the restitution of the Norcolor factory to its former owner -- all this shows these "labor" leaders that soon they will no longer have a place in the ruling apparatus. The new pretenders are already there: the "scramble for power of dubious elements" that outrages Révolution et Travail expresses the ruling class's swing to the right. The techno-bureaucrats and the military have no possible allies but the representatives of the traditional bourgeoisie. At the same time that the officers, in the style of South American armies, are attaining bourgeois status (everyone knows about their BMWs, duty-free and 30% discounted), a multitude of Algerian bourgeois, following in the footsteps of the Norcolor owner, are returning to the country in the expectation of recovering their property, seized "in completely illegal conditions by unscrupulous persons" (Boumaza). Added to these challenges is the rapid increase in food prices. The workers, thoroughly aware of this process, are resisting on the spot: the repeated strikes in the Renault factories, the strikes of the press and parcel distributors and of the telephone and insurance workers, the demonstrations of the unpaid workers of Mitidja -- these are the first steps of a movement of rage which, if it asserts itself effectively, is capable of sweeping aside the whole present regime.

Incapable of mastering a single one of their problems, the rulers react with constant delirious conferences, constant torture in their prisons, and denunciations of the "slackening of moral standards." El Moudjahid (7 December 1965) attacks "the erotic sentimentalism of a young generation without political commitment" and the (accurate) views of those who "are tempted to reject religion as being a restraint on their taste for pleasure and on their liberation, which they take simply to mean their possibilities for pleasure, and who consider the contributions of Arab civilization as a step backward." The tone is no different from that used by the rulers in Washington or Moscow when they regretfully announce their lack of confidence in the young generation. And after a few months the new regime is emulating Ben Bella in its most ludicrous Islamic manifestation: the prohibition of alcohol.

The present opposition to the Boumediennist dictatorship is twofold: On one side, the workers are defending themselves in the enterprises (self-managed or not); they are the real contestation implied in the facts. On another side, the leftists of the FLN apparatus are trying to re-form a revolutionary apparatus. The first effort of the Organisation de la Résistance Populaire, led by Zahouane and supported by the French Stalinists, was a hollow declaration that only appeared six weeks after the coup, a declaration that analyzed neither the present regime nor the means to oppose it. Its second appeal was addressed to the Algerian police, from whom it anticipated revolutionary support. This strategy proved to be somewhat of a miscalculation since by the end of September those police had arrested Zahouane and broken up his first clandestine network (Harbi himself had already been arrested in August). The ORP is continuing its activity, beginning to collect contributions "for Ben Bella" from Algerian workers in France and winning over the majority of the student leaders. This apparatus (underground or in exile) is counting on an economic-political crisis in Algeria in the near future to reestablish its influence with the struggling Algerian workers. In this Leninist perspective it will present itself, with or without the banner of Ben Bella, as the solution for a replacement of the Boumediennist regime.

What is nevertheless going to prevent the establishment of a Bolshevik-type apparatus, striven for by so many militants? The time passed since Lenin and his failure, and the continued and evident degradation of Leninism, which is directly expressed by these leftists' allying with and fighting each other in every sort of variant -- Khrushchevo-Brezhnevists, Maoists, sub-Togliattists, pure and semi-Stalinists, all the shades of Trotskyism, etc. All of them refuse, and are forced to refuse, to clearly face the essential problem of the nature of the "socialism" (i.e. of the class power) in Russia and China, and consequently also in Algeria. Their main weakness during the struggle for power is also the main guarantee of their counterrevolutionary role if they were to accede to power. These leftists will present themselves as a natural continuation of the personalized political confusion of the preceding period; but the real class struggle in Algeria has now brought that period to a close. Their doubts about Ben Bella overlapped with their doubts on the world (and on socialism) and will continue after Ben Bella. They don't say all they know and they don't know all they say. Their social base and their social perspective is that bureaucratic sector which came out worst in the power reshuffle and which wants to regain its old position. Seeing that they can no longer hope to dominate the regime, they turn toward the people in order to dominate the opposition. Nostalgic bureaucrats or would-be bureaucrats, they want to counterpose "the people" to Boumédienne, whereas Boumédienne has already revealed to the masses the real focus of opposition: state bureaucrat versus worker. But the most despicable aspect of their bolshevism is this glaring difference: the Bolshevik Party did not know the sort of bureaucratic power it was going to end up establishing, whereas these leftists have already been able to see, in the world and among themselves, that bureaucratic power which they wish to restore in a more or less purified form. The masses, if they have the chance to choose, will not choose this corrected version of a bureaucracy whose essential elements they have already had the opportunity of experiencing. The Algerian intellectuals who don't rally to the regime still have the choice between participating in this apparatus or seeking a direct linkup with the autonomous movement of the masses. As for the Algerian petty bourgeoisie (storekeepers, lower functionaries, etc.), it will naturally tend to support the new technocratic-military bureaucracy rather than the bureaucratic leftists.

The only road to socialism, in Algeria as everywhere else, passes through "an offensive and defensive pact with the truth," as a Hungarian intellectual put it in 1956. People in Algeria who got the SI's Address understood it. Wherever practical revolutionary conditions exist, no theory is too difficult. Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, a witness to the Paris Commune, noted, "For the first time one can hear the workers exchanging their opinions about problems that until now have been considered only by philosophers." The realization of philosophy, the critique and reconstruction of all the values and behavior imposed by alienated life -- this is the maximum program of generalized self-management. The leftist militants of the bureaucratic groups tell us that these theses are correct but that the time has not yet come when one can tell the masses everything. Those who argue in such a perspective never see this time as having come, and in fact they contribute toward making sure that it never does come. It is necessary to tell the masses what they are already doing. The specialized thinkers of revolution are the specialists of its false consciousness, who afterwards come to realize that they have done something entirely different from what they thought they were doing. This problem is aggravated here by the particular difficulties of underdeveloped countries and by the persistent theoretical weakness in the Algerian movement. Although the strictly bureaucratic fringe within the present opposition is extremely small, its very existence as a "professional leadership" is a form that weighs on and determines the content of that opposition. Political alienation is always related to the state. Self-management can expect nothing from revived Bolsheviks.

Self-management must be both the means and the end of the present struggle. It is not only what is at stake in the struggle, but also its adequate form. It is its own tool. It is itself the material it works on, and its own presupposition. It must totally recognize its own truth. The state power proposes the contradictory and absurd project of "reorganizing self-management"; it is in fact self-management that must organize itself as a power or disappear.

Self-management is the most modern and most important tendency to appear in the struggle of the Algerian movement, and it is also the one that is the least narrowly Algerian. Its meaning is universal. In contrast to the Yugoslavian caricature that Boumédienne wants to emulate, which is only a semi-decentralized instrument of state control ("We have to decentralize in order better to control the self-managed enterprises," Boumédienne openly admits in Le Monde, 10 November 1965), a subordinate level of central administration; and in contrast to the Proudhonian mutualism of 1848, which aimed at organizing on the margins of private property, real self-management -- revolutionary self-management -- can be won only through the armed abolition of the titles of existing property. Its failure in Turin in 1920 was the prelude to the armed domination of Fascism. The bases for a self-managed production in Algeria were spontaneously formed -- as in Spain in 1936, as in Paris in 1871 in the workshops abandoned by the Versaillese -- wherever the owners had to flee following their political defeat: on vacant property. These takeovers are a vacation from property and oppression, a temporary break from alienated life.

Such self-management, by the simple fact that it exists, threatens the society's entire hierarchical organization. It must destroy all external control because all the external forces of control will never make peace with it as a living reality, but at most only with its label, with its embalmed corpse. Self-management cannot coexist with any army or police or state.

Generalized self-management, "extended to all production and all aspects of social life," would mean the end of the unemployment that affects two million Algerians, but it would also mean the end of all aspects of the old society, the abolition of all its spiritual and material enslavements and the abolition of its masters. The present fledgling effort toward self-management can be controlled from above only because it consents to exclude below it that majority of the workers who don't participate in it or who are unemployed; and because even within its own enterprises it tolerates the formation of dominating strata of "directors" or management professionals who have worked their way up from the base or been appointed by the state. These managers are the state virus within that which tends to negate the state; they are a compromise. But the time for compromise is past, both for the state power and for the real power of the Algerian workers.

Radical self-management, the only kind that can endure and conquer, refuses any hierarchy within or outside itself. It must also reject in practice any hierarchical separation of women (an oppressive separation openly accepted by Proudhon's theory as well as by the backward reality of Islamic Algeria). The self-management committees, as well as all the delegates in the federations of self-managed enterprises, should be revocable at any moment by their base, this base obviously including all the workers, without any distinctions between permanent and seasonal ones.

The only program for the Algerian socialist elements consists in the defense of the self-managed sector, not only as it is but as it must become. This defense must therefore counter the purge carried out by the state with another purge within self-management: a purge carried out by its rank and file against everything that negates it from within. A revolutionary assault against the existing regime is only possible with a continued and radicalized self-management as its point of departure. By putting forward the program of quantitatively and qualitatively increased workers' self-management, one is calling on all the workers to directly take on the cause of self-management as their own cause. By demanding not only the defense of self-management but its extension to the point of dissolving all specialized activity not answerable to self-management, Algerian revolutionaries can show that this defense is the concern not only of the workers of the temporarily self-managed sector, but of all the workers, as the only way toward a definitive liberation. In this way they will demonstrate that they are struggling for the liberation of everyone and not for their own future domination as specialists of revolution; that the victory of "their party" must at the same time be its end as a separate party.

As a first step, it is necessary to envisage linking up self-management delegates with each other and with the enterprise committees that are striving for self-management in the private and state sectors; to disseminate and publish all information on the workers' struggles and the autonomous forms of organization that emerge out of them, and to extend and generalize these forms as the sole path for a profound contestation. At the same time, through the same clandestine relations and publications, it is necessary to develop the theory of self-management and its requirements, within the self-managed sector itself and before the masses of Algeria and the world. Self-management must become the sole solution to the mysteries of power in Algeria, and it must know that it is that solution.

SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL
Algiers, December 1965 (circulated clandestinely)

Translated by Ken Knabb (slightly modified from the version in the Situationist International Anthology). Translator’s note below.

  • 1 Sukarno (president of Indonesia 1945-1967) "reigned à la Ben Bella, by basing his power on the obvious antagonism between the army and the most powerful Stalinist party of Asia" (Internationale Situationniste #10, p. 44) -- until the army carried out a coup (1965) in which hundreds of thousands of Communists were massacred, and shortly afterwards removed Sukarno from power.

Comments

jv-martin.png

On the arrest of J.V. Martin on fabricated charges of terrorism in Denmark following a firebomb detonating in his apartment. From Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966).

Author
Submitted by Fozzie on February 20, 2023

Early in 1965, quite a stir was made when J.V. Martin was brought up on charges in Denmark in relation to the publication of "subversive comics," three examples of which were included in the preceding issue of this journal (pages 21, 36 and 37). As he was responsible for the SI in that country, Martin found himself personally prosecuted following a complaint by the Danish branch of the "Moral Rearmement" movement, the famous American capitalist shock ideological organization, essentially concerning tracts clandestinely distributed by us in Spain. These tracts were formal détournements of comics, with naked girls expressing various truths in favor of moral and political freedom, which were inscribed in the traditional "speech balloons." This allowed Moral Rearmement to express their condemnation of the SI, starting with Martin, for crimes against morality and good custom, as well as eroticism, pornography, anti-social activity, outrages against the State, and so on.

Along with these documents, the celebrated image of Christine Keeler, declaring her obvious superiority to the Danish princess who had consented to marry King Constantin (rightly described as a fascist before he proved it himself, last summer, turning against almost everyone in Greece) drew the additional accusation of injury to the Danish royal family. The ridiculous proceedings pursued by Moral Rearmement were closely followed by the entire Danish press. In a public statement, Martin immediately agreed that the situationists were indeed enemies of all the values defended by Moral Rearmement, and were actively employed in the moral disarmement of society as we know it. He also admitted, "It's certainly possible that the photos of the naked girls might have some erotic effect. Fortunately." He pointed out that while the question of the publication of pornography had nothing to do with our tracts, it certainly had a lot to do with the repressive morality they provoked, and moreover generally tolerated it. After all, the supression of publications injurious to the Francoist order by the social democratic authorities of a country officially opposed to Francoism was somewhat paradoxical. In the end, the judge decided not to take the case against Martin any further, dismissing the charges rather than dragging on a process that has proved instructive to say the least.

Not long after, NATO decided to move German troops into Denmark on two occasions, to participate in joint exercises with the Danish army. This was the first time that the German army had been allowed into that country since the end of its occupation in 1945. The fact aroused the usual hollow protests from across the Left, with their stock standard complaints and petitions. Naturally, no-one took any notice. The first German units were due to arrive in Randers, Jutland, on March 16th, where Martin happened to be living at that time.

The notoriety stemming from his recent charges reinforced the liaison that his previous situationist activity had created with various avant-garde elements. Besides Martin, a few students from the University of Aarhus, local dockers, and old partisans of the armed struggle against the Nazis formed a committee to oppose the entry of the troops into their city, by force if necessary. Their declaration was plastered on posters and written on walls, drawing people from all over Denmark. Journalists from every Sandinavian newspaper — and even a few from Germany — converged on Randers to witness the encounter.

With the aid of important police reinforcements, the Danish army surrounded the city on March 16th. Their plan was to smuggle the German motorized column under cover of darkness to the barracks where they were due to be stationed. But the committee had organized surveillence of every route, so that it could be warned as soon as the approaching troops were seen. These small groups were able to slow the convoy's passage, giving the rest of the protesters enough time to assemble by the barracks at the point where the column was due to be shown in. The German vehicles arrived in the middle of a violent clash between the protesters and Danish soldiers and police. Rocks were thrown at the vehicles, and tyres were slashed. A jeep was even stolen. After some time, the troops managed to enter the barracks, where they spent the night, only to leave again in light of this symbolic victory. Shortly afterwards, a spokesman for Bonn denied that they had ever intended to send a secind detachment of German troops into Denmark, and declared that the accomplishment of first manuever was perfectly satisfactory.

Two days later, on the evening of 18 March, while Martin and the rest of the group responsible for the demonstration were leaving his house at 16 Slodsgade — from which all ongoing action was organized, and which was therefore known to all as "riot headquarters" — a powerful firebomb ripped through the room that they had just exited, injuring his young daughter Morton, who was fortunately on another storey. In next to no time, the house was consumed by fire. While initial suspicions focused on an attack by the extreme Right, it was Martin who was arrested, police accusing him of terrorist activity that this "accident" had revealed quite opportunely.

The following day, however, the police retracted their completely groundless theory. They easily located the bomber, a demonstrator by the name of Kanstrup, who had left a second bomb in a taxi, in luggage bearing his name. Kanstrup has had a rather colorful career: leader of the Young Communists, he infiltrated a neo-nazi organization in the German Democratic Republic in order to blow the cover of their agents , whom he denounced to the authorities in East Berlin. He was subsequently arrested by the Copenhagen police for spying. After this mysterious turn of events, Kanstrup became a Troskyite, before secretly obtaining dual membership of a Left socialist group. It was on this account that he participated in the Randers demonstration, without revealing, of course, that he had brought two bombs along with him.

According to Kanstrup's statements to the police, his bomb, which he had only ever considered putting to symbolic use, was accidentally detonated by Martin. It soon became evident that Kanstrup was a provocateur. It could not be established, however, whether the explosion was intended to actually kill the people who happened to be in the room a few moments earlier, or merely to destroy the building. Kanstrup could have activated the detonator himself, or an accomplice might even have triggered the bomb by throwing a grenade through the window (Kanstrup himself put this hypothesis forward then retracted it several times, considering the unlikeliness of the coincidence, and his own affirmation that he was the only person who knew of the bomb). We can't be bothered trying to figure out if Kanstrup was acting on behalf of the political police in Copenhagen — who have had a hold over him since his espionage affair — or the Stalinists — regardless of whether they are the insignificant Danish party or even his bosses in East Berlin. Indeed, in this instance, the goals of both institutions are the same. It is first of all a matter of brutally intimidating a protest group; and then worsening the situation by giving the impression that the organizers can be linked to a terrorist conspiracy with Eastern Bloc bureaucrats. While it is the Danish political police who have more to gain in manipulating Kanstrup in such a way (which they continue to demonstrate clearly enough), the Stalinists could only have found themselves dealt a rather telling blow by an autonomous organization which had just shown its capacity for powerful action.

J.V. Martin, variously treated by the German press at the time as an anarchist and a pro-Stalinist, and in any case as anti-German (although posters in Germany underline that the reception in Randers was only aimed at German militarism), affirmed that his opposition to the Warsaw pact was equal to his opposition to NATO, and that the situationists were certainly not anti-German, to the point of naming one of their journals Der Deutsche Gedanke (German Thought).

The Swedish police and the Scandinavian press then uncovered a small nazi group in Sweden, which was trying to promote an image of systematic extremism by possessing a number of weapons and sending a few threatening letters in the post. At the beginning of Kanstrup's trial, and to the visible surprise of his lawyer — the Stalinist Madsen — the prosecuter suddenly and without explanation abandoned the charge of bombing an inhabited building, and limited himself to call for two months imprisonment without remission, which he obtained, for "possession of explosives and participation in an illegal protest"! It's not hard to figure out that Denmark has the judiciary leniency of the Wild West, for a short while later a young comrade who had thrown a simple teargas grenade into a mass conducted by the repugnant pastor Billy Graham was condemned to three months prison. The police laboratory in Copenhagen then concluded that the bomb could have gone off because of an extremely high temperature was reached in its vicinity (but without taking into account the fact that it exploded into unheated pieces). Finally, in December, the lawyer Madsen demanded that a new inquiry be opened, precisely accusing the police in Randers of having been aware of Kanstrup's attack on Martin's house twenty-four hours in advance; and therefore of at the very least having let him accomplish it. He also accused the army of having provided the explosives. His accusations were reported by the entire Danish press, including the Stalinist daily Land og Folk (1-1-66). Thus, the Stalinists only revealed Kastrup's shady role as a provocateur in the service of the police after a long delay whose uncertainty served their purposes.

This whole affair is interesting, as a sign of the general mounting of violence under the comfort of Scandinavian democracy; and the movement that carries this violence towards its transformation into contestation of society, here attempting methods best demonstrated by the Japanese avant-garde. It appears in the same current as the quite recent example of hundreds of young Amsterdam Provos who took to the streets on 10 March, completely sabotaging the wedding ceremony of a local princess to an ex-Nazi. It is remarkable that, from the day after the confrontation in which the SI's practice showed its excellence, a separate demonstration of peaceful protest called by various non-violent organizations, found itself attacked by teenage street gangs. Another notable detail is that with the complete destruction of the principle depot of SI publications in Northern Europe, most of the paintings completed eighteen months earlier by Martin and Bernstein for the exhibition "Destruction of RSG 6" (cf. I.S. #9, page 32 1 ) were also destroyed: here we have a supression of artistic negation without its realization! The "blanket" of art now finds itself burnt. It is also very significant that the proceedings celebrated in America or in Spain, or in the unity of action of the Moroccan and French police, can find their application in the army and police of social-democratic Denmark, where it is a matter of standing in the way of a movement that makes them anxious.

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

Attachments

Comments

Cover of Accion Communista journal

The SI on the spanish journal Acción Comunista. From Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966).

Submitted by Fozzie on February 20, 2023

A new current of social critique is developing in Spain, with which we are in considerable agreement. This current is not only faced with the task of opposing that particular retrograde form of power, the Franco regime. It has to oppose all the forms of global power, because it is preparing to confront the next Spanish form of capitalist power. Its aim is to form an alternative at the moment (which will not be long in coming) when the Franco regime comes to an end — so that a choice is presented between modern capitalism, as it exists in the European Common Market, and genuine socialism, i.e. workers’ power, which exists nowhere in the world. This current is opposed to all the old organizations of the Spanish left, which are hostile to a struggle for such objectives. But there is also a struggle within this current, between a lucid critique of existing conditions and tendencies that still confusedly cling to fragments of old revolutionary ideologies. The difficulties of underground activity and the numerous forms of censorship imposed by the Franco regime complicate the work of clarification and objective discussion that is needed. The collapse of old leftist politics outside Spain provides the Spanish comrades with negative object lessons about what they must avoid. But the positive experience that could be provided by a new radical critique has been limited by the extremely restricted base of such a critique.

The first attempt of this current to express itself in Spain was the formation of the FLP (Frente de Liberación Popular). The FLP experience proved disappointing because (like the Algerian FLN in 1954) it consisted of groups issuing from the various traditional parties which decided to put aside the question of a program in order to engage in joint action. This coexistence of antagonistic perspectives was soon recognized by the radical wing as the main cause for a stagnation in the FLP’s initial activity (reflected in insufficient linkups with striking workers) and for its inability to clarify the forthcoming crisis of Spanish society. The most advanced tendency that has emerged during the ensuing public discussion over the last few years has published the journal Acción Comunista, of which four issues have appeared since January 1965. According to the opening declaration of this journal: “The editorial committee of Acción Comunista, composed of revolutionary Marxist members of diverse workers organizations, is beginning with these collective articles to elaborate the political platform of a socialist revolution in Spain.” The editors go on to say that this platform will need to be deepened and concretized, “counting on the contributions and critiques of all those who are in agreement with us on the two fundamental points of our platform: the necessity and possibility of a socialist alternative to the current development of capitalism in Spain, and the need for the formation of a genuine revolutionary workers party.” We have been encouraged to make the present contribution to this discussion by the radical and staunchly internationalist perspectives that have been expressed by the Acción Comunista comrades, particularly in Lorenzo Torres’s article “From Workers’ Commissions to Workers Councils” (in issue #2).

The theoretical discussion initiated by Acción Comunista has already addressed four main issues: (1) how to characterize the economy and society of present-day Spain; (2) the general goal of a radical current in Spain; (3) the evaluation of the present state of the global revolutionary movement; and (4) the question of revolutionary organization. On the first two issues we are in complete agreement with the positions they have adopted. The discussion of the last two has been less extensive, and the arguments and ideas that have emerged have been less clear. In this context we are going to offer some observations which we hope will prove useful.

Acción Comunista has shown that Spain can no longer be considered an economically backward country — a dogma which continues to be maintained by all the traditional workers parties. The development of capitalism under Franco during the last decade (part of a global process) has transformed all the conditions in Spain. The ruling class no longer has its main base in a land-owning bourgeoisie, as was the case in the 1930s, but in an industrial bourgeoisie closely interlinked with international capital. This transformation is reflected in the scale of current expansion, in the rapid decrease of the agricultural proletariat (which is being channeled into the new factories), and in the success of Spanish manufactured goods on the international market (in Cuba, for example). It is this development, which has also been provoking a resurgence of worker struggles since 1962, that is leading the ruling class to seek more modern “European forms of exploitation” to replace the old Francoist forms. The neo-capitalist solution to the Franco regime has organized its political force, with the support of the Church, in a pseudo-underground Christian-Democratic party which seeks to unify the oppositional Catholics. This party, due to the influence of the professors who belong to it, has up till now largely controlled the student opposition, and has taken particular care to prevent any juncture between workers’ and students’ actions (the recent episode in which students were surrounded by the police in a Barcelona convent that had granted them asylum illustrates this point). Being aware, however, that the Catholic labor unions will not suffice to guarantee a painless birth of the new regime they envision, the Christian Democrats are seeking other “workers organizations” capable of lulling the workers to sleep during the transition. They will find such elements in the Spanish Socialist Party, particularly among those who are calling for a technocratic renewal of this reformism, such as T. Galvan. The “national reconciliation” advocated by the Stalinist party is completely in favor of such collaboration (though the Spanish bourgeoisie’s mistaken but ingrained fear of “reds” may cause it to reject this sincere offer of collaboration and assistance). The recent negotiations between the CNT and the Falangist unions are yet another reflection of this same tendency toward submission to bourgeois evolution.

The Acción Comunista comrades accept the present struggle for democratization while simultaneously pointing out its inevitable limits and putting forward their own perspectives. Specifically, they advocate participating in the workers commissions and factory committees that already exist illegally or semilegally, in order to work toward a local, regional and national coordination of these commissions to the point of transforming them into workers councils. This change of function and unification of sovereign workers assemblies would constitute a classic dual-power situation, concretely revealing the alternative between capitalism and workers’ power. Acción Comunista does not present this outcome as a probability, but as a possibility which will depend on the consciousness of the masses and on the programmatic formulations that revolutionary elements will have been able to develop among those masses. None of the organized political groups have any conception of this sort of activity — as was shown by the example of the Madrid steelworkers’ struggle, which was organized by a workers commission outside the influence of any of those groups. Supporting the power of workers councils, Acción Comunista advocates a model of socialist society incompatible with any bureaucratic domination, whether economic or political: “When a class has gone through the practical apprenticeship of struggle against a union bureaucracy (in this case the Falangist bureaucracy), it becomes easy for it to understand the dangers of any bureaucracy and the need for a genuine workers democracy, within its own organizations as well as outside them . . . and the need for direct election of all its delegates, at the shopfloor, enterprise and national level” (Acción Comunista #2, p. 22). If there is a significant bureaucratic danger at the moment of victory, it is even more obvious that the mere reconstitution of a “Popular Front” safeguarding the capitalist order, as sought by so many of the oppositional forces, amounts to the defeat of any post-Franco socialist perspective.

Although they are preparing to support in their country a total struggle against modern capitalism, and against the bureaucratic organizations whose inevitably reactionary role they denounce, not all of the Acción Comunista comrades seem to completely recognize the implications of this capitalist modernism or the role of this bureaucratic power in the world, or the interaction between the two (their simultaneous rivalry and solidarity). The theory of revolutionary organization is clearly inseparable from such a consistent analysis. In issue #1 (pp. 26-27), Acción Comunista declares itself in favor of “a total freedom of criticism concerning the numerous and increasingly evident negative aspects” of the so-called socialist countries (whose global crises have had the salutary effect of undermining some of the illusions held by the bureaucratically influenced underground organizations in Spain) and calls for “a scientific analysis of the social system of those countries.”
But this analysis is not sufficiently developed. The lack of precision regarding the nature of the oppression in Russian or China is still greater in the case of Cuba, Castro’s “antidogmatism” seeming to have at least temporarily impressed some of the Acción Comunista editors. Similarly, the Marxian critique of ideology has as yet been taken up only vaguely in Acción Comunista; and without the foundation of that critique it is not possible to understand and effectively combat the bureaucracy of professional leaders. And in fact the democratic workers organization that Acción Comunista evokes seems to be insufficiently distinguished from Leninism: the proposal that “permanent” members be limited to a minority in its “Central Committee” is certainly an inadequate precaution against the bureaucratization of the party itself. In another place Acción Comunista seems to accept the project of one big nonbureaucratic labor union, only to admit a few lines later that the predictable union divisions and the examples of coopted trade unionism in the modern capitalist countries render such a project very dubious (since the unitary enterprise committees must maintain their sovereignty, there will be an inevitable open struggle between those assemblies and any union).

Devoting itself to a concrete discussion under difficult conditions, and having to begin by creating some of the very bases of information that need to be discussed, Acción Comunista has presented to its readers a number of classic texts of the workers movement. This presentation suffers from a certain empiricism, because it is not criticized by the editors from any specific perspective. Documents that are well worth reading — on the program of the Spartakus League, Christian Rakovsky’s Letter to Valentinov, some texts from the First International, a forthcoming text from Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness — are presented alongside Trotsky’s 1936 analyses of the bureaucracy. Marx’s Address of the Central Council to the Communist League (March 1850), reproduced in issue #4, is appropriate in the part where it urges the workers not to give up their political autonomy and warns them of the consequences of tagging behind the petty bourgeoisie, but very dangerous in the final section which advocates the most Jacobin sort of statist centralism. The first part is precisely applicable to Spain and its coming crisis. The latter has been disproved by the experience of all the proletarian revolutions of our time; and was already inapplicable to the situation of Spain in 1936, where regional autonomy was the basis enabling the expression of the most radical tendencies. The present position of Acción Comunista calls rather for a study of a party such as the Kommunistische Arbeiter Partei in 1920 Germany. Moreover, the rich experience of the Spanish revolution has been strangely neglected by Acción Comunista. The problem of revolution can only be posed in a global and total form. Just as it must not forget the scope of its terrain of struggle, revolution must not forget its own past. Acción Comunista is aware of this when it states that its militants are “at the forefront of all the fronts of struggle.” The fundamental theoretical critique of politico-economic power, the understanding of the profound tendencies of modern society in its production of culture and its regimentation of everyday life, the cohesion of all the positions taken at the international level — these are fronts of the same unitary struggle. In this context, it seems to us that Eduardo Mena’s article “Political Regression in Algeria” (issue #3) somewhat underestimates the bureaucratic factor in its condemnation of Boumédienne’s reactionary coup. More disappointing is the reprinting in issue #4 of a particularly stupid and superficial article on the Los Angeles uprising by Bertrand Russell, and of another article by the Trotskyist economist Mandel, whose book (currently fashionable among the Parisian intelligentsia) Treatise on Marxist Economics by its title alone contradicts the whole revolutionary method of Marx, who limited himself to criticizing political economy as a discipline reflecting a society dominated by the logic of the commodity.

The first role of revolutionary organization, the very price of its right to existence, is certainly its coherence, the ruthless critique which must smash the “force of habit,” the most powerful force of the old world among the masses. And the most important habits to smash are the “habits of the left” during a revolutionary situation. At such a moment, if you don’t disarm Noske he will kill you. For forty years this red police role has primarily been been carried out under the “communist” label, whether in Barcelona in 1937 or more recently in Athens or Budapest.

Revolutionary coherence must also be concretized. It is necessary to make the workers aware of what they are capable of doing, and of the consequences of following a revolutionary strategy, whether it ends in victory or in defeat. When workers councils appear, there can be no moderation on either side. A councilist program has everything to gain and nothing to lose from recognizing and facing all its implications. The old principle of battle — “Don’t put your fate at stake without engaging all your forces” — is its principle, and its forces are precisely the awareness of, and desire for, what is possible. The enemies of workers councils are quite justified in fearing the worst from councilist power, just as the councilists must fear the worst from the inevitable retaliation their agitation will provoke, whatever they do or don’t do. The bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy are forced by all their interests (whether as established ruling class or as ruling class in the process of formation) to totally combat the aims of the councils. So you might as well express those aims to those who can recognize them as their program and their life.

Councilist power is the total enemy of existing “survival.” It therefore cannot itself survive for very long without staking and winning its bet on the total transformation of all existing conditions and the immediate liberation of life. From the very beginning it must bring about the fundamental transformation of what is produced and how it is produced, reorienting people’s needs and abolishing the whole commodity production system. It must transform the organization of the environment, the methods and goals of education, the implementation of justice and the very definition of crimes. It must eliminate all hierarchies and the morality and religion that go with them. The deepening, the defense and the illustration of such a program are the first tasks of any organization that proposes to unleash such forces. But the same program can be expressed by its other side: concrete methods of popular agitation. Acción Comunista is well aware that what will unify the present “opposition” in the immediate aftermath of the Franco regime will be respect for the capitalist order, organized into some sort of democratic national front. The way to make a clear break with this pseudo-opposition is to expropriate the foreign and domestic capital that owns the means of production. This project seems rather abstract, and many people will be unable to imagine any solution to such a complex problem except some form of statist nationalization. To cut through this apparent complexity, let us propose a concrete example.

Advanced European capitalism’s present organization of consumption is leading its privileged strata to buy houses in Spain. An article in France-Soir (11 November 1965) notes that “there are now kilometers of villas, whole strings of vacation-villages which have sprung up in six months on previously vacant beaches. For Spain this is an economic godsend; for the middle classes of France, Germany and England it’s a discovery of paradise — at only ten thousand francs apiece.” The article goes on to quote a representative of the “Constructores Ibericos” real estate company: “Our buildings have been approved by ‘Securitas,’ which verifies construction quality throughout the world, and are also guaranteed for ten years by a Swiss insurance company.” But the insurance companies of Europe could be upset in Spain as they were in 1905 by the “economic declaration” of the St. Petersburg Soviet, which announced that loans contracted by the Czarist government to fight the Russian people would in no case be honored by that people once they had liberated themselves. Those who take advantage of the low price of local labor power by investing in construction in Spain are economically supporting the regime that is responsible for that condition, as well as littering the countryside with “second homes” that will remain empty nine-tenths of the year. To this new form of exploitation, reflecting a contemptuous indifference toward the Spanish proletariat, a councilist program could respond by declaring right now that all foreign real estate investments will be seized without compensation the moment workers councils come to power. The Spanish workers would be able to recognize the highest moments of their past in this project of direct expropriation; while the forces that strive for the democratization of capitalism will see it as the most intolerable action imaginable. But the international impact of this measure would be just as considerable. Everyone knows that the feeble, years-long anarchist campaign urging tourists to boycott Spain has completely failed. This campaign was carried on in the name of political issues that the masses have clearly forgotten. It went against the whole general development of modern society — the same development that has caused the 1936 revolution to be largely forgotten. This development is resulting in poor people going on vacations (eight million French people visited Spain during the summer of 1965) and no political voluntarism evoking some seemingly incomprehensible detail is going to have any notable effect on this trend. In contrast, a threat against the property of people capable of investing in Spain, in apartments that bring them 10,000 francs apiece, has the interest of bringing glaringly into view a wealthy class whose existence has been completely hidden in Europe since modern sociology’s discovery that classes no longer exist. The European ruling class has been just as forgotten as the Spanish revolution: television never talks about it, and the Left only talks about what is talked about on television. Thus, this scientific demonstration of the existence of a privileged class could have the greatest practical effect, and not only on sociologists.

According to a report of the National Institute of Statistics published in June 1965, half the wage laborers in France still have a monthly paycheck of less than 750 francs (for 27% of them, less than 562 francs). It is quite obvious that these workers would not be harmed by the decision of their Spanish comrades. On the contrary, this example, by revealing both the disease and the appropriate remedy, could have the most salutary influence in their own country. A workers power in Spain would need such support from the masses of Europe, because it would immediately face the active hostility of all the European rulers and “middle classes.” That sector’s investment in “durable goods” in Spain reflects their confidence in the capitalist future of Spain. Our business is to create, against all present appearances, a totally opposite confidence.

Translated by Ken Knabb. From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/spain.html

Comments

On power, urbanism and technology. From Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966).

Author
Submitted by Fozzie on February 21, 2023

An insane society proposes to manage its future by spreading the use of technically improved and collective straightjackets (houses, cities, real-estate developments), which it imposes on us as a remedy for its ills. We are invited to accept and to recognize this prefabricated "non-organic body" as our own; Power intends to enclose the individual in another, radically different self. In order to accomplish this task, a vital one for itself as well as its flunkies (urbanists, real-estate developers), it can count on the misguided souls currently working overtime in the so-called social sciences. Servants, in particular, of an "anthropology" that is no longer speculative but structural and operational, they busy themselves in extricating one more "human nature," but this time a directly usable one, like the police register, for various conditioning techniques. The final result of the process thus undertaken (assuming that the rising strength of the new opposition that everywhere accompanies it gives it enough leisure) henceforth appears as the modernized version of a solution that has proven itself, the concentration camp, here deconcentrated all over the planet. People in it will be absolutely free, especially to come and go, to circulate, while being total prisoners of that futile freedom to come and go in the byways of Power.

The dominant society, which has nowhere been mastered (eliminated) by us, can only master itself by dominating us. The convergence of present forms of development for living space little by little makes this domination concrete. A room, an apartment, a house, a neighborhood, a town, a whole territory can and must be developed step by step or simultaneously: with no transition from "how to live happily in a large housing project" (Elle) to how "to make this society agreeable for everyone" (Le Monde). Present-day society, in its proclaimed desire, as sick as it is ingenious, to survive, falls back entirely on a growth that can do nothing but develop in a dull way the ridiculous potentialities that are the only ones permitted by its own rationale, the logic of the market. Which means that political economy, as the "logical conclusion of the denial of humanity," pursues its destructive work. Everywhere there is a spectacular clash between divergent economic theories and policies, but nowhere are the absurd imperatives of political economy itself challenged and bourgeois economic categories abolished in practice for the benefit of a free (post-economic) construction of situations, and therefore of all life, on the basis of the currently concentrated and squandered powers in "advanced" societies. This colonization of the future in the name of a past that deserves to be so utterly abandoned that the memory of it be lost presupposes the systematic reduction of any possible radical alternative, though such are quite present in all manifestations of our oppressive society, so much so that things seem to persist in "going off the tracks," when they are forced to.

This miserable feat of prestidigitation reveals its trademark from the start: ideology, albeit an upside-down, mutilated reflection of the real world and Praxis, but an ideology the practice of which makes what appears to be upside-down and distorted, and not just in the heads of intellectuals and other ideologues, enter into reality: the world turned upside-down in earnest. This modern process of reducing the gap between life and its representation for the benefit of a representation that turns back on its assumptions is merely an artificial, caricatured, spectacular resolution of real problems posed by the widespread revolutionary crisis of the modern world, a "simulacrum" of resolution that will fall at the same time as the greater number of illusions that continue to foster it.

Power lives by our incapacity to live, it maintains splits and separations infinitely multiplied, while at the same time planning occasions that are allowed to happen almost the way it likes. Its masterstroke is still its successful dissociation of everyday life as space-time, individual and social, from the presently possible indissoluble reconstruction of ourselves and the world, for the purpose of separately and jointly controlling time and space and ultimately reducing both one and the other, the one by the other. The progress of these operations visibly betrays the seriousness of an effort in which the sinister vies with the burlesque. The aim is the constitution of a "homogenous," perfectly "integrated" space, formed by the addition of "homologous" functional blocks, structured hierarchically (the famous "hierarchical network of towns, innervating and coordinating a region of a given size, and common to all societies"), so that in the agglomerate thus achieved the gaps, segregations, and multiple conflicts born of separation and the division of labor will be buried in conflict: the conflict between classes, the conflict between city and countryside, the conflict between society and the State, classical ones since Marx, and to which one might add the many interregional "disparities" of which the current conflict between developed and underdeveloped countries is only the pathological exaggeration. The "ruse of history" is nevertheless such that the apparent early successes of this policing arrangement, an attenuation of the class struggle (in the former sense) and of the antagonism between city and countryside, disguise less and less the radical and hopeless proletarianization of the huge majority of the population, condemned to "live" in the uniform conditions that constitute the bastardized and spectacular "urban" milieu born of the break-up of the city, one that, combined with the antagonism between State and society, thereby reinforced and so alarming to the sociologists ("We must establish new channels of communication between the authorities and the population" — Chombart de Lauwe, Le Monde, July 13, 1965), betrays the literally "unreasonable" nature of the process of "rationalizing" the reification in progress, while assuring it all sorts of problems, perfectly "irrational" ones from its bureaucratic and alienated point of view, but no less well-founded from the standpoint of the dialectical reasoning inherent in all living reality, all Praxis. As Hegel clearly saw, if only to congratulate himself on it, in the rule of modern States, the State allows the pseudofreedom of the individual to develop, while maintaining the coherence of the whole, and it draws from this antagonism an infinite strength, which normally turns out to be its Achilles' heel when a new coherence, radically antagonistic to such an order of things, is established and strengthened. Moreover, any coherent and "successful" arrangement must be imposed all over the planet in a widespread urbanism that means reducing the phenomenon of underdevelopment, as potentially disturbing to the impossible equilibrium being pursued. But, as though inadvertently, and in a fatal fidelity to itself, capitalism finds itself making war on underdeveloped countries instead of its touted war on underdevelopment, caught as it is in the trap of contradictory, but for it equally vital, demands, and thereby destroying its own claims to survival: all its technocratic-cybernetic "programmings." Such a dialectic promises a rude awakening to the rulers of the present prehistoric world who dreamed of putting themselves beyond reach while burying us under a wall of cement that will surely end by being our own tomb.

The arrangement, in this perspective, should also be seen as the death throes of communication in the old limited, but real, sense, the residue of which is everywhere hunted down by Power for the benefit of information. Henceforth a "universal communications network" radically suppresses the distance between things while indefinitely increasing the distance between people. Circulation in such a network ends by neutralizing itself, in such a way that the future solution will consist in making people circulate less and information circulate more. People will stay home, transformed into mere audiovisual "receivers" of information: an attempt to perpetuate in practice the current — i.e., bourgeois — economic categories, in order to create the conditions for a permanent and automatic functioning of the present alienated society, "a more smoothly running machine" (Le Monde, 4 June 1964). The economists' "perfect market" is impossible, especially from the fact of distance: a perfectly rational economy would have to be concentrated at a single point (instantaneous Production and Consumption); if the market is not perfect, that would be due to the imperfection of the world itself, causing the developers to work hard to make the world perfect. Real-estate development is a metaphysical enterprise in search of a neo-feudal space. The planners' Grand Oeuvre, their search for the philosophers' stone, means the situation of a space without surprises, where the map would be everything and the territory nothing, because it has been completely effaced and is no longer important, justifying too late the "architecture" of those imbecile semanticists who claim to deliver you from the tyranny of Aristotle, from "A is not Not-A," as though it had been established for centuries that "A becomes Not-A."

This is so true today that one no longer "consumes" space, which tends to become uniform, but time. the American who goes around the world from one Hilton hotel to another without ever seeing any variation in setting, except superficially as imitation local color, thus integrated and reduced to a gimmick, clearly prefigures the itineraries of the multitude. The conquest of space, as an "adventure" reserved for an "elite" and resounding spectacularly all over the planet, will be organized and foreseeable compensation. But, through the expedient colonization of space, Power intends to "draw on the future," to "take a long-term view," which means emptying time of its substance (our achievements in the course of a History) in order to cut it up into perfectly inoffensive slices, devoid of any unforeseeable "future" not programmed by its machines. The aim is the constitution of a gigantic contrivance designed to "recycle" linear time for the benefit of an expurgated and "shrunken" time, the mechanical time of machines, without history, and which would combine the pseudocyclical time of the quotidian with a universalized neo-cyclical time, the time of passive acceptance and forced resignation to the permanence of the present order of things.

It must be said: "alienation and oppression in society cannot be arranged, according to any of their variation, but only rejected totally along with that society itself" (I.S. 4, p.36) 1 . The task of reunifying time and space in a free construction of the individual and social time-space belongs to the coming revolution: the overthrow of the "developers" will coincide with a decisive transformation of everyday life, and it will be that transformation.

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

Comments

From Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966).

Author
Submitted by Fozzie on February 21, 2023

As though old Marx directed everything from his grave, the commodity form has contributed, by the logic of its real development, to enlightening and deepening the critique of political economy. As bourgeois and bureaucrats, the heirs of this critique have, of course, done everything theoretically and practically to conceal or maintain the confusion about the subject by drowning it under a load of metaphysical subtleties and theological arguments. But the world has gone on without them. Marx transcribed with a blinding clarity into the mundane everyday the analyses the bourgeois and the bureaucrats do all they can to dissimulate. He gave to the theory of fetishism of commodity an objective truth and an experienced banality which brought it within the understanding of everyone.

The commodity has maintained itself as a form despite the minor setbacks it has suffered since Marx. A form that masks the products of creative activity (of the praxis) that wage labor has deprived of all humanity. A form that — as a faithful heir to the old Judeo-Christian God — has acquired an autonomous existence and created man and world in its image. A form that gave birth to the anthropology of an isolated individual who remained deprived of the ruches of his social relationships. The commodity is the praxis of power: not only the dissolutive principle of the old peasant-religious civilization (the remains of which it is still tracking down) but a mode of representation of the world and a form of action upon it. It has acquired the totality of social reality to the quantifiable and installed the totalitarian domination of the quantitative, even extending it to those areas of life that have not yet been dominated.

What seemed to be the most concrete was in fact the most abstract; a formal rationalization, an illusion. But such an illusion (once it has acquired its autonomy) acts unlike a revolutionary idea by inciting to submission in the real world.

The prevailing society always advances and reaches new heights in the escalation of repression and alienation. By combining the fetishism of the commodity with the fetishism of the work of art, the "cybernated state" has summoned a fetishism at its own level: the commodity spectacle which is a projection of all life into a hypostasized and crystallized essence, ghost and scaled-down model of life itself. The concentration of alienations has developed parallel to the concentration of capital. Competitive capitalism was satisfied with crushing social man with a host of partial alienations. Bureaucratic capitalism, by reducing the old separate spheres to one reification, and on the road to a rapid cybernation, deep-freezes social man and puts him in the shop-window.

Such a process and the prospective of its end could only be unforeseeable for bourgeois thought and still-born structuralist thought. In fact a structural analysis could have deduced from the commodity form the totality of the society it produces and which reproduces it, including the ideology it contains. This ideology was incapable of going through such an analysis since it only unconsciously expressed the structures of the reification processes underway and erected them into an ahistorical absolute.

Undertaken during the Renaissance, the bourgeoisie's old work of negation was accomplished haphazardly and always on time. The unitary society dissolved long ago is replaced by emptiness, an emptiness presented as the only possible. To this micro-society that organized itself around unities real enough though limited in quantity and quality (village, family, guild, etc.), emptiness has substituted a cohort of reified abstractions: the individual, the state, the consumer, the market et. al. that drew their apparent reality from the appearance of reality they have assume din our lives.

The principles of formal logic (which penetrated the City with the first merchants) find their full realization in the commodity-spectacle. The principle of identity is to the commodity what the category of totality is to the revolutionary movement. In the structure of the commodity form — prior to its overwhelming expansion — the general identity of commodities was only obtainable by subverting the fictitious identification into a general abstract equivalent. This illusory identity, assumed daily, succeeded in penetrating the identity of all needs and therefore of all consumers, and in this way achieves a certain degree of reality. The full realization — the complete identity — of the old abstract equivalence would be the climax of this process. Due to this dilation, the area of cultural production, or publicity, has more and more trouble differentiating between products and so prophesizes the great tautology to come.

The commodity, like the bureaucracy, is a formalization and a rationalization of praxis: its reduction to some thing that can be dominated and manipulated. In the end, social reality under this domination reduces itself to two contradictory meanings: a bureaucratic-commodity meaning (which on another level corresponds to exchange value) and a real meaning. The bureaucratization of capitalism does not mean an inner qualitative transformation, but on the contrary is an extension of the commodity form. The commodity was always bureaucratic.

The spectacular-commodity form parodies the revolutionary project of the mastery of the environment, natural and social, by a humanity become master of itself and its history. The spectacular-commodity presides over the domination of an isolated and abstract individual in an environment organized by power. If it is true that men are the products of their conditions, it is sufficient to create inhuman conditions to reduce them to the state of things. In the organization of the commodity atmosphere, as in the principles of communicating vessels, "Man" is reduced to the state of things, and things in return assume human qualities. The magazine Elle can use the publicity title: "These furnishings live" — yes, off our very lives. Man is the world of man.

Nietzsche notes that a "predominance of rice in diet leads to the use of opium and narcotics. As a predominance of potatoes leads to the use of alcohol. Which agrees with the fact that pushers of narcotic thought-fashions as well as Hindu philosophers advocate a purely vegetarian diet. They want to make of this diet a law for the masses. Seeking thus to awaken needs they alone could satisfy, they and not others." But in a society that can only secrete the need for another life, the opium of commodity-spectacle is but a mock realization of this sole real want. Through the commodity form and its shows, the society of the spectacle tends to crumble this sole want by giving it a host of illusory and partial satisfactions. In exchange for the surrender of the possible — in other words, another society — it generously grants us all the possibilities of being other in this one.

The commodity-spectacle colonizes the possible by delineating with police methods the practical and theoretical horizon of the time. In the Middle Ages, the religious framework seemed to be the insurmountable horizon within which all class struggles had to take place. The spectacular-commodity form tends to create for itself a similar framework in the midst of which all struggles — already lost — for total emancipation would take place.

Even though the commodity form, while monopolizing reality, only lived in the 19th century bourgeois mind, this nightmare of a society is but a lived — an outlived — ideology, an organization of appearances that only rises to an appearance of organization. In fact, the spectacle is but the fantastic realization of the commodity because the commodity never had a true reality. The commodity's mysterious characteristic rests simply on the fact that it mirrors the characteristics of men's lives, but reflects these characteristics back to men as objective. Power thus projects the image of survival as power allows it and adds elements to it that sometimes contain a liberatory potential, always opening on the possible. Through this operation, these elements pass into the service of repression, in making alienation more palatable after it's been adorned by the flowers of criticism.

The reveries of the dominant classes are far more and more revealing to those who can decipher the social context of the period. Nothing less than the construction of an abstract society (abstract from society) where abstract spectators would abstractly consume abstract things. Thus, the highly desired conjunction between ideology and reality would be achieved: its portrayal becoming an image of the world, and in the end substituting the image for the world to build the mirror-world created by power and sold on the market. The conscious representation of one's life as a product of one's own activity would then disappear from the consumer-spectator's mind who could then watch the spectacle of his own consumption.

The cybernetician's conception of going beyond philosophy agrees with the conception's dream of reconstructing, on the basis of the society of the spectacle, the lost paradise of the unitarian societies by pouring into it 2000 years of development in social alienation. By the way, those dreams reveal the slyly concealed and mystified character of these societies: they only drew their unity from repression. In a reality reduced to the quantifiable, thoroughly dominated by the principle of identity and without the slightest dissent to threaten its balance, the old economico-philosophical babble would be useless.

These fantasies sometimes find an embryo of practical realization unsurpassed in what they reveal. A hospital, in Richmond, Virginia, perfected an "Isle of Life: For the Critically Burned." The thing itself is a gigantic plastic bubble kept completely free of germs. The burned, after being de-contaminated, are placed inside this bubble in a pre-sterilized atmosphere — "No claustrophobia: the isle of life is transparent." Awaiting the nuclear conflict that will provide this philanthropic organization with the customers it deserves, this society builds the images of the conditions it imposes: survival in controlled isolation.

Though the commodity-spectacle tends to install this flat and disincarnated positivity, it suckles negation, and like all historical reality produces itself the seeds of its own destruction. An old socio-economic commonplace, the development of the mass consumer goods industry produces and overproduces overproduction. Some sociologists even get to understand that with overproduction of goods, the objective differences between objects disappear. The only differentiation that can be introduced is merely subjective. But it is beyond a sociologist to discover the latent tendencies to self-destruction that such a process gestates. With the disappearance of use-value, the general identity between things passes from experienced fancy to fantasmagorical realization. Yet, the use-value is the kernel of reality which is indispensable to the breeding and survival of exchange value. The commodity itself suppresses its own conditions. When the system can dispense with reality, it is because reality can do without the system. Modern society is already so big [pregnant] with a revolution that it parodies its own destruction. Gadgets work for the doomsday of the commodity. The latest gadgets are nothing-gadgets: the purposeless machine, the self-destructive machine, the phony dollar to be burned in the fireplace.

But the commodity is also producing its own gravediggers who would not know how to limit themselves to the spectacle of its destruction since their objective is the destruction of the spectacle. We can't refute the conditions of existence, we can only liberate ourselves from them.

Gestures appear in outline at all levels of practical contest, ready to transform themselves into revolutionary acts. But in the absence of a revolutionary movement, these practical contests remain at the individual level. Theft in department stores, labeled "unknown proceedings" by the psycho-sociologists of the owners, is of a qualitatively different essence. In the spectacle of abundance, the so-called consumer goods cease being objects for pleasure to become objects for contemplation, more and more radically foreign to those whose needs they are supposed to satisfy. Theft at that point seems to be the only mode of appropriation for pleasure, contrary to the "known proceedings" that appear for contemplative use, which is a way of being possessed by things without getting pleasure from them.

Some sociologists in their police-method investigations have announced as a discovery the relationship that exists between gangs of Hell's Angels and archaic societies. Yet it is only simply and obviously the real relationship between a society which is within the commodity and gangs that are beyond it. The voluntary destruction of commodities, breaking of shop-windows, recalls the sumptuous destructions of pre-capitalist societies (with the restriction that the extent — the revolutionary reach — of such gestures is limited in a society where there is overproduction). Some Hell's Angels avoid this ambiguity by stealing commodities in order to give them away. They reproduce on a higher level the practice of giving that dominated archaic societies but which exchange — because it was a formalization of social relationships on the basis of a low level of productive forces — came to ruin. They — the Angels — in this way find a pattern of behavior even better adapted to a society that defines itself as a society of plenty (by beginning practically to go beyond).

The most spontaneous gestures of past insurrections, those called blind by the antennae of power, were finally the most revolutionarily lucid. To cite only one example from the recent past, the insurgents of L.A. directly attacked the spectacular exchange value serving as decor to their bondage: they stormed the heavens the spectacle. As they destroyed the shop-windows and burned down supermarkets, they sketched out on the spot a restitution of use-value: a black carrying a stolen refrigerator in a wheelbarrow, opens it and takes out steaks and bottles of whiskey.

If it is true that until now revolutions have generally lost their time donning the rags of ancient celebrations, the enemy has always known how to remind the revolutions of the gestures that should have been accomplished long before. What has been taken for gestures of despair only expressed the despair of not having accomplished them sooner. Future revolutions will rediscover these gestures immediately and perform them without delay. As destruction of the commodity spectacle, the gestures carry the hope of a free construction of life. It will be time then to claim as man's own all treasures stolen for the benefit of the heaven of the spectacle, to return them toward real life. We will be called the destroyers of the commodity world, we will only be the builders of ourselves.

Translated by Tony Verlaan. From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/perspectives.html

Comments

"capital pants southern style" advert

A short text on "Capital pants" from Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966).

Submitted by Fozzie on March 24, 2023

The autonomy of the commodity is at the root of the dictatorship of appearance; of the fundamental tautology of the spectacle, where importance is always presupposed and defined by the staging of importance. The prefabricated pseudo-event which dominates and orients the real is an event that is no longer visible for what it contains, but which has no other content than to be visible. For example, what is the most grand claim made for Capital pants, strengthened by the submission of thousands of their surveyed citizens (a submission which, the poster does not fail to note, they “themselves have chosen” the details)? Precisely what these fetishes proclaim: they are “the very expression of their own fashion”. The slavish Southernism of these commodities obviously appears as indisputable before the human cattle that it has branded. Rarely has an advertisement of such concertedly weak inventiveness so ably expressed unconsciously the split between men and their objectification; [thus] the insolent rebellion of their own actions return against them as an alien power. All the desires of the era are suspended until our victory in this War of Secession.

And a translation of the advert above:

Translated from the French by Anthony Hayes, September 2012. Thanks to NOT BORED! and Alastair Hemmens.

From: https://thesinisterquarter.wordpress.com/2012/09/23/the-independence-of-the-commodity/

Attachments

Comments

From International Situationniste #10 (March 1966).

Submitted by libcom on September 5, 2005

What can be dealt with by radical theory must be prevented from being dealt with by speculation. As the situationist analysis of reality prepares the way for the practical realization of our project, this demand tends to become more widely applicable.

Knowledge is inseparable from the use that is made of it. The agitation that our irrefutable theories are beginning to foment in varying degrees in all the sectors of the old world is going to see to the improvement and correction of our good use of ideas and things. This is why, in a society of guaranteed abundance, we are the only ones who are not frightened by that abundance.

How to use theory is never problematical. The specialists of idle speculation -- from Socialisme ou Barbarie to Planète -- are only concerned with concealing who profits from their ideology of confusion. The situationists work in the opposite perspective. We pose only the questions to which the will to subversion of the greatest number can respond. Our aim is to give this will its maximum effectiveness.

The topics to consider listed briefly below will have the interest of shedding light on the revolutionary worth of whoever deals with them, and on the importance that must be accorded to them in current struggles.

Critique of political economy -- Critique of the social sciences -- Critique of psychoanalysis (in particular: Freud, Reich, Marcuse) -- Dialectics of decomposition and supersession in the realization of art and philosophy -- Semiology: contribution to the study of an ideological system -- Nature and the ideologies of nature -- The role of playfulness in history -- History of theories and theories of history -- Nietzsche and the end of philosophy -- Kierkegaard and the end of theology -- Marx and Sade -- The structuralists.

The romantic crisis -- The Preciosity movement -- The baroque -- Artistic languages -- Art and everyday creativity -- Critique of dadaism -- Critique of surrealism -- Society and pictorial perspective -- Self-parodying art -- Mallarmé, Joyce and Malevich -- Lautréamont -- Primitive arts -- On poetry.

The Mexican revolution (Villa and Zapata) -- The Spanish revolution -- Asturias 1934 -- The Vienna insurrection -- The Peasant War (1525) -- The Spartakist revolution -- The Congolese revolution -- The Jacqueries -- Unknown revolutions -- The English revolution -- The communalist movements -- The Enragés -- The Fronde -- Revolutionary songs (study and anthology) -- Kronstadt -- Bolshevism and Trotskyism -- The Church and the heresies -- The different currents of socialism -- Socialism and underdevelopment -- Cybernetics and power -- The state -- The origins of Islam -- Theses on anarchy -- Theses for a final solution of the Christian problem -- The world of the specialists -- On democracy -- The Internationals -- On insurrection -- Problems and theory of self-management -- Parties and labor unions -- On the organization of revolutionary movements -- Critique of civil and penal law -- Nonindustrialized societies -- Theses on utopianism -- Homage to Charles Fourier -- Workers councils -- Fascism and magical thought.

On the repetitive in everyday life -- Dreams and dreamlike ambiances -- Treatise on the passions -- The moments and the construction of situations -- Urbanism and popular construction -- Manual of subversive détournement -- Individual adventure and collective adventure -- Intersubjectivity and coherence in revolutionary groups -- Play and everyday life -- Personal fantasies -- On the freedom to love -- Preliminary studies toward the construction of a base -- Madness and entranced states of mind.

RAOUL VANEIGEM (1966)

Translated by Ken Knabb (slightly modified from the version entitled "Some Theoretical Questions To Be Treated Without Academic Debate or Speculation" in the Situationist International Anthology).

Comments

Houari Boumedienne (1966) by Erling Mandelmann

"Proletarian revolutions . . . pitilessly scoff at the hesitations, weaknesses and inadequacies of their first efforts, seem to throw down their adversary only to see him draw new strength from the earth and rise again formidably before them, recoil again and again before the immensity of their tasks, until a situation is finally created that goes beyond the point of no return."

--Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Submitted by libcom on September 5, 2005

Comrades,

The collapse of the revolutionary image presented by the international Communist movement is taking place forty years after the collapse of the revolutionary movement itself. This time gained for the bureaucratic lie -- that supplement to the permanent bourgeois lie -- has been time lost for the revolution. The history of the modern world pursues its revolutionary course, but unconsciously or with false consciousness. Everywhere there are social confrontations, but nowhere is the old order destroyed, not even within the very forces that contest it. Everywhere the ideologies of the old world are criticized and rejected, but nowhere is "the real movement that suppresses existing conditions" liberated from one or another "ideology" in Marx's sense of the word: ideas that serve masters. Revolutionaries are everywhere, but nowhere is there any real revolution.

The recent collapse of the Ben-Bellaist image of a quasi-revolution in Algeria is a striking example of this general failure. The superficial power of Ben Bella represented the moment of rigid balance between the movement of the Algerian workers toward the management of the entire society and the bourgeois bureaucracy in the process of formation within the framework of the state. But in this official balance the revolution had nothing with which to further its objectives -- it had already become a museum piece -- whereas those in possession of the state controlled all power, beginning with that fundamental repressive instrument, the army, to the point of finally being able to throw off their mask, i.e. Ben Bella. Two days before the putsch, at Sidi Bel Abbes, Ben Bella added the ridiculous to the odious by declaring that Algeria was "more united than ever." Now he has stopped lying to the people and the events speak for themselves. Ben Bella fell as he had reigned, in solitude and conspiracy, by a palace revolution. He was ushered out by the same forces that had ushered him in: Boumédienne's army, which had opened the road to Algiers for him in September 1962. Ben Bella's regime ratified the revolutionary conquests that the bureaucracy was not yet able to repress: the self-management movement. The forces so well hidden behind the "Muslim Brother" Boumédienne have this clear goal: to eliminate all self-management. The June 19th Declaration sums up the policy of the new regime with a mixture of Western technocratic jargon and bombast about enforcing Islamic moral values: "We must put a stop to the current stagnation, which is already manifesting itself in lowered productivity, decreasing profitability and a disturbing withdrawal of investments," while "keeping in mind our faith, our convictions and the secular traditions and moral values of our people."

The astonishing acceleration of practical demystification must now serve to accelerate revolutionary theory. The same society of alienation, of totalitarian control (here the sociologist predominates, there the police), and of spectacular consumption (here the cars and gadgets, there the words of the venerated leader) reigns everywhere, despite the diversity of its ideological and juridical disguises. The coherence of this society cannot be understood without an all-encompassing critique, illuminated by the inverse project of a liberated creativity, the project of everyone's control of all levels of their own history. This is the demand in acts of all proletarian revolutions, a demand until now defeated by the specialists of power who take over revolutions and turn them into their own private property.

To revive and bring into the present this inseparable, mutually illuminating project and critique entails appropriating all the radicalism borne by the workers movement, by modern Western poetry and art (as preface to an experimental research toward a free construction of everyday life), by the thought of the period of the supersession and realization of philosophy (Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx), and by the liberation struggles from the Mexico of 1910 to the Congo of today. To do this, it is first of all necessary to recognize, without holding on to any consoling illusions, the full extent of the defeat of the entire revolutionary project in the first third of this century and its official replacement, in every region of the world and in every domain of life, by delusive shams and petty reforms that camouflage and preserve the old order. The domination of bureaucratic state-capitalism over the workers is the opposite of socialism -- this is a fact that Trotskyism has refused to face. Socialism exists wherever the workers themselves directly manage the entire society. It therefore exists neither in Russia nor in China nor anywhere else. The Russian and Chinese revolutions were defeated from within. Today they provide the Western proletariat and the peoples of the Third World with a false model which actually serves as a mere counterbalance to the power of bourgeois capitalism and imperialism.

A resumption of radicality naturally requires a considerable deepening of all the old attempts at liberation. Seeing how those attempts failed due to isolation, or were converted into total frauds, enables one to get a better grasp of the coherence of the world that needs to be changed. In the light of this rediscovered coherence, many of the partial explorations of the recent past can be salvaged and brought to their true fulfillment (the liberating content of psychoanalysis, for example, can be neither understood nor realized apart from the struggle for the abolition of all repression).(1) Insight into this reversible coherence of the world -- its present reality in relation to its potential reality -- enables one to see the fallaciousness of half-measures and to recognize the presence of such half-measures each time the operating pattern of the dominant society -- with its categories of hierarchization and specialization and its corresponding habits and tastes -- reconstitutes itself within the forces of negation.

Moreover, the material development of the world has accelerated. It constantly accumulates more potential powers; but the specialists of the management of society, because of their role as guardians of passivity, are forced to ignore the potential use of those powers. This same development produces widespread dissatisfaction and objective mortal dangers which these specialized rulers are incapable of permanently controlling. The fundamental problem of underdevelopment must be resolved on a worldwide scale, beginning with the revolutionary overcoming of the irrational overdevelopment of productive forces in the framework of the various forms of rationalized capitalism. The revolutionary movements of the Third World can succeed only on the basis of a lucid contribution to global revolution. Development must not be a race to catch up with capitalist reification, but a satisfaction of all real needs as the basis for a genuine development of human faculties.

New revolutionary theory must move in step with reality, it must keep abreast with the revolutionary praxis which is starting up here and there but which yet remains partial, mutilated and without a coherent total project. Our language, which will perhaps seem fantastic, is the very language of real life. History continues to present ever more glaring confirmations of this. If in this history the familiar is not necessarily known, it is because real life itself only appears in a fantastic form, in the upside-down image imposed on it by the modern spectacle of the world: in the spectacle all social life, including even the representation of sham revolutions, is written in the lying language of power and filtered by its machines. The spectacle is the terrestrial heir of religion, the opium of a capitalism that has arrived at the stage of a "society of abundance" of commodities. It is the illusion actually consumed in "consumer society."

The sporadic explosions of revolutionary contestation are countered by an international organization of repression, operating with a global division of tasks. Each of the blocs, or of the spinoff splinters of blocs, ensures the lethargic sleep of everyone within its sphere of influence, contributing toward maintaining a global order that remains fundamentally the same. This permanent repression ranges from military interventions to the more or less complete falsification practiced today by every constituted power: "The truth is revolutionary" (Gramsci) and all existing governments, even those issuing out of the most liberatory movements, are based on lies inside and out. It is precisely this repression that constitutes the most resounding verification of our hypotheses.

Revolutionary endeavors of today, because they have to break all the rules of false understanding imposed by the "peaceful coexistence" of reigning lies, begin in isolation, in one particular sector of the world or in one particular sector of contestation. Possessing only the most rudimentary conception of freedom, they attack only the most immediate aspect of oppression. As a result, they meet with the minimum degree of aid and the maximum of repression and slander (they are accused of rejecting one existing order while necessarily approving of an existing variant of it). The more difficult their victory, the more easily it is confiscated by new oppressors. The next revolutions can find aid in the world only by attacking this world as a whole. The freedom movement of the American blacks, if it can assert itself incisively, will call into question all the contradictions of modern capitalism; it must not be sidetracked by the "black nationalism" and "black capitalism" of the Black Muslims. The workers of the United States, like those in England, are engaging in "wildcat strikes" against the bureaucratized unions that aim first of all at integrating them into the concentrated, semiregulated capitalist system. It is with these workers and with the students who have just won their strike at the University of California in Berkeley that a North American revolution can be made; and not with the Chinese atom bomb.

The movement drawing the Arab peoples toward unification and socialism has achieved a number of victories over classical colonialism. But it is more and more evident that it must finish with Islam, an obviously counterrevolutionary force as are all religious ideologies. It must grant freedom to the Kurdish people. And it must stop swallowing the Palestinian pretext that justifies the dominant policy in the Arab states -- a policy that insists on the destruction of Israel and thereby perpetuates itself since this destruction is impossible. The repressive forces of the state of Israel can be undermined only by a model of a revolutionary society realized by the Arabs. Just as the success of a model of a revolutionary society somewhere in the world would mean the end of the largely sham confrontation between the East and the West, so would end the Arab-Israel confrontation which is a miniature version of it.

Revolutionary endeavors of today are abandoned to repression because it is not in the interest of any existing power to support them. So far, no practical organization of revolutionary internationalism exists to support them. We passively watch their combat and only the delusory babble of the UN or of the specialists of "progressive" state powers accompanies their death throes. In Santo Domingo US troops dared to intervene in a foreign country in order to back up fascist army officers against the legal government of the Kennedyist Caamano, simply for fear that he would be overwhelmed by the people he had had to arm. What forces in the world took retaliatory measures against the American intervention? In the Congo in 1960 Belgian paratroopers, UN expeditionary forces and the Mining Association's tailor-made state [Katanga] broke the impetus of the people who thought they had won independence, and killed Lumumba and Mpolo. In 1964 Belgian paratroopers, American transport planes, and South African, European and anti-Castroist Cuban mercenaries pushed back the second insurrectional wave of the Mulelists. What practical aid was provided by "revolutionary Africa"? A thousand Algerian volunteers, victors of a much harder war, would have been enough to prevent the fall of Stanleyville. But the armed people of Algeria had long been replaced by a classical army on lease to Boumédienne, who had other plans.

The next revolutions are confronted with the task of understanding themselves. They must totally reinvent their own language and defend themselves against all the forms of cooption prepared for them. The Asturian miners' strike (virtually continuous since 1962) and all the other signs of opposition that herald the end of Francoism do not indicate an inevitable future for Spain, but a choice: either the holy alliance now being prepared by the Spanish Church, the monarchists, the "left Falangists" and the Stalinists to harmoniously adapt post-Franco Spain to modernized capitalism and to the Common Market; or the resumption and completion of the most radical aspects of the revolution that was defeated by Franco and his accomplices on all sides -- the revolution that realized truly socialist human relationships for a few weeks in Barcelona in 1936.

The new revolutionary current, wherever it appears, must begin to link up the present contestatory experiences and the people who bear them. While unifying such groups, it must at the same time unify the coherent basis of their project. The first gestures of the coming revolutionary era embody a new content, both visible and hidden, of the critique of present societies, and new forms of struggle; and also the irreducible moments of all the old revolutionary history that has remained in abeyance, moments which reappear like ghosts. Thus the dominant society, which prides itself so much on its constant modernization, is going to meet its match, for it is at last beginning to produce its own modernized negation.

Long live the comrades who in 1959 burned the Koran in the streets of Baghdad!

Long live the workers councils of Hungary, defeated in 1956 by the so-called Red Army!

Long live the dockers of Aarhus who last year effectively boycotted racist South Africa, in spite of their union leadership and the judicial repression of the Danish social-democratic government!

Long live the "Zengakuren" student movement of Japan, which actively combats the capitalist powers of imperialism and of the so-called "Communist" bureaucracies!

Long live the workers' militia that defended the northeastern districts of Santo Domingo!

Long live the self-management of the Algerian peasants and workers! The option is now between the militarized bureaucratic dictatorship and the dictatorship of the "self-managed sector" extended to all production and all aspects of social life.

SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL
Algiers, July 1965 (circulated clandestinely)

[TRANSLATOR'S NOTE]

1. "The discoveries of psychoanalysis have, as Freud suspected, turned out to be unacceptable for the ruling social order -- or for any society based on repressive hierarchy. But Freud's 'centrist' position, stemming from his absolute, ahistorical identification of 'civilization' with repression by exploitation of labor, and thus his carrying out of a partially critical research within an uncriticized overall system, led psychoanalysis to become officially 'recognized' in all its degraded variants without being accepted in its central truth, namely its potential critical use. This failure is of course not exclusively attributable to Freud himself, but rather to the collapse in the 1920s of the revolutionary movement, the only force that could have brought the critical findings of psychoanalysis to some fulfillment. The subsequent period of extreme in reaction in Europe drove out even the partisans of psychoanalytic 'centrism.' The psychoanalytic debris who are now in fashion (in the West, at least) have all developed out of this initial capitulation, in which an unacceptable critical truth was turned into acceptably innocuous verbiage. By surrendering its revolutionary cutting edge, psychoanalysis exposed itself both to being used by all the guardians of the present Sleep and to being disparaged for its insufficiencies by run-of-the-mill psychiatrists and moralists." (Internationale Situationniste #10, p. 63.) "Cardan [Cornelius Castoriadis], who here as elsewhere seems to think that it suffices to speak of something in order to have it, vaguely blathers on about 'imagination' in an attempt to justify the gelatinous flabbiness of his thought. He latches onto psychoanalysis (just as does the official world nowadays) as a justification of irrationality and of the profound motivations of the unconscious, although the discoveries of psychoanalysis are in fact a weapon -- as yet unused due to obvious sociopolitical reasons -- for a rational critique of the world. Psychoanalysis profoundly ferrets out the unconscious, its poverty and its miserable repressive maneuvers, which only draw their force and their magical grandeur from a quite banal practical repression in daily life." (Internationale Situationniste #10, p. 79.)

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

Comments

The concentrated spectacular image

A short text on Indonesia from Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966).

Submitted by Fozzie on March 24, 2023

In the under-developed zones of the world market, gathered together in the ideology and – at the extreme – in a single man, all that is guaranteed by the state as indisputably admirable must be applauded and consumed passively. The feeble quality of these actually available commodities tends to reduce this consumption to the pure gaze. The image of power, in which this gaze must find all its happiness, is thus a grab-bag of socially recognized qualities. Sukarno had to be both a genial conductor of the people and an irresistible seducer of cinema. [As] philosopher, he concentrated in the concept of “Nasakom” nationalism, religion and Stalinist “communism”; and he has ruled, like Ben Bella, by founding his authority on the evident antagonism of the army and the most powerful Stalinist party in Asia. He wants to continue to hold his “unique role” of perpetual representative of this hybrid perfection even though his army massacred, according to him, at least 97,000 of his communists, and that it continues. “Our ability to round off the corners is such,” wrote the official Indonesian Herald after the failed coup of 1 October [1965], “that if Moscow and Peking had adopted the Indonesian system for ‘resolving’ problems, the current ideological conflict between the two countries would never have become public.”

Translated from the French by Anthony Hayes, September 2012. From https://thesinisterquarter.wordpress.com/2012/09/09/the-concentrated-spectacular/

Translator's notes:

More on the diffuse and concentrated forms of the spectacle can be found in Chapter 3: Unity and Division Within Appearances in Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, in particular theses 63, 64, 65 and 70.

Another English translation of this article was made by Paul Hammond under the title ‘The concentrated spectacle’. It is available in the book Theory of the Dérive and other situationist writings on the city edited by Libero Andreotti & Xavier Costa, and published in 1996 as an accompaniment to the exhibition Situationists: Art, Politics, Urbanism at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. As far as I can tell it is not available to read online.

Comments

diffuse spectacle image

A short text from Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966).

Submitted by Fozzie on March 24, 2023

Newly arrived at the stage of commodity abundance, capitalism disperses its representations of happiness – and thus of hierarchical success – in an infinity of objects and gadgets expressing, really and deceptively, so many appendages to the stratifications of consumer society; and all these objects are outmoded and replaced according to the necessities of the flow of expanding production. The spectacle of manifold objects that are for sale invites the taking of manifold roles because it aims to oblige everyone to recognize and to realize them-self in the effective consumption of this production spread everywhere. Being only a response to a spectacular definition of needs, such consumption itself remains essentially spectacular insofar as it is pseudo-use: it has an effective role only as an economic exchange necessary for the system. Thus the real need is not seen; and what is seen has almost no reality. The object is first of all displayed so that one wants to possess it; then, in response, it is possessed to be displayed. Collections of worthy objects are thus constituted, which have the function of signifying a specific social status, and even a pseudo-personality exactly identical to the objects which represent it. Here, on display in the magazine Lui of January 1964, the collection of purchases equivalent to the “business man” personality contains an edition of the “economic works” of Marx.

Translated from the French by Anthony Hayes, September 2012. From: https://thesinisterquarter.wordpress.com/2012/09/04/the-diffuse-spectacular/

Translator's notes:

More on the diffuse and concentrated forms of the spectacle can be found in Chapter 3: Unity and Division Within Appearances in Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, in particular theses 63, 64, 65 and 70.

Another English translation of this article was made by Paul Hammond under the title ‘The concentrated spectacle’. It is available in the book Theory of the Dérive and other situationist writings on the city edited by Libero Andreotti & Xavier Costa, and published in 1996 as an accompaniment to the exhibition Situationists: Art, Politics, Urbanism at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. As far as I can tell it is not available to read online.

Comments

phtoto of SI meeting in Paris 1966

Preface to a Situationist Dictionary. From Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966).

Submitted by libcom on September 5, 2005

Popular assumptions, due to what they conceal, work for the dominant organization of life. One such assumption is the notion that language is not dialectical, thereby implying that all use of dialectics should be rejected. But in fact nothing is more clearly subject to dialectics than language, since it is a living reality. Thus, every critique of the old world has been made in the language of that world, yet directed against it and therefore automatically in a different language. Every revolutionary theory has had to invent its own terms, to destroy the dominant sense of other terms and establish new meanings in the "world of meanings" corresponding to the new embryonic reality needing to be liberated from the dominant trash heap. The same reasons that prevent our adversaries (the masters of the Dictionary) from definitively fixing language, today enable us to assert alternative positions that negate existing meanings. But we already know that these same reasons also prevent us from proclaiming any definitive certitudes. A definition is always open, never definitive. Ours have a historical value, they are applicable during a specific period, linked to a specific historical practice.

It is impossible to get rid of a world without getting rid of the language that conceals and protects it, without laying bare its true nature. As the "social truth" of power is permanent falsification, language is its permanent guarantee and the Dictionary its universal reference. Every revolutionary praxis has felt the need for a new semantic field and for expressing a new truth; from the Encyclopédistes to the Polish intellectuals' critique of Stalinist "wooden language" in 1956, this demand has continually been asserted. Because language is the house of power, the refuge of its police violence. Any dialogue with power is violence, whether passively suffered or actively provoked. When power wants to avoid resorting to its material arms, it relies on language to guard the oppressive order. This collaboration is in fact the most natural expression of all power.

From words to ideas is only a step -- a step always taken by power and its theorists. All theories of language, from the simple-minded mysticism of Being to the supreme (oppressive) rationality of the cybernetic machine, belong to the same world: the discourse of power considered as the sole possible frame of reference, as the universal mediation. Just as the Christian God is the necessary mediation between two souls and between the soul and the self, the discourse of power establishes itself at the heart of all communication, becoming the necessary mediation between self and self. This is how it is able to coopt oppositional movements, diverting them onto its own terrain, infiltrating them and controlling them from within. The critique of the dominant language, the détournement of it, is going to become a permanent practice of the new revolutionary theory.

Since any new interpretation is called a misinterpretation by the authorities, the situationists are going to establish the legitimacy of such misinterpretation and denounce the fraudulence of the interpretations given and authorized by power. Since the dictionary is the guardian of present meaning, we propose to destroy it systematically. The replacement of the dictionary, that master reference of all inherited and tamed language, will find its adequate expression in the revolutionary infiltration of language, in the détournement extensively used by Marx, systematized by Lautréamont, and now being put within everyone's reach by the SI.

Détournement, which Lautréamont called plagiarism, confirms the thesis, long demonstrated by modern art, that word are insubordinate, that it is impossible for power to totally coopt created meanings, to fix an existing meaning once and for all; that it is objectively impossible to create a "Newspeak." The new revolutionary theory cannot advance without redefining its fundamental concepts. "Ideas improve," says Lautréamont. "The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress depends on it. It sticks close to an author's phrase, uses his expressions, deletes a false idea, replaces it with a true one." To salvage Marx's thought it is necessary to continually make it more precise, to correct it and reformulate it in the light of a hundred years of reinforcement of alienation and of the possibilities of negating alienation. Marx needs to be detourned by those who are continuing on this historical path, not moronically quoted by the thousand varieties of coopters. On the other hand, power's own thought is becoming in our hands a weapon against power. Ever since it came to power the bourgeoisie has dreamed of a universal language, a language which the cyberneticians of today are trying to implement electronically. Descartes dreamed of a language (a forerunner of Newspeak) in which thought would follow thought with mathematical rigor: the mathesis universalis or perpetuity of bourgeois categories. The Encyclopédistes, dreaming (under feudal power) of "definitions so rigorous that tyranny could not tolerate them," paved the way for an eternal future power that would be the ultimate goal of history.

The insubordination of words, during the experimental phase from Rimbaud to the surrealists, has shown that the theoretical critique of the world of power is inseparable from a practice that destroys it. Power's cooption of all modern art and its transformation of it into oppressive categories of its reigning spectacle is a sad confirmation of this. "Whatever doesn't kill power is killed by it." The dadaists were the first to express their distrust in words, a distrust inseparable from the desire to "change life." Following Sade, they asserted the right to say everything, to liberate words and "replace the Alchemy of the Word with a real chemistry" (Breton). The innocence of words is henceforth consciously refuted and language is revealed as "the worst of conventions," something that should be destroyed, demystified, liberated. Dada's contemporaries did not fail to stress its will to destroy everything, the danger it represented to the dominant sense. (Gide uneasily referred to it as a "demolition job.") After Dada it has become impossible to believe that a word is forever bound to an idea. Dada realized all the possibilities of language and forever closed the door on art as a specialty; it posed once and for all the problem of the realization of art. Surrealism was of value only insofar as it carried on this project; in its literary productions it was reactionary. The realization of art -- poetry in the situationist sense -- means that one cannot realize oneself in a "work," but rather realizes oneself, period. Sade's inauguration of "saying everything" already implied the abolition of literature as a separate domain (where only what is literary may be said). But this abolition, consciously asserted by the dadaists after Rimbaud and Lautréamont, was not a supersession. There is no supersession without realization, one cannot supersede art without realizing it. In fact, there has not even been any actual abolition, since even after Joyce, Duchamp and Dada a new spectacular literature continues to thrive. This is because there can be no "saying everything" without the freedom to do everything. Dada had a chance for realization with the Spartakists, with the revolutionary practice of the German proletariat. Their failure made the failure of Dada inevitable. With its cooption (including that of virtually all its original protagonists) into subsequent artistic movements, Dada has become the literary expression of the nothingness of poetic activity, the art of expressing the nothingness of everyday freedom. The ultimate expression of this art of "saying everything" deprived of any doing is the blank page. Modern poetry (experimental, permutational, spatialist, surrealist or neodadaist) is the antithesis of poetry, it is the artistic project coopted by power. It abolishes poetry without realizing it, living off its own continual self-destruction. "What's the point of saving language," Max Bense asks resignedly, "when there is no longer anything to say?" Confession of a specialist! Muteness or mindless chatter are the sole alternatives of the specialists of permutation. Modern thought and art, guaranteeing power and guaranteed by it, move in the realm of what Hegel called "the language of flattery." Both contribute to the eulogy of power and its products, perfecting reification while banalizing it. Asserting that "reality consists of language" or that "language can only be considered in and for itself," the specialists of language arrive at the concepts of "language-object" and "word-thing" and revel in the panegyrics of their own reification. The thing becomes the dominant model and once again the commodity finds its realization and its poets. The theory of the state, of the economy, of law, of philosophy, of art -- everything now has this apologetic character.

Whenever separate power replaces the autonomous action of the masses, whenever bureaucracy seizes control of all aspects of social life, it attacks language and reduces its poetry to the vulgar prose of its information. Bureaucracy appropriates language for its own use, just as it does everything else, and imposes it on the masses. Language -- the material support of its ideology -- is then supposed to communicate its messages and reflect its thought. Bureaucracy represses the fact that language is first of all a means of communication between people. Since all communication is channeled through bureaucracies, people no longer even need to talk to each other: their first duty is to play their role as receivers in the network of informationist communication to which the whole society is reduced, receivers of orders they must carry out.

This language's mode of existence is bureaucracy, its becoming is bureaucratization. The Bolshevik order born out of the failure of the soviet revolution imposed a whole series of more or less magical and impersonal expressions in the image of the bureaucracy in power. "Politburo," "Comintern," "Cavarmy," "Agitprop" -- mysterious names of specialized agencies that really are mysterious, operating in the nebulous sphere of the state (or of the Party leadership) without any relation to the masses except insofar as they reinforce their subjection. Language colonized by bureaucracy is reduced to a series of blunt, inflexible formulas in which the same nouns are always accompanied by the same adjectives and participles. The noun governs; each time it appears the other words automatically fall in around it in the correct order. This "regimentation" of words reflects a more profound militarization of the whole society, its division into two basic categories: the caste of rulers and the great mass of people who carry out their orders. But the same words are also called on to play other roles, invested with the magic power to reinforce the oppressive reality, to cloak it and present it as the only possible truth. Thus there are no more "Trotskyists" but only "Hitlero-Trotskyists"; one never hears of Marxism but only of "Marxism-Leninism," and the opposition is automatically "reactionary" in the "Soviet regime." The rigidity with which these ritual formulas are sacralized is aimed at preserving the purity of this "substance" in the face of obviously contradictory facts. In this way the language of the masters is everything, reality nothing, or at most the shell of this language. People are required in their acts, their thoughts and their feelings to behave as if the state was that reason, justice and freedom proclaimed by the ideology. The ritual (and the police) are there to ensure conformity to this behavior (see Marcuse's Soviet Marxism).

The decline of radical thought considerably increases the power of words, the words of power. "Power creates nothing, it coopts" (Internationale Situationniste #8). Words forged by revolutionary criticism are like partisans' weapons: abandoned on the battlefield, they fall into the hands of the counterrevolution and like prisoners of war are subjected to forced labor. Our most direct enemies are the proponents and established functionaries of false critique. The divorce between theory and practice provides the central basis for cooption, for the petrification of revolutionary theory into ideology, which transforms real practical demands (for whose realization the premonitory signs are already appearing in the present society) into systems of ideas, into demands of reason. The ideologues of every variety, the watchdogs of the reigning spectacle, carry out this task, emptying the content from most corrosive concepts and putting them back into circulation in the service of maintaining alienation: dadaism in reverse. They become advertising slogans (see the recent Club Med prospectus). Concepts of radical critique suffer the same fate as the proletariat: they are deprived of their history, cut off from their roots. They become grist for power's thinking machines.

Our project of liberating words is historically comparable to the Encyclopédiste enterprise. The Enlightenment's language of "tearing apart" (to continue the Hegelian image) lacked the conscious historical dimension; it was a real critique of the decrepit feudal world, but it had no idea of what would emerge from it (none of the Encyclopédistes were republicans). It was, rather, an expression of the bourgeois thinkers' own internal tearing apart. Our language aims first of all at a practice that tears the world apart, beginning with tearing apart the veils that cloak it. Whereas the Encyclopédistes sought a quantitative enumeration, the enthusiastic description of a world of objects in which the bourgeoisie and the commodity were already victorious, our dictionary will express the qualitative, the possible but still absent victory, the repressed of modern history (the proletariat) and the return of the repressed. We propose the real liberation of language because we propose to put it into a practice free of all constraints. We reject any authority, linguistic or otherwise: only real life allows a meaning and only praxis verifies it. Debates over the reality or unreality of the meaning of a word, isolated from practice, are purely academic. We place our dictionary in that libertarian region which is still beyond the reach of power, but which is its only possible global successor.

Language remains the necessary mediation for comprehending the world of alienation (Hegel would say: the necessary alienation), the instrument of the radical theory that will eventually seize the masses because it is theirs. Only then will it find its own truth. It is thus essential that we forge our own language, the language of real life, against the ideological language of power, the terrain of justification of all the categories of the old world. From now on we must prevent the falsification or cooption of our theories. We use specific concepts already used by the specialists, but we give them a new content, turning them against the specialists that they support and against future salaried thinkers who might be tempted to besmear situationist theory with their own shit (as Claudel did with Rimbaud and Klossowski with Sade). Future revolutions must invent their own language. Concepts of radical critique will be reexamined one by one in order to rediscover their truth. The word alienation, for example, one of the key concepts for the comprehension of modern society, must be disinfected after having passed through the mouths of people like Axelos [editor of Arguments]. All words have the same relation with power as does the proletariat: they are both its present servants and the instruments and agents of future liberation from it. Poor Revel! There are no forbidden words; in language, as it will be in every other domain, everything is permitted. To deny ourselves the use of a word is to deny ourselves a weapon used by our adversaries.

Our dictionary will be a sort of code book enabling one to decipher information and rend the ideological veils that cover reality. We will give possible translations that will enable people to grasp the different aspects of the society of the spectacle, and show how the slightest signs and indications contribute to maintaining it. In a sense it will be a bilingual dictionary, since each word has an "ideological" meaning for power and a real meaning that we think corresponds to real life in the present historical phase. Thus we will be able at each step to determine the various positions of words in the social war. If the problem of ideology is how to descend from the heaven of ideas to the real world, our dictionary will be a contribution to the elaboration of the new revolutionary theory where the problem is how to effect the transition from language to life. The real appropriation of the words that work cannot be realized outside the appropriation of work itself. The inauguration of free creative activity will at the same time be the inauguration of true communication, freed at last. The transparency of human relations will replace the poverty of words under the old regime of opaqueness. Words will not cease to work until people do.

MUSTAPHA KHAYATI (1966)

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

Comments

a female white hand with painted nails holds a computer punch card

A short text on computer alogrithms for dating. Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966)

Submitted by Fozzie on February 22, 2023

In 1965, a new technique for matching up prospective spouses was developed in the United States. The tastes and aspirations of each individual are exhaustively defined by their responses to seventy questions, then a computer determines their maximum compatibility, representing it on a punch card. According to Le Monde (25-11-65):

As the years go by, tendencies as unavoidable as they are irreversible develop and begin assert themselves: a computer's job is to be good at everything... They've been introduced into education, taking on the role of tutors. They participate in the development of elaborate "strategies," both military and commercial. As perfect performers in constant demand, they are expected to bear fruit... Each and every soul in search of another fills out a form describing what they are and to what they aspire. Their offers and wishes are then transformed by a perforator into a series of holes, judiciously arranged on a card. One could go so far as to say that with the state of the market, the discovery of what satisfies the one's desires lies but a systematic investigation away; all the better, of course, if the market is larger... The experience, as it happens, is not expensive: a mere three dollars. In less than three months, more than 7000 students from colleges and universities in New England entrusted their personal prospects and leisure time to a computer... Is it not true that there are computers which, working "in real time," can follow the development of events progressively? Why not extend the idea to optimizing matchmaking?

The society that has realized the optimum of separation between humans and their activity and between humans themselves unilaterally distributes images of their own world back to them as information monopolized by economic and State power. To reach a new stage of submission and equivalence to the machinery of progress, this society dreams of going beyond its fabrication of information as substitute for the deprivation of reality; it experiments with the positive fabrication of the reality of individual existence as the carrying out of existing information. Individuals must agree to recognize themselves — and, in a romantic relationship, each other — according to the inevitability of a supposedly free and objective code. But the programmers have themselves been programmed. The criteria of the questionnaires they create for matchmaking are the very social criteria that create separation everywhere. If one seeks another only to discover in this relationship the representation of their own reality, the condom of electronic computation guarantees the reciprocal discovery of the same lie.

The systematic expropriation of intersubjective communication, the colonization of everyday life by authoritarian mediation, does not necessarily have to be the product of technological development. On the contrary, this autonomization of social potential makes it necessary for all possible techniques to be deferred to the specific outcome of a self-regulated existence. In the last ten years, all over the world, radio transmitters and receivers once permitted open dialogue at any wavelength have been silenced by absolute judicial control. Those who use them, selected on the basis of this very obligation to be silent, do not have the right to exchange messages concerning their technique, or meteorological conditions, or even an SOS for survival. The technology of basic communication is evidently forbidden on account of its possible wealth of subversive uses.

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

Comments

a crowd of paris police in front of a cinema

A short text on the police and urbanism. From International Situationniste #10 (March 1966).

Submitted by Fozzie on February 22, 2023

It would only be stating the obvious to say that urbanism aids the police; and that the police, in the age of concentrated capitalism, are quite readily urbanist. Maintaining close relations with these two specializations — relations that have barely been brought to light — is the significant domain of leisure. In 1965, to avoid the threat of teenagers on school vacation being driven to delinquency by their boredom, the French police opened "28 recreation centers, 14 controlled by the CRS1 and 14 by municipal police, reaching a total of more than 5,000 adolescents. And it seems that this is only the beginning" (Le Monde, 2 September 1965). The author of the article added that the CRS eventually intend "to minimize their role as the force of order. . . . The creation of recreation centers for teenagers has been something of a public relations campaign, a sort of demystification of the traditional role of the police." You have to admire the complete inversion of the term "demystification" in this passage, an inversion whose way has been paved by its long-standing sociological fashionability. The mystification would therefore be the studied, baroque, utopian, incomprehensible — situationist, as it were — image of the policeman operating as a member of the force whose job is to maintain order. To a demystified consciousness, then, a policeman would appear as what he was in essence: an entertainer, a psychologist, a humanist. And that's not all: "Police stations should be equppied with hostesses to greet and provide information to the public. This revolutionary proposal was made yesterday by the police themselves at a press conference given by the 'Joint Union Committee for the Police and Sûreté Nationale2 '... For the Joint Union Committee would like to make the relationship between the police and the public less intimidating." (France-Soir, 12 June 1965). And in the editorial of its 97th issue (6 September 1965), the police prefecture's information bulletin, Liaisons, notes that "since ancient times, the police have been identified with the City," and describes the consequent magnitude of their task:

Apart from exceptional circumstances when national cohesion is the instinctive response to a seemingly adverse fate, communication between different social groups proves to be difficult. Each group has a tendency to shut itself off, to think and react according to its preoccupations, its aspirations, and its own language, to a point where words themselves sometimes take on meanings particular to whomever is using them. The individual does not always spontaneously open up to those who do not directly share his concerns, and he often tends to identify with those who do share them, establishing a system of solidarities, partial in that they are limited to but one of the elements of the "self." Contact, in the philosophical sense of the term, becomes more difficult, and so what is supposed to be dialogue is often only a confrontation between two monologues. The Police have to take these partial solidarities in account. . . .

This research into police transparency, into a language of cybernetic consent, into a spontaneous solidarity beyond all real social separations, is capable of directing its conclusion toward an eminently concrete perspective:

To speak of civilization is certainly to speak of material organization, but also of moral concepts, order, security. The developments of urbanization cannot be considered without at the same time taking into consideration the means of putting it at the disposal of the police so that it can face up to its heavy responsibilities. Once again, one cannot content oneself with what is: it is necessary to envisage what will be, and this future is already known.

In this already known future, which is therefore only the spatial extension of the present order, the megapolice will possess the means of meeting their heavy responsibilities. According to an AFP dispatch from New York (1 December 1965), "A custom built television camera was unveiled in New York yesterday: it can operate in complete darkness thanks to a helium laser that projects an infra-red beam. The device could be used in police surveillence operations, as well as for scientific purposes." But if the police are always the priority when it comes to application of scientific development, their function has expanded from a strictly repressive role to a role of preventative integration. It is here that the specialized forces of sociological Sûreté are beavering away. How can the atomized, television addicted mob in the grands ensembles of the new urbanism be led to this "contact, in the philosophical sense of the term," from which the police anticipate the delicate extirpation of any "particular meaning"? This is the role of culture, the new leading commodity in the age of the consumption of leisure. In France, a state run organization is being set up for this very prupose, and the drugstore that has it on display is called a "community arts center": the era that has manufactured the most gaping cultural void is precisely that which is beginning to introduce the museum into everyday life, to tautologically fill the same void. In June 1965, a "Colloquy for grands ensembles Community Leaders" was held, as would be expected, in Sarcelles. Their Official Journal of 30 November published a decree constituting "artistic councillors delegated to artistic creation" divided across "regional action districts."

All that the spectacle spreads is general devaluation: it recuperates the gold of the old contestation and turns it into lead; in the spectacle's universe, all possible value is invisible. Its leaders are therefore so comical that we can depart joyously from the old cultural world, a simple facade maintained by the manipulators of a son et lumière show that lights up the entire surface of society with the same factitious poverty. On his 15 May 1965 visit to Bourges, known in the press as "the capital of cultural leisure" because of the promising results of early surveys ("63,000 inhabitants, 63,000 spectators in eight months" according to the formula in France-Soir, 15 November 1964), de Gaulle declared: "Culture, in our modern world, is not only a refuge and a consolation in the midst of a time that is essentially mechanical, materialist and altogether hectic. It is also the prerequisite for our civilization. As modern as it can be and more modern than it should be, it will be always be guided by spirit."

Spirit often seems to have forgotten and lost itself, but inwardly opposed to itself, it is inwardly working ever forward (as when Hamlet says of the ghost of his father, "Well said, old mole! canst work i' th' ground so fast?") until grown strong in itself it bursts asunder the crust of earth which divided it from the sun, its Notion, so that the earth crumbles away.

— Hegel

The Social Space-Time of Crime


COLOGNE, Tuesday: Criminolgists meeting in Cologne have arrived at the conclusion that most murderers attack members of their family and that most of them kill on the weekend, that is, between Friday evening and first mass on Sunday morning.

France-Soir (9 December 1965)

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

  • 1Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité, the State Security Police.
  • 2France's federal criminal investigation bureau.

Attachments

Comments

jean-luc-godard.jpg

From International Situationniste #10 (March 1966).

Submitted by libcom on September 5, 2005

In cinema Godard presently represents formal pseudofreedom and the pseudocritique of manners and values -- the two inseparable manifestations of all fake, coopted modern art. Everyone does everything to present him as a misunderstood and unappreciated artist, shockingly audacious and unjustly despised; and everyone praises him, from Elle magazine to Aragon-the-Senile.1 Despite the absence of any real critiques of Godard, we see developing a sort of analogy to the famous theory of the increase of resistances in socialist regimes: the more Godard is hailed as a brilliant leader of modern art, the more people rush to his defense against incredible plots. Repetitions of the same clumsy stupidities in his films are automatically seen as breathtaking innovations. They are beyond any attempt at explanation; his admirers consume them as confusedly and arbitrarily as Godard produced them, because they recognize in them the consistent expression of a subjectivity. This is true, but it is a subjectivity on the level of a concierge educated by the mass media.

Godard's "critiques" never go beyond the innocuous humor typical of nightclub comics or Mad magazine. His flaunted culture is largely the same as that of his audience, which has read exactly the same pages in the same drugstore paperbacks. The two most famous lines from the most read poem of the most overrated Spanish poet ("Terrible five o'clock in the afternoon -- the blood, I don't want to see it" in Pierrot-le-Fou) -- this is the key to Godard's method. The most famous renegade of modern art, Aragon, in Les Lettres Françaises (9 September 1965), has rendered an homage to his younger colleague which, coming from such an expert, is perfectly fitting: "Art today is Jean-Luc Godard . . . of a superhuman beauty . . . of a constantly sublime beauty. . . . There is no precedent to Godard except Lautréamont. . . . This child of genius." Even the most naaive can scarcely be taken in after such a testimonial from such a source.

Godard is a Swiss from Lausanne who envied the chic of the Swiss of Geneva, and then the chic of the Champs-Elysées, and his successful ascent up from the provinces is most exemplary at a time when the system is striving to usher so many "culturally deprived" people into a respectful consumption of culture -- even "avant-garde" culture if nothing else will do. We are not referring here to the ultimately conformist exploitation of any art that professes to be innovative and critical. We are pointing out Godard's directly conformist use of film.

To be sure, films, like songs, have intrinsic powers of conditioning the spectator: beauties, if you will, that are at the disposition of those who presently have the possibility of expressing themselves. Up to a point such people may make a relatively clever use of those powers. But it is a sign of the general conditions of our time that their cleverness is so limited, and that the extent of their ties with the dominant ways of life quickly reveals the disappointing limits of their enterprises. Godard is to film what Lefebvre or Morin is to social critique: each possesses the appearance of a certain freedom in style or subject matter (in Godard's case, a slightly free manner in comparison with the stale formulas of cinematic narration). But they have taken this very freedom from elsewhere: from what they have been able to grasp of the advanced experiences of the era. They are the Club Med of modern thought (see in this issue "The Packaging of 'Free Time' "). They make use of a caricature of freedom, as marketable junk, in place of the authentic. This is done on all terrains, including that of formal artistic freedom of expression, which is merely one sector of the general problem of pseudocommunication. Godard's "critical" art and his admiring art critics all work to conceal the present problems of a critique of art -- the real experience, in the SI's phrase, of a "communication containing its own critique." In the final analysis the present function of Godardism is to forestall a situationist use of the cinema.

Aragon has been for some time developing his theory of the collage in all modern art up to Godard. This is nothing other than an attempt to interpret détournement in such a way as to bring about its cooption by the dominant culture. Laying the foundations for a Togliattist variant of French Stalinism, Garaudy and Aragon are setting up a "completely open" artistic modernism, just as they are moving "from anathema to dialogue" with the priests. Godard could become their artistic Teilhardism.2 In fact the collage, made famous by cubism during the dissolution of plastic art, is only a particular case (a destructive moment) of détournement: it is displacement, the infidelity of the element. Détournement, originally formulated by Lautréamont, is a return to a superior fidelity of the element. In all cases, détournement is dominated by the dialectical devaluing-revaluing of the element within the development of a unifying meaning. But the collage of the merely devalued element has been widely used, well before being constituted as a Pop Art doctrine, in the modernist snobbism of the displaced object (making a spice bottle out of a chemistry flask, etc.).

This acceptance of devaluation is now being extended to a method of combining neutral and indefinitely interchangeable elements. Godard is a particularly boring example of such a use without negation, without affirmation, and without quality.

SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL (1966)

Translated by Ken Knabb (slightly modified from the version in the Situationist International Anthology). Translator's notes below.

  • 1Aragon-the-Senile: popular designation for the surrealist Louis Aragon after he became a Stalinist. During his surrealist days he had once made a contemptuous reference to "Moscow-the-Senile."
  • 2artistic Teilhardism: i.e. a modernist artistic-Stalinist synthesis, by analogy to the modernist scientific-Catholic synthesis of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

Comments

a coke bottle in an op art advert

From Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966).

Submitted by Fozzie on February 23, 2023

The decomposition of the values and forms of traditional one-way artistic communication (in the plastic arts as well as all aspects of language) is accompanied by what is vaguely known as "the crisis of communication" in society, and which is at the same time the monopolistic concentration of one-way communication (of which the mass media is but a technological expression) and the dissolution of all common and communicable values, a dissolution produced by exchange value's crushing victory over use value on the battlefield of the economy.

The revolutionary sense that has dominated all truly modern art (and whose absence marks the qualitative end of modern art) can only understood in the context of the struggle against dominant conditions, that is to say, the project of a new communication. The victims of the various mystifications of this project — neo-dadaism and Stalino-Sartrism — all allow notions of originality and repetition to enter modern intellectual production, because they do not have enough foresight; they are cooled by the air of familiarity. But this familiarity is about as good as that of Atrides. When a certain [Georges] Pérec, the consumer of Les Choses, writes in Partisans, the journal of "open Stalinism," that "the crisis of language is a refusal of the real," he is ignoring the reality of refusal. The "refusal of the real" that he sees quite unimaginatively in the form of an artist who refuses reality, is in a totally different sense the refusal of the artist by reality: the radiography of a refusal that socially fabricated "reality" places in opposition to the tendencies of real life. If, in modern art, "the inexpressible is a value and the indescribable a dogma" (Pérec), it is because it is a matter of a world in which there is nothing that can be said. This rebellious contestation of modern art is reprised in the new literature of Robbe-Grillet without a hint revolt — even admiringly. This is just one sign among many of the generalized resignation in critical intelligence that led to the collapse of the revolutionary movement of the 1920's. One Sartre, at the October 1965 Congress of the "European Community of Writers" in Rome, did his best to shake off the problem of the cultural avant-garde, which was too complicated for him by asserting that it is conceivable only in a decolonized country. And during a "confrontation" — clearly stage-managed from the start — between believers and non-believers, at the 17th Catholic Intellectuals Week (closely related to the so-called Marxist "Thought" Weeks of the red priest [Roger] Garaudy), which gathered around a Jesuit such names as P.H. Chombart de Louwe and Ricouer, Philonenko and Balandier: "All agreed to recognize that unlike what took place last century, the human sciences have discovered their limits in the consideration of religious phenomena."

But already the industrial recuperation of artistic neo-decomposition is organized on the grandest of scales. Op Art, for example, turned into decoration almost immediately — current clothing styles represent the point when an art that was no more than a fashion directly became the art of fashion. You can read it for yourself in the 16 September 1965 issue of Elle: "The 1966 Elle style suits Op Art to a T. They're made for each other. The Elle style is a way of moving with the times, of getting into the new when it's serious and the reasonable when it's a little crazy. . . . Let this delightful little bug bite you, too. Get into the Op-timism of Op Art."

In fact, Pop Art and Op Art are one and the same: Prop Art, the propaganda art that forces you to survive with your times. Spreading everywhere, a machine named Abraham Moles1 hopes to have a creative function acknowledged by supporting a theory of "machines for creating."

To the delight of robots, combinatory writing can electronically compose a suite of poetry, sculpture, music, painting and so on. One can just as easily appreciate its mastery in Revue d'esthétique (no. 2, 1965) as in yet another Week, held in Bordeaux in October, where "Even [Jacques] Chaban-Delmas could be persuaded to take an interest it" (L'Express, 3-11-65). And in [André] Malraux's last Biennale — "the most successful," according to him — the goals of this integrated recuperation of the devalued fragment appeared at their best. According to Le Monde (30-9-69), always naïve and easily pleased: "These gatherings of the world's youth show that to some degree, artistic preoccupations even themselves out. There is no fundamental difference between the offerings of French, the Italians, the Japanese, the Swiss or the Turks. They are the same painted forms, the same collages, the same metal assemblages: today's modern art is truly international. Another observation: today's artists not only preoccupy themselves with pictures, but also with art in the city. Sculptors, painters and architects are combining their efforts to build "ideal cities," churches, youth hostels. . . . If you want to stay in step with the latest in young art, you need to go down the Avenue de President-Wilson."

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

  • 1Abraham Moles is the subject of Correspondence with a Cybernetician in I.S #9. He was also a "collaborator" with the journal Arguments which received scathing criticism in previous issues.

Comments

"communism is the answer to the worlds problems it will bring you heaven on earth in which everyone will be happy

A very short article which is simply a paragraph from a newspaper, from Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966).

Submitted by Fozzie on February 23, 2023

A colloquium on the question of life after death took place in Paris on 2 March. It was organized by the International Institute of Humanist Studies and the Theological College of Paris, headed by Mrs Amédée Ponscue and Pastor Marchal respectively. During the course of this meeting, whose participants included Monsignor Jobit, the philosopher [Kostas] Axelos, and Professors [Henri] Birault and [Paul] Ricoeur, Germaine Lafaille read texts by Nietzsche, Simone Weil, Kierkegaard and Saint John of the Cross.

Le Monde (6 March 1966)

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

Comments

From Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966).

Submitted by Fozzie on March 27, 2023

Through the art of advertising’s reuse of all the scraps of partial critical conclusions, our epoch will teach to those who are more accommodating that those who speak more or less [about] the same questions, and who employ almost the same formulas, are not for all that “close” [to us], and can [even] express rigorously antagonistic orientations. An “advertising enquiry” on “vacation sickness” (inserted into diverse publications, among them Le Nouvel Observateur of 1-4-[19]65) shows this marvellously. “Club Méditerranée” is praised in terms likely to attract an “educated” stratum to it, badly represented in its first years.1 In the customary style of Planète — “We are on the verge of a metamorphosis”; “it is here that it is necessary to come and decipher the civilisation of tomorrow” — the smooth-talking salesman [bonimenteur] promises that we will be introduced there “to thought and the arts, to history and the sciences”, and that “friendship is born from all the gestures” in “the leading organisation of leisure in Europe, the laboratory of the vacations of the future”.2 This institution has, however, the sensitivity to leave “to the politicians, the thinkers, the artists, the educators, even to the heroes” the task of “building a new morality, promoting a freer morality or reforming industrial society”, because “its role is limited to one-twelfth [i.e. one month] of life”.

An organisation of vacations is what the existing organisation of work takes for its point of departure, and arranges to treat the waste of this work industrially — it’s pseudo-freedom, [which] is the time reserved for the spontaneity of robots. How can they meet? On the basis of their fundamental alienation. The principle of their one-twelfth of friendship is the contrary of Montaigne’s remark: “because it was not he, because it was not I”.3 But the organisers of the vacation industry strongly criticise the artisans of “conventional vacations”, denouncing everywhere else a real “levelling by mediocrity”, for which they alone produce a remedy: “Today, man’s Sunday invades all of the week little by little. What will he make of this freedom? To create still more obligations, addictions, [and] alienations? And what if the great fair of vacations was only a drug, a new opium of the people?”

Thus is created — waiting [for] its integration into the State: “there is still no country in the world with a coherent politics of leisure” — a business for the sale of the most recent opium of the masses: the freedom-commodity. All other forms of slavery combine to furnish it with clients, and its advertising has taken notice of this: “Urban life, in which everyone is one’s own guardian, spy and teacher, and which has cut time into slices in order to compartmentalise men, their hearts, their strength, still exists …” The Club Méditerranée would be ungracious to not to let this happen, since it sucks up a concession on nothing less than a global slice of a twelfth of the year. “Henceforth, thanks to the promises of automation and to the new psychology of business relations, work will abandon more and more of time and space to leisure.” This perspective does not frighten managers who henceforth know how to keep people in the cracks of work; as a result of which they can admit that “though much degraded, it [work] has even become a sign of frustration. For many, it is no more than a necessary nightmare, an alibi which makes vacations possible… In the underdeveloped countries, the unions begin to demand time instead of demanding money”.

And for these vacations, which will be taken to provide so much consolation and value, the faith-healers of Club Méditerranée already present an ambitious ideology, which must naturally recuperate, in a combinatorial style, the maximum echo of modern critical theory. For the purchaser of freedom-commodities, “if only he lets his age-old taste for play and festivals return (which consists of improvising, as one goes along, rules that are used only once), he will re-establish broken communication with other people… We speak highly of the play of vacations, but not to confuse it with childish play. This is the play that, the further we go back in civilisation, gave birth to ceremonies, to sports, to theatre, to the circus, to the imaginings of art — in a word, to intelligence. To restore this play is to wager that anyone, facing strangers who offer themselves to him openly, will be able to cease being the suspicious and docile spectator of his own life and, on the contrary, become the creator of it.”

Some contemplate this in the Club Méditerranée; as do we, but quite otherwise, as we sometimes say.

[The following détournements & comment originally appeared at the top of page 61]

“For better productivity in the factory, put on a play for bosses and workers”

the specialists of psychodrama, meeting in congress in Paris, recommend4 .

THE SELF-MANAGEMENT OF ALIENATION (France-Soir, 3-9-64)

“M. Georges Lapassade is a cunt”

Situationist International no. 9, August 1964

“Was there ever a century in which the thinkers better merited the motto: What do I know? They all fall into a pleasant error: in every science, they forget the fundamental problem, which is the pivot of the entire science… It is a methodical carelessness, until it regularly bears upon essential questions.”

Charles Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements

First published in Internationale Situationniste no. 10, March 1966, pp. 60-61. Translated from the French by Anthony Hayes, October 2013. Thanks to Not Bored! for help with the translation. Translator's footnotes below. From https://thesinisterquarter.wordpress.com/2013/10/10/the-packaging-of-free-time/

  • 1An early ‘package-tour’ organisation for overseas holidays. Founded in 1950 Club Méditerranée (aka “Club Med”), underwent considerable expansion after being bought by Baron Edmond de Rothschild in 1961. Initially the Club offered communal accommodations in ‘exotic’ locals for mostly young, single, French speaking tourists.
  • 2‘The journal Planète often incurred the criticism of the S.I. […] Planète, a magazine that combined science fiction stories with articles on speculative ‘science’, is perhaps the progenitor of such English language magazines as Omni and Wired, and is indeed the forerunner of the ideological function of such magazines. In their article Ideologies, Classes, and the Domination of Nature from I.S. no. 8, the Situationists compared Planète’s function to that of the journal Arguments. Whereas Arguments, under the guise of being a journal of ‘eclectic’ and ‘critical’ Marxist theory, was criticized for producing ‘the futile questioning of pure speculation’ (and thus played an important role in the spectacle of criticism), Planète was criticized for haranguing ‘ordinary people with the message that henceforth everything must be changed — while at the same time taking for granted 99% of the life really lived in our era.’ Thus the similarity of function – both journals were mouthpieces of the ideology of ‘progressive’ change (a central tenant of bourgeois ideology in its ‘free market’ and ‘state capitalist’ variants), whilst operating within and by virtue of the parameters of the bourgeois market. Their function as commodities that offered non-threatening change was central to the Situationist critique of them. Thus it was this appearance of modernity that was effectively non-threatening vis-à-vis capitalist modernity that was most egregious in the eyes of the Situationists, whose alternative was encapsulated in their conception of a coherent revolutionary project. Such an appearance would soon be shifted into the spectacle of post-modernism; the babble of ultra-modern theoretical radicalism that apparently interrogated everything all the better to hide the unitary nature of capitalist exploitation and alienation.’ (from fn. 5, Well Said S.I.! (I.S. No. 9)
  • 3“Si on me presse de dire pourquoi je l’aimais, je sens que cela ne se peut exprimer qu’en répondant : «Parce que c’était lui, parce que c’était moi.»” Montaigne, De l’Amitié (“If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.”)
  • 4See “controlled froth” (I.S. no. 9).

Comments

From Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966).

Submitted by Fozzie on March 28, 2023

“There are already machines specially constructed to serve no useful purpose. Here is the best: on sale in New York, for a dollar, [there is] a self-eating machine. As soon as you press on a particular red button, a noisy mechanism starts and, slowly, ineluctably, the bits composing the machine get stuck, break, [and] fall. At the end of a quarter of an hour, there remains only a dismal pile of rods, springs, pulleys and disassembled gears! Supreme luxury: the advertising to make you buy this machine promises in large print, that the assembly — as soon as one has played with [it] once — is beyond repair!”

(Elle, of 2-9-65)

In America, the automobile, the proliferation of which progressively reduces its use-value until it tends toward the status of a gadget (those responsible for the circulation of traffic in New York begin to envisage the necessity of a local prohibition of its use), has in 1965 spread to two cars for a quarter of American families (11 million). According to a survey by the Wall Street Journal, the motivation of the buyers is “to possess those that are better”, and to arouse the admiration of their neighbours: an enterprise worthy of Sisyphus, since the neighbours inevitably do the same. Far beyond the social sector whose riches permit such accumulation, these purchases are provoked through the facilitation of credit, the repayment of which can be extended to 42 months, and the guarantees to provide [such credit] reduced to a minimum. New gadgets appear that propel part of the considerable growth in crime. In New York an attempted rape is recorded every six hours, and someone is attacked every 12 minutes. According to a report by Michel Gordrey, who observes in this city a previously unknown “obsessive fear of crime” (France-Soir of 27-7-65), store fronts and newspaper advertisements offer “gadgets intended to strike assailants with an electro-shock of 4,000 volts, pocket sprays that cover them in an indelible colour and perfume them with an identifiable odour for a long time (to facilitate police searches”. One thousand two hundred special police officers have been assigned to surveillance of the subways, where armed attacks and other crimes have risen 52% from 1963 to 1964. “The avenues of the big department stores are now deserts once night has fallen. When I walk alone the rare passers-by who see me from afar start running.” A long film documentary for TV shows the “self-defense of a building” after many burglaries and murders: “The 45 tenants of the building and their families have formed a defense association, the men taking turns guarding the entry hall and the elevators, patrolling the basements and the cellars. At the end of the film, a police commissioner appears on the screen to encourage other buildings to ‘organise themselves’ in a similar fashion and to give advice…” Godrey concludes that we should not “take the psychosis of New York too lightly. What is happening in New York, at a higher level, interests all the large cities in a crisis of growth. Our city-planners who study American urbanism for the Paris of the year 2000 know that analogous sociological crises have suddenly appeared or will emerge in other forms in Europe.”

“Vietnam reveals the permanent violence that hides itself behind the smile and urbanity of the American way”, the Vietnam Day Committee wrote in their October [1965] bulletin.1 Nevertheless the report of the commission of enquiry created by the State of California after the Watts uprising — which admits “the situation is so serious that unless adequate measures are taken, other troubles yet more serious can happen” — accuse the black “extremist” leaders, not only of having encouraged the masses to riot, but also of “delaying the solution of the black problem”. We may even say that, generally, “extremist” men — like us — scandalously delay “the definitive solution of the problem of man” in the concentration camps programmed by the cyberneticians of power. If the contradictions of the barbarism of abundance constrain all the groups of society to self-defense, it will solely be necessary to redefine here and there the values and the type of life to defend.

In Encounter, August 1965, Irving Kristol pondered on the incredible revolt of American students.2 He clearly sees that the support of the blacks’ demands has only been an opportunity and that “Viet Nam itself, one may suspect, is as much the occasion as the cause” of the movement begun five years ago. Kristol writes: “Why American students, amidst general prosperity, and under a liberal Administration that is expanding the Welfare State more aggressively and successfully than anyone had thought possible, should ‘go left,’ is a riddle to which no sociologist has as yet come up with an answer. One theory is, simply, that these young people are bored”. For a critique that finds this already paradoxical, “all sorts of paradoxes” result: “For instance, these young American radicals are in the historically unique position of not being able to demand a single piece of legislation from their government”. It is here that we discover the greatest novelty, the originality, of the contestation that is currently brewing in America, measured by the stupefied gauge of Irving Kristol. From on high he judges what remains incomprehensible to him: the appearance of strangers in his country, in his habits. But he shows its importance, which he himself does not see, when he notes, “It is a strange experience to see a radical movement in search of a radical cause — it is usually very much the other way around.”

The transformation of a society is a totally different affair from political struggles concerning a few precise points within a society that is accepted. Here the program precedes the movement; there the movement precedes the program — which will be made in the same process. In this same overdeveloped urban zone of the north-east United States — where the gigantic electrical power failure in November [1965] that paralysed thirty million inhabitants for a few hours showed what guerrilla opportunities can appear in the highly industrialised countries3 — the recent attempt at a Free University in New York falls into the category of research into the formation of such a program.4 The manifesto of the Free University5 declares that it wants “to develop the concepts necessary to comprehend the events of this century” in “response to the intellectual bankruptcy” of the American educational order.6 Oriented from the outset toward an active contestation, this self-managed university — which constitutes itself without any fixation in particular buildings, and declares itself ready for semi-clandestinity by being able to exist scattered throughout the city — “is necessary because, in our conception, American universities have been reduced to institutions of intellectual servitude. Students have been systematically dehumanised, deemed incompetent to regulate their own lives, sexually, politically and academically.” (Address of the Free University of New York, 20 E. 14th Street, New York City).

First published in Internationale Situationniste no. 10, March 1966, pp. 61-62. Translated from the French by Anthony Hayes, October 2013. Thanks to Not Bored! for help with the translation. Translator's footnotes below. From: https://thesinisterquarter.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/the-production-of-decadence/

  • 1‘Vietnam Day Committee’ in English in the original. The Vietnam Day Committee (VDC) was a coalition of left-wing political groups, student groups, labour organizations, and pacifist religions in the USA that opposed the Vietnam War. The VDC was formed as a result of a 35 hour ‘Vietnam Day teach-in’ organised in and around the Berkley campus of the University of California on May 21 & 22, 1965. It is claimed the teach-in involved 35,000 people. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_Day_Committee)
  • 2Irving Kristol, ‘Teaching In, Speaking Out: The Controversy over Viet Nam — Letter from New York’, in Encounter, August 1965, pp. 65-70. All of the citations by the S.I. in the following paragraph have been checked against the original article. Available here: http://www.unz.org/Pub/Encounter-1965. Encounter was an Anglo-American literary magazine founded in 1953 and originally associated with the ‘anti–Stalinist’ Left. In 1967 Encounter was revealed to have been in receipt of funding from the C.I.A.: “The magazine received covert funding from the Central Intelligence Agency, after the CIA and MI6 discussed the founding of an ‘Anglo-American left-of-centre publication’ intended to counter the idea of cold war neutralism.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encounter_%28magazine%29)
  • 3“The Northeast blackout of 1965 was a significant disruption in the supply of electricity on Tuesday, November 9, 1965, affecting parts of Ontario in Canada and Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont, New York, and New Jersey in the United States. Over 30 million people and 80,000 square miles (207,000 km2) were left without electricity for up to 13 hours.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_1965)
  • 4The Free University of New York (FUNY) “began as a home for professors dismissed from local universities for protesting the Vietnam War, or for holding socialist views. Course topics included: Black Liberation, Revolutionary Art and Ethics, Community Organization, The American Radical Tradition, Cuba and China, and Imperialism and Social Structure. FUNY opened on July 6, 1965 in a loft at 20 East 14th Street overlooking Union Square. FUNY began as an experimental school for the New Left, built on models such as Black Mountain College (North Carolina), though it became closely aligned with the Maoist Progressive Labor Party. Tuition for the 10 week session was $24 for the first course course, and $8 for each additional course; welfare recipients could attend for free. After the first year, many of the initial collaborators left or were forced to leave, and it shut down a few years later.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_University_of_New_York)
  • 5English in the original.
  • 6I was able to check the S.I.’s citations against a copy of the FUNY manifesto reproduced in an article of the Peace Times, 29 October, 1965. A scan of this article is available here: http://antihistory.org/image/19473441418

Comments

A detourned comic - two women with speech bubbles "everything is fine" "nobody is happy"

Another short text on alienation from Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966).

Submitted by Fozzie on February 24, 2023

Content warning: suicide.

Suicide has now practically reached epidemic proportions in the United States. In 1965, it took tenth place among the causes of death in the country, and third place among those of young people. Setting up "anti-suicide centers," one of them operating on a nationwide level, is now being seriously considered.

Recently, in France, a certain Bernard Durin killed himself — apparently for no reason. He was 37 years old and had been a model employee for the last fifteen of them. Everyone who knew him agreed that "he had everything one needs to be happy." He had "a ten-year-old daughter, Agnes, who got on well at school. A charming wife. A good job at IBM. A salary of 2,500 francs a month. An attractively furnished modern apartment. An automobile. A television, a washing machine, a refrigerator and even an aquarium. . . .

In an article in France-Soir, 24 December 1964, Charles Coron wrote:

The shop where Durin worked was situated in a multi-story glass-fronted building. His section largely consisted of small metal offices. Shelves stretched out of sight. Metal shelves. Metal filing cabinets. It was there that the spare parts Durin sorted out and packaged up were kept. No windows. Neon light. His timetable was irregular. The shop was open from seven in the morning until twelve at night. His shift was changed every two weeks. Sometimes he got up at five-thirty in the morning and finished work at four in the afternoon.

Sometimes he started work at four-thirty in the afternoon and got home at one o'clock in the morning. Durin was a model employee. No one worked harder. Someone suggested he take a correspondence course in English. He did so. He studied in the evening. He studied on Saturday and Sunday. . . . When he left the shop in Vincennes, Durin drove back to his home in Bondy in his 404. He drove in the lines of traffic you all know. He waited in the traffic jams. He saw the lights of the Bondy skyscraper housing estate. The straight lines. The concrete. The shopping center in the middle. He lived in apartment number 1153, 13, rue Leon Blum, FG 3. That was his life: electronics, skyscraper housing estates, cars, refrigerators and televisions. It was also his death.

For several years now, at least in the United States, it hasn't been uncommon to see excited crowds watching someone who has been driven desperate threaten to hurl themselves down from a window ledge or a roof. Whether the public has become blasé, or whether it is attracted by more professional spectacles, it doesn't intend to pay any further attention to these "unofficial stars" unless they get on with it, and jump. So far as we know, it was on 16 April 1964, in Albany, New York State, that for the first time this new attitude came out into the open. While Richard Reinemann, aged 19, prevaricated for the better part of two hours on a twelfth-story ledge, a crowd of some four thousand people watching him chanted "Jump!" A female passersby explained: "I don't want to wait all night. I've already missed my favorite TV show."

Translator unknown. From: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/suicide.html

Comments

Sigmund Freud at Karl Marx's grave

A short text on psychoanalysis from Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966).

Submitted by Fozzie on February 24, 2023

The discoveries of psychoanalysis, like the thought of Freud, are at the end of the day unacceptable to the dominant social order — for any society founded on a repressive hierarchy. But Freud's "centrist" position, stemming from his absolute and supra-temporal identification of "civilization" with repression through the exploitation of labor, and therefore his handling of a partial critical truth inside a total non-critical system, led psychoanalysis to be officially "recognized" across all the degraded variants that it would inspire, without, however, being accepted in its truth: its potential critical usage. Of course, this failure is not exactly attributable to Freud, but rather to the collapse of the revolutionary movement of the 1920s, the only force that could have brought the critical data of psychoanalysis to its realization. The period of extreme reaction that followed in Europe drove off even the partisans of psychoanalytic "centrism." The psychoanalytic debris that are, in the West at least, currently fashionable, all developed out of this initial resignation, which made acceptable as verbiage that which could not be accepted in its critical authenticity. By agreeing to give up its revolutionary edge, psychoanalysis was gave itself up for use by all the guardians of the existing sleep, and, at the same time, opened itself up to rebuke for its insufficiency by ordinary psychiatrists and moralists.

Thus Professor Baruk, who has been known to boast of working nearly half a century of wonders as the head doctor at Charendon, attracted a lot of attention in the very first session of the Bichat symposium, when he assailed psychoanalysis — thinking he'd found something much better — by reproaching Freud for having sought no other solution than "the satisfaction of the individual to the detriment of society." But at the same time, other defenders of society have for five years conducted experiments, which the Council finds particularly moving, with a systematic psychoanalysis of every Benedictine in a monastery in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Under the volcano,1 the collected rabble of the asylums and neo-Roman Teilhardism2 strive to recuperate the memories of one of the most redoubtable explosions yet to have begun making the moral order tremble. And for the admiration of idiots in the salons of Paris, Lacan reprises Heidegger's formula (which has been so successful lately that even the finest spirits refuse to admit that such a profound thinker could really have been a Nazi). Between them, and with no other motive than that of dazzling the gallery, Heidegger and Lacan carry out the obscure dispersal of language that they discovered in the final phase of modern poetic writing (this is where this dispersal had a deeper meaning). They take on this style at the height of their literary talent, but within their "discipline." It is thus the supposed seriousness of the philosopher or the psychoanalyst that validates the obscurity of recent poetry, which was criticized so much as a gratuitous game detrimental to the comfort of the reader. But the return to obscurity, now truly hollow and pompous, covers the emptiness of their words, and allows both to mount the cultural show of the continuation of those old philosophical forms of separate thought, which have for a long time been separated from thought, petrified, dead. Modernism's new clothes were sewn in Pompeii.

Translated by Reuben Keehan. Translator's notes below. From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/partial.html

  • 1The title of the 1947 novel by Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957), set in Cuernavaca, especially popular with the Lettrist International.
  • 2Theories of Pierre Tailhard de Chardin (1881-1955), a French Jesuit who attempted to blend science and Christianity.

Comments

A round up from International Situationniste #10 (March 1966).

Submitted by Fozzie on February 28, 2023

1965, with the odd finishing touch added here and there in the first weeks of 1966, was something of a complete review of the failures of every variety of the existing power, as well as those of the solutions presented by its oppositional alternatives. While the current order has seen no threat of any kind of negation whatsoever, it has, through its own functioning, accumulated false starts, paralyses and setbacks everywhere. In its economy and in its repressive imperatives, the present world is already a unity; none of the powers that currently control it will ever be capable of truly dominating it, nor of sharing it in a completely satisfactory manner, nor will they even be able to impose on it any kind of supposedly rational direction. At the same time, in spite of the price it is capable of paying — and, indeed, of making others pay — no power has understood how to bring any of its projects to a successful conclusion.

The myth of the "socialist camp" has ended up degenerating into public rows among its governments, which now includes the exchange of insults between Cuba and China. From China on down, all its subdivisions have shown their incapacity to respond effectively to the all out attack by the United States in Vietnam and elsewhere. The "sense of history," served with a Mao and Stalin sauce, has been ridiculed by America's general offensive since the Cuban missile crisis, "a complete ruin — opening a new period in the division of the world," as we wrote in I.S. in January 1963 [Situationist News], going on to show that the game "shared by Russia and America of not waging thermo-nuclear war but 'continually escalating the spectacle of possible war'" caused Russia to suffer the consequences of its "bad calculations in the theater of global strategy." The dissolution of the international bureaucratic union continues to accelerate, as much on a military and political level as it does on an ideological level.

More profoundly, the internal difficulties of the bureaucratic states never cease revealing themselves. These difficulties, which have their source in the administration of industry, and even more prominently in that of agriculture, appear everywhere in the sphere of the political control of every aspect of life. In Russia, clandestine intellectual opposition is spreading. In Cuba, "homosexuals" are being purged from the University of Havana; the panic created by the attempts to assassinate Castro is a good indication of just how "socialist" a regime that depends on a single man really is; and the forced self-criticism of the accused Cubela, the revolutionary who "gave himself over to debauchery" and who "has no idea" how he managed to end up plotting against the Castro that he loves, was a replay of the Bukharin trial in Moscow. In August, the People's Daily admitted that there is "an inevitable gap between the level of consumers that is really necessary in socialist society and that which is actually permitted" (the ideology of the extension of classes to the benefit of the bureaucratic distribution of surplus-value). And the Supreme Court of the Federal Republic in Russia has decided to fight juvenile delinquency by laying charges against the parents (Associated Press, Moscow, 2-6-65), that is to say by holding families legally responsible for the direct use of their authority, which is so necessary to the state.

With the most powerful resources at its disposal, and finding itself in a position to unleash them in an ever widening zone, the United States has suffered the least definitive failures; but nowhere, however, have they led to any kind of success. While black riots and the revolt of young university students — who, at this stage of the country's economic development, represent a considerably large social strata (numerically around five million) — are beginning to clear the way for a new kind of crisis at home, the massive military intervention overseas has failed to break the resistance of Vietnamese fighters, nor even to reestablish order in favor of the generals of Santo Domingo. As a consequence, guerilla warfare has broken out across an enormous part of Latin America. In order to meet the responsibility of its influence, the United States has enlisted itself in a number of interminable conflicts: the down side of its politics is that it must always oppose change precisely where change is most necessary and urgent, from where none of their psychologists' calculations can deliver them.

The leaders of the rest of Western capitalism (the model of socializing reformism) have only attempted to prove themselves once again: for Germany, this is by not coming to power; in England, it is by doing just that. German ex-Social Democracy was dismissed in the September elections, almost by accident. The "engaged writer" Günther Grass was perhaps the only person not to notice that the rallying to Christian Democratic principles had been perfected to such a point that no-one could figure out what they actually were. According to Le Monde (14-9-65), this caused a member of Willy Brandt's staff to declare: "Even if we don't win, we have achieved something of a triumph this year. No-one, or almost no-one, has taken us for reds." Without taking Wilson for a red, one might be struck by the sense of humor he has shown since the electoral victory of the English left. The workerist government unanimously applauded the American war in Vietnam. Against the racist secessionists in its colony Rhodesia, it was markedly worse than de Gaulle, despite the fact that it had not been brought to power by a plot hatched by settlers in Salisbury. Its principle domestic duty was to give the unions complete control over the government's economic decisions; and above all to reduce the workers to the role of mere executors of union orders by means of laws against "wildcat strikes." And yet Wilson's election brought with it classical reprisals of the "wall of silver" that every analyst of "industrial society" has thought impossible since 1924; Le Monde was even driven to this terrible conclusion: "The great lesson to be learnt from the current British crisis is that Western society is still dominated by capitalism."

As for what the papers call the "Third World," it has come to know a fantastic accumulation of failures, from which not one of its pretensions or deceptive expectations has recovered. The fragments of power that are all that remain from the collapse of the Arab world's "progressive camp" are as fragile as the powers of the reactionary camp in the service of the West. In Egypt, the bureaucratic military leadership formulates the failures and exposes the plots of even the most obscure forces. Things are no better elsewhere: certainly not in Yemen, where the young republic has sold out to Saudi Arabia; nor in Iraq, where the recognition of "Right-wing Nasserism" has ended up legitimating the power of the real right and the return of pre-1958 ministers. The Ba'th, driven from Iraq and restricted to its "Syrian province," has torn itself into putschist factions. Soldiers and civilians, "extremists" and moderates, follow one another just as vainly into power, while all the party's personalities and all their chances are exhausted. Ben-Bellaism is ruined in a night.

The crumbling of the foundations for a "revolutionary" regrouping of the African states is also complete. The almost nonexistent Organization of African Unity, abandoning all hope after the declaration of independence in Rhodesia, failed to take the risk of an armed intervention in that country. It even admitted that it was incapable of breaking with England, after having announced it to the world in an extremely short lived ultimatum. In Ghana, Nkrumah "the Redeemer" and his unique party vanished when faced with a simple military plot, just like six other regimes on the continent had in the preceding days. These facts are just supplementary failures for Peking's extravagent political outsider.

Nothing has been more dramatic, however, than the bloody collapse of Indonesian Stalinism, whose bureaucratic habits blinded it to the point of having no anticipation whatsoever of the seizure of power, let alone the conspiracy or the coup, while leading the immense mass movement under its control to complete annihilation without calling on it to fight (the total number of executions now exceeds 300,000). Though the imperturbable Sukarno still hovers above his faithful subalterns, the already impossible "Second Bandung" for unification with Algeria has lost its biggest stars. India's neutralist "socialism" has run headlong into the war in Punjab, military repression of minorities and workers' demonstrations, and famine. By perishing in this way, torn apart by the pressures of rival imperialisms, the spectacular fraternization of the Afro-Asiatic states reveals that it only ever existed as an illusion.

Just as all repressions currently under way everywhere are also beginning to falter, this cascade of failures characterizes a lamentable world where no-one achieves their ends; where the course of events is completely different to that conceived by those who think they control them; where the ruse of the commodity continues to lead human history astray. This hilarious succession of gags in the comedy of power is just the political expression of the universal divorce between all systems and all realities.

Translated by Reuben Keehan. From https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/1965.html

Comments

From Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966).

Submitted by Fozzie on March 28, 2023

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!

Draft 0.0 (26 May 2016)

The Current Means and Goals of Play

Marcel Giuglaris (in France-Soir 4 August 1965) has described the construction of a massive area and a series of exercises undertaken (with enormous resources) by the American Army to test the application of its war effort in Vietnam: “If a date is to be chosen to mark the change in the American strategic understanding of the Vietnam War, it’s that of Operation ‘Silver Land’ 1 .” After it, the Americans will no longer improvise. Using every minute detail they know, they rehearse every action to be undertaken in Vietnam, on the west coast of the United States. In spring 1965, over an area covering the entire western United States (from Seattle to the Mexican border – a distance of more than 2000 km, and more than 1000 km inland to just beyond Las Vegas) the Americans set up representations of [a number of] countries: Lancelot (South Vietnam) – covering the South of California – is “a country where guerrillas have harassed government forces so much since 1964, that in December it appealed to the UN for American military assistance.” Merlin (North Vietnam), north of Lancelot, is a country under a dictatorship that inspires, arms, supplies, and aids Lancelot’s guerrillas. Modred (China), is a large country that borders on Merlin, that possesses nuclear weapons, and is of the same political allegiance as Merlin, a country it holds in its sphere of influence. Finally, Neutrala 1 and Neutrala 2 (Laos and Cambodia) are more or less neutral countries which border Merlin and Lancelot. It’s not necessary to be a real expert to recognise the likenesses: but if these aren’t already obvious 2 , six Vietnamese villages (with the smells, hens and black pigs) have been recreated in Lancelot around Camelot, an urban area on the coast. Due to the lack of natives, and in order to ensure the same language problems, people who speak only Spanish (most likely Mexicans) were located there… “Silver Land” brought into play not only 80 vessels ranging from aircraft carriers to nuclear submarines but also tens of thousands of men. The scenario was incredibly intricate. Incidentally the exercise was modified so much, and at such short notice, in its execution, that a number of unit leaders were unable to get any sleep.”

Through its concrete significance, its futility, its alienation from the ludic, and the practical ignominy of its objectives, this American war-game can be seen as a counter-example of our concept of the “constructed situation” – formulated to address the liberating potential of these times.

From: https://isinenglish.com/10-11-the-current-means-and-goals-of-play

  • 1The name of the exercise was actually “Operation Silver Lance”.
  • 2au cas où celles-ci échapperaient

Comments

A short text from International Situationniste #10 (March 1966).

Submitted by Fozzie on March 28, 2023

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!

Draft 0.0 (26 May 2016)

Words & their users (cont)

“While addressing many thousands of students who completed summer internships in various government agencies, President Johnson greeted them as ‘revolutionary comrades’. ‘All my life’, he told them, ‘I have been revolutionary, fighting against bigotry, poverty, and injustice.’ ”

A.P., Washington, 5-8-65.

From: https://isinenglish.com/10-13-words-their-users-cont/

Comments

Comments on recent coverage of the Situationist International in the press. From Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966).

Submitted by Fozzie on February 28, 2023

According to Le Monde Libertaire in December 1964: "The SI's revolutionary critique of everyday life is incontestably right on the mark. However, there is one domain, far from having lost its importance, that escapes them: work." We, on the other hand, believe that we've more or less never dealt with any problem other than that of work: its conditions, its contradictions, and its consequences. Le Monde Libertaire's error stems perhaps from the habits of undialectical thinking, which isolates an aspect of reality on conveniently recognizable terrain, where it can only ever be treated conventionally.

Reporting on an earlier special number of the Times devoted to the avant-garde, Le Figaro Littéraire of 3 September 1964 wrote: "Thus, Michèle Bernstein and Jörgen Nash confront one another from opposing pages. Both extol the virtues of 'international situationism.' Both want art not to be separate from the world, transforming society in such a way that the individual will be free to 'enjoy life.' And yet Nash was excluded by Michèle Bernstein. Here we touch on one of the avant-garde's darkest traits: its taste for the absolute." It seems that the recourse to an absolute "situationism" is completely out of the question when it comes to ridding oneself of a character like Nash. It really isn't that difficult to figure it out comparitively.

In Holland, the Rotterdamsch Nieuwsblad of 5 December 1964 devoted a page to the study of "Situationist Traits in the Face of Our Era." The face presented by this title was hardly very attractive, because it threw the SI into a stew of Nashism, happenings, and even a photo of the avant-garde royalist Georges Mathieu, ever the wretched pretender. Debord is described as "the movement's great prophet," and they are shocked that he refuses the term "situationism." In this article, the only thing that appears to be undiluted is their stupidity.

We'll pass over the dozens of confusionist articles in the Scandinavian press, hardly any better than their archetypal model that appeared in Politiken on 11 October 1964, earnestly searching for the reasons behind the "Nashist deviation," which has so flattered local patriotism. We are also poorly understood (poorly translated, poorly quoted) in issue 2 of the German bulletin Anschlag, the expression of a rather timid investigation into a radical position. And worse still in the example of the elogious but unintelligent article that the Lapassardist René Lourau thought he should devote to the SI in issue 82 of the journal Tour de Feu.

Nothing, however, can top the bizarre allusion of Paolo Marinotti, director of the International Center for Arts and Customs in Venice, reporting on a retrospective exhibition by Jorn at the Palazzo Grassi in one of the Center's publications. Marinotti writes of Jorn, who figured among the founders of the SI, and has since gone on to many other achievements: "Let's remember that the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus and this 'Situationist International' were both founded by Jorn from 1954 to 1962." What a confused historian!

Is this supposed to mean that the SI came to an end in 1962? We can't be confined to the mausoleum of cultural history just yet. Or perhaps Marinotti means that Jorn founded his first movement in 1954 and the SI in 1962? This certainly makes us look a bit younger. But this meaning shouldn't be read from the phrase; rather, it intends that Jorn took eight years to found the two movements. And if he had to do this all by himself, the time it took to complete this Herculean effort is understandable. But a deeper question is raised, prior to Director Marinotti's lyricism: how do you remember what you don't yet know?

As for the ex- Observateur, shortly before it ceased publication (1-10-64), it was pleased to point out in a little note amusingly titled "Revolution by Geniuses" that our journal deserved "close examination" for its "revolutionary approach to the modern world on every level," and this "in spite of its excesses." On this point, we haven't a clue what they mean. Just like Pancho Villa at the end of Jack Conway's beautiful film, all we can do is ask: "What excesses?"

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

Comments

From Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966).

Submitted by libcom on September 5, 2005

The situationists' practice of concretely breaking with apologists for any aspect of the present social order (particularly visible with regard to the leading representatives of the culture and politics of submission, and including as its extreme case the exclusion of certain members of the SI) has been subject to the greatest misunderstanding, although it follows quite directly from our basic positions. Certain commentators have propagated the most hostile interpretations of this practice, thereby causing concern among semi-informed people. The reality in this particular case is quite simple. Those who accept one or more variants of the prevailing pseudodialogue become the advocates of a new type of free exchange in the name of an abstract right to dialogue at any price (payable in avowed concessions to falsehood), and they reproach us for interrupting this fake dialogue. It is, however, only in this way that we are able to be the bearers of the reality of dialogue. On the question of exclusion, we believe that through experimentation we have made an advance in determining the requirements for the nonhierarchical organization of joint projects, which projects can be sustained only by the self-discipline of individuals proving themselves in the coherence of the theories and acts through which each member strives to merit his joint responsibility with all the others. The one-sidedness of Stirner's notions on the relations of the egoist with the organization that he enters or leaves at whim (though it does contain a kernel of truth regarding that aspect of freedom) does not allow any independent basis for his passive and defenseless ghost of an "organization." Such an incoherent and undisciplined organization is at the mercy of any individual "egoist," who can cynically exploit it for his own ends while disdaining any social aims it might have (and in fact the Stirnerian individual can just as well enter the most reactionary association for his own personal profit). But a free association -- "a bond, not a power" -- in which several individuals meet on a common basis cannot be passively subject to someone's individual whim. Those who wish neither to judge nor to command must be able to reject any person whose conduct would implicate them. When the SI excludes someone, we are calling him to account not for his life but for ours, for the common project that he would falsify (whether out of hostile intentions or through mere lack of discernment). Each side remains individually free (the fact that this freedom is generally impoverished is another problem, without which there would be no need for undertakings like the SI) and by throwing back on his own an individual who has always remained autonomous we are only expressing the fact that this autonomy was not able to fulfill itself within our common project. In rejecting someone in accordance with the rules of the game that he thought he had accepted, or had pretended to accept, it is our own resignation that we are rejecting.

It may be helpful to elucidate these remarks with excerpts from two letters recently addressed to one of our correspondents in East Europe.

(First letter.) Our theoretical positions (on play, language, etc.) would not only risk becoming mendacious and valueless, they would already be without value if we held them in coexistence with some doctrinal dogmatism, whatever it might be. All of us believe, as you do, that "the freedom to travel all the unaccustomed paths" must be absolute (and not only on the artistic or theoretical plane, but in all aspects of practical life). For a thousand reasons, of which the experience of the Eastern bloc is the most obvious, we know that an ideology in power turns any partial truth into an absolute lie. . . . We are not a power in society, and thus our "exclusions" only express our freedom to distinguish ourselves from the confusionism around us or even among us, which confusionism is much closer to the actual social power and partakes of all its benefits. We have never wished to prevent anyone from expressing their ideas or doing what they want (and we have never sought to be in a position to exert such pressure). We merely refuse to be ourselves mixed up with ideas and acts that run contrary to our convictions and tastes. Note that this is all the more vital in that we have hardly any freedom to express our own convictions and tastes, due to their going so sharply against the mainstream. Our "intolerance" is nothing but a very limited response to the very strict intolerance and exclusion that we run into everywhere, particularly among the "intellectual establishment" (considerably more intense than the hostility the surrealists had to endure), and which we scarcely find surprising. Just as we are in no degree a controlling power in society, we refuse to become one one day by means of some political reshuffling (we are in this regard partisans of radical self-management, of workers councils abolishing all separate state power or even separate "theoretical" power); and we are refusing to transform ourselves into any power whatsoever, even on the small scale that we would be allowed, when we refuse to enlist disciples, who would give us, along with the right of control and direction over themselves, a greater recognized social standing as representatives of one more artistic or political ideology. . . . One should not confuse the practical conditions of free thought here and in the East -- or in Spain, for example. In countries where nothing can be openly expressed, it is obviously necessary to support the right of everyone to express themselves. But in places where everyone can express themselves (though under conditions of enormous inequality) any radical thought -- without of course wishing to suppress this practical freedom -- must first of all clear the way for its own "unaccustomed path," must assert its own right to exist without being "coopted" and distorted by the social order which manifestly reigns behind this visible confusion and complexity and which ultimately possesses the monopoly of appearances (cf. our critique of the "spectacle" in the consumer society of commodity abundance). Finally, the reigning "tolerance" is one-way, and this on a global scale in spite of the antagonisms and complexity of the different types of exploitive societies. What the tolerant people who are in a position to express themselves tolerate, fundamentally, is the established power everywhere. You tell us that you live in X... If you were in Paris you would see how many of these tolerant leftist intellectuals turn out to be undecided, understanding and tolerant toward the established conditions in X... or in Peking. What they call "the sense of history" is their Hegelian adherence to what they read in the daily papers.

(Second letter.) A radically different point of departure in fact first of all restores the truth of the liberatory endeavors of the past. It is necessary to break clearly with the old confusion, and therefore with its partisans, whether they be open, cunning or simply unconscious. We obviously have to bear the negative consequences of the attitude we have chosen, and we have to acknowledge this negativity. . . . We are in complete agreement with you on the interrelation of all aspects of the problem of the present avant-garde. We are in fact trying to initiate dialogue everywhere that that state of mind manifests itself in a radical direction. For that state of mind is itself divided by a struggle between its truth and its organized cooption by the ruling powers.

SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL (1966)

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

Comments

Some book reviews from Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966).

Submitted by Fozzie on March 1, 2023

Kurt Wittfogel's Le Despotisme Oriental (Editions de Minuit) is principally an important contribution to Marxist theory, on the central but oft neglected question of the economic importance of the state in history. It is easy to reject the book's numerous errors on account of their very enormity. Wittfogel's entire current direction is based on the identification — a practically geographical identification — of "Oriental" state totalitarianism born of "the hydraulic means of production" with the current bureaucratic zone of the world. He overlooks, on the one hand, the existence in current bureaucratic society of an industrial development which has effectively taken its first great stride toward the conditions enjoyed by the European bourgeoisie of the middle ages, but which must now be adapted and administered in all its aspects. On the other hand, he fails to extend his analogies to the decisive role of the state in the concentrated capitalism of the West. It is nevertheless this perspective neglected by Wittfogel that best reveals the universal actuality of a potential under-estimated in Marx's analyses, on account of the passing economic effacement that it experienced between the middle ages and the 19th century (an effacement that effectively permitted the cumulative "kick start" of the economy, and ultimately the appearance of "economic thought"). Wittfogel's schematization is meant to lead to the conclusion that Western freedom must go to war as soon as possible to drive back the hydraulic slaves that lay siege to it from Moscow and Peking. Wittfogel then concludes his work with a quotation from Herodotus, asserting that when one knows the nature of freedom, one must fight for it, "not just with the spear, but with the hatchet." This peculiar optimism, which is very much like that of Dr Strangelove, is otherwise refuted by the fact that those who fight most for freedom are often those who have never known it, like the Vietnamese, or the masses of Santa Domingo, still battling to make Wittfogel's marines see it. The reader might recognize themself among the mirages in which Wittfogel loses his way. But this is certainly not made any easier by the pedentic preface in which Pierre Vidal-Naquet has authoritatively slipped in his own counter-interpretation of "the Left," without permission of the author. This "critique of the Left," imposed on the reader to mediate before gaining access to the author's own thought — which is most assuredly right wing — is as authoritarian in its content as it is in its presentation. Vidal-Naquet is so prostrate before neo-Stalinism that he contributes to the perpetuation of a division of the world à la Wittfogel. Lie against lie, the choice is yours. As a sufficiently sordid qualitative example, Vidal-Naquet has allowed himself to write in a note on page 41 of his preface: "By Marxists, we mean the majority currents of the worldwide communist movement. It is quite obvious that Stalinist theses have no influence whatsoever on those currents which are, by definition, anti-Stalinist. Studying their position here would be completely beside the point."

[Joseph] Gabel's False Consciousness: an essay on reification (same publisher) is on the whole an excellent parallel between schizophrenia and political ideology, both shown to be related to the loss of the dialectical apprehension of reality. The absence, however, of a corollary critique of the practical functioning of political ideology (Gabel's psychiatric description is far more substantial than his recognition of the interest held by the interaction with ideological alienation) gives rise at the same time to a certain weakness within Gabel toward Stalinist orthodoxy, as it does toward Western academic thought — such as a poorly considered attempt to salvage Bergsonism. False Consciousness, which throws all revolutionary theory and action out with the bathwater of ideology, seems in the end like of a book of "specialization without portfolio," of a specialist without perspective who prefers to ignore what and whom he can serve. The "putting back the dialectic back on its feet" to which Gabel frequently refers — after Marx's treatment of Hegelian method — can in no way be understood in the form of a simple amelioration of dialectical discourse in the same book. As Karl Korsch put it so well in Marxism and Philosophy, the inversion of Hegel goes further than that. A dialectical book in our time is not only a book that presents a reasoning dialectically; it is a book that recognizes and calculates its own relationship with the totality to be actually transformed.

Maurice Pianzola's book Peintres et Vilains (Editions Cercle d'Art, 1962) has the merit of showing the participation of the principle artists of the era in the Peasants' War of 1525, often in a leading role among the insurgents. Unfortunately, this study remains firmly within the traditional framework of the art book.

The pocket book on Les Marxistes (L'Essential collection) produced by Kostas Papaioannou constitutes an excellent choice, with intelligent and honest commentary. The intelligence of the texts is nevertheless limited by its historian's perspective in dealing with a period that is now over. It is indeed strange to restore such texts without any idea of their future. The use of the book escapes its author who even seems to believe that that it doesn't have one. This is an example of the basic character of contemporary mass culture. The contradictions and superficial uncertainties of this culture have allowed a great deal of abstractly utilizable information to enter it, but in a state of practical incoherence. The curiously restrained partial coherency of Papaioannou's work is the most extreme case of this incoherence.

A long way from these books which should still, of course, be read, the book that Françoise Choay has devoted to Urbanisme, utopies et réalités (Seuil) only warrants being pointed out for the achievement that consists of dealing with this subject without ever mentioning a single situationist thesis.

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

Comments

From Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966).

Submitted by Fozzie on March 1, 2023

It is well known that by hastily copying fourteen situationist theses, Henri Lefebvre purported to offer a new interpretation of the Paris Commune (see the SI's tract, Into the Trashcan of History from February 1963). His book La Proclamation de la Commune, in which he admires our important conclusions from the end of 1962, was finally published by Gallimard in 1965, leaving a number of points to be made on this largely rethought work, now totally accessible, as well as on the positive reception that it has generally encountered.

The situationist formula "the Commune was the greatest festival of the 19th Century," was adapted as the central idea of this "investigation" into a "total history" (but, of course, without the slightest awareness of the theoretical renewal whose foundations it laid); and was immediately celebrated by 75% of the critics. ". . . what Henri Lefebvre's book calls a 'festival.' Indeed, everything that occurred in the days and nights of the Commune was a festival." (Duvignard, Nouvel Observateur, 22-4-65). "The March 1871 insurrection was first of all a festival . . ." (C. Mettra, L'Express 5-4-65). "With this work, Henri Lefebvre can't be ignored. The Paris Commune was 'an immense, grandiose festival,' 'a revolutionary festival and a festival of revolution.' That's the general tone." (A. Duhamel, Le Monde, 6-9-65). "When Henri Lefebvre, immediately emphasizing the importance of style in great historical events, has reason to describe the style of the Paris Commune, it is as a festival." (J.Julliard, Critique, December 1965). And Michel Winock, in the February 1966 edition of Esprit: "Aside from 'the end of state politics,' what did the Commune offer us? What was its deepest significance? The greatest imaginable: 'the transformation of (everyday) life into an endless festival, into a game whose only limit is the fatality of death. . . .' Lefebvre does not give in to utopian literature: with his attention to the detail of the day to day facts of Paris in 1871 — often seen as less 'historical' — he concludes that the 'festive style' is 'the style proper to the Commune.' The phrase is not forced . . . This leads Lefebvre to see in the Commune 'the only attempt at revolutionary urbanism' . . . From now on, it will be impossible to speak of the Commune without being familiar with Henri Lefebvre's ideas."

There is no reason to believe that Lefebvre's pillaging is confined to yet-to-be-published texts. The following lines come from issue 7 of the journal Internationale Situationniste (page 12 1 ), which appeared in April 1962: "The assault of the first workers movement against the whole organization of the old world came to an end long ago, and nothing can bring it back to life. It failed. Certainly it achieved immense results, but not the ones it had originally intended. No doubt such deviation toward partially unexpected results is the general rule in human actions; but the one exception to this rule is precisely the moment of revolutionary action, the moment of the all-or-nothing qualitative leap. The classical workers movement must be reexamined without any illusions, particularly without any illusions regarding its various political and pseudotheoretical heirs, for all they have inherited is its failure. The apparent successes of this movement are actually its fundamental failures (reformism or the establishment of a state bureaucracy), while its failures (the Paris Commune or the 1934 Asturian revolt) are its most promising successes so far, for us and for the future." This is what became of that paragraph three years later, when it was transfigured by Lefebvrian thought: "Today, we must resume the workers' movement in an entirely new way: at once disillusioned and audacious. Limited to Europe, this movement's first assault against the old world partially failed. The situation has changed dramatically; it has achieved immense results, but not the ones intended by those who undertook its initial theories and actions. Some of the Commune's political and theoretical pseudoheirs hold only the heritage of a failure, whose meaning has been lost precisely because of their belief in its success. Is there not a dialectical movement of history and defeat, of failure and success? The success of the revolutionary movement has in fact concealed its failures; in contrast, its failures — that of the Commune, among others — are at the same time victories that open onto the future . . ." (page 39 of La Proclamation de la Commune).

But, you ask, is it possible for Lefebvre write such an awful book simply by adapting three 'situationist' pages? Of course not. He has read four or five well-timed books in the past few years that he has been capable of tirelessly but unevenly amalgamating into several investigations concerning the unfolding of events (for example, Dautry and Scheller's study, Le Comité Central des Vingt Arondissements de Paris, Editions Sociales, 1960). Finally, no doubt to the delight of his last master Gurvitch, who is still alive, Lefebvre fraudulently and with no apology credited Proudhon with being something like the inventor of the autonomous worker! This is the Proudhon, ever the partisan of order, who wanted to improve the existing order, in the sector of private property (through cooperation) as everywhere else; the apolitical enemy of all violent struggle; the reactionary who, in the middle of the 19th century, neither considered nor tolerated any choice for women other than that between prostitution and motherhood; the man who perfectly summed up every uselessness of the moralist when he decided, precisely against the existing minimum of worker autonomy, that "There is no more right to strike than there is to incest and adultery."

But that's not all. From the very beginning of his book, Lefebvre demonstrates what poor ideas he can make out of festival and revolution. He searches unimaginatively for how literary forms expressed in Paris at the time — lyricism and drama — must, by hypothesis, be rediscovered. He thereby reveals that he has absolutely no understanding of the liberated life that transcends these forms, autonomizing itself as expression and action, to the point of possessing in itself lyricism and drama of an entirely different quality to this resurrection of the artistic masks of the old carnival of separation. Having quite simply misunderstood — at the level of doorman's gossip — our theses' suggestion that the official history of dominant society "brings about the disappearance" of the subversive sense of an era, even in the field of its artistic and poetic manifestations, Lefebvre believes that he can venture to insinuate that Lautréamont was murdered! (page 169). Like the famous Fantômas — where each chapter was written by a different author — Lefebvre's historical monument is composed with the same hypnogogic negligence, a cloak and dagger novel culminating in the stupefying idea that Marx visited the Commune in order to be a purely theoretical partisan of the destruction of the state.

Lefebvre has attempted to exorcise the situationist specter haunting his thought — as well as that of quite a few other small minds of present spectacular culture — by directing an acknowledgment to a mysterious Guy Debud, who would certainly be the type associated with the elaboration and approval of such a book but for his unfortunately chimerical form. Typographically — for want of better means — a prouder correction of historical exactness has not been seen since Stalinaud, who the ever faithful Henri Lelièvre loved so hopelessly for thirty years (or at least preferred to Garaudisque). Vaccinated against ridicule like no-one else in Paris, The Thinker of Nanterre has once again mastered a delicate subject with the handling of his dialoctical brilliance.2

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

  • 1The Bad Days Will End
  • 2All typographical errors in this paragraph are intentional and appear in the original text. "Henri Lelièvre" is literally "Henri the hare" — trans.

Comments

a "ye ye" girl with sunglasses frames in the shape of suns

From International Situationniste #10 (March 1966).

Submitted by libcom on September 5, 2005

Even worse than the old Observateur, the Nouvel Observateur is a veritable Niagara of stupidity (6,810,000 liters per second). A considerable portion of this flow is produced by two of its editors, Katia Kaupp and Michel Cournot, whose writings could serve as excellent historical documents for the study of the supreme phase of spectacular decomposition. Their combination of stupidity and stylistic vulgarity makes them perfect Jean Nochers of the Left (a Left which adheres to the dominant society as fundamentally as does Jean Nocher, apart from a few details concerning the "modernization" of this domination). For its launching, however, this magazine called on some guest celebrities. Its opening issue (19 November 1964) presented a five-page interview with a star thinker. We reproduce here a few of his most extraordinary statements. The parenthetical remarks are obviously ours and not those of the Nouvel Observateur flunky who pretends to dialogue with the oracle.

"The young people I meet," says the imbecile, "are perhaps less hotheaded than in the past, but what I find most striking is that politically they are often at the same point as I am. My point of arrival is their point of departure. . . . And they have a whole lifetime ahead of them to build on the base that is my point of culmination." (The young people who are not at the same point of political degradation would obviously never have been interested in meeting this imbecile. As for those who have the misfortune to be at that point, a hundred successive lifetimes "ahead of them" would never suffice to build anything on the base of his culmination, which has been revealed from every angle as an intellectual dead end.)

"In France the 'yé-yé' phenomenon was used in order to turn the youth into a class of consumers." (A perfect inversion of reality: it is because the youth of the modern capitalist countries has become a very important category of consumers that phenomena of the 'yé-yé' sort appear.)

"You can only be alluding to Marxist ideology. Today I don't know of any other: current bourgeois ideology is more notable for its absence than for its strength." (Those who have read Marx know that his method is a radical critique of ideologies; but he who has only read Stalin can praise "Marxism" for having become the best of ideologies, the ideology that has had the strongest police.)

"Socialism can be pure only as an idea or, perhaps, much later, if it becomes the regime of all societies. In the meantime its incarnation in a particular country implies that it must develop and define itself through innumerable relations with the rest of the world. In the forging of reality, the purity of the idea becomes tainted." (Here is a Marxist ideologue really ideologizing: ideas are pure in the heavens and become rotten when they are incarnated. Since this thinker is himself real and has affirmed the principle that any realization in the world must entail a fundamental corruption, he implicitly both admits his own degradation in his "relations with the rest of the world" and justifies it on the grounds of inevitability. From all this we can appreciate his "advanced" state of decomposition.)

Right after this, the imbecile quotes a Malian's statement which he greatly admires: "Our socialism is conditioned by the fact that we are a country without any outlet to the sea." (Is it not also somewhat conditioned by the absence of an industrial proletariat in Mali? But this is just a trifling detail in the geopolitics of such a profound thinker!)

To the idea that all the industrial societies have many features in common, the imbecile retorts: "To say that, one would have to prove that there is a class struggle in the socialist countries, that is, that the privileges accorded certain people are becoming stratified. Now, this is not at all the case. There are admittedly some very real inequalities; but the money obtained by a factory manager in the USSR cannot be reinvested anywhere: it is spent and cannot be replenished or augmented in his hands to become the basis of a class power." (A basis which lies elsewhere: in the possession of the state. The extra money received by the privileged in the USSR is not the basis of their power, but a clear expression of their power.)

"The Soviets are shocked when one seems to believe that among them money can confer power." (Of course, since it's the other way around!)

"To be sure, these 'high-ranking functionaries' have numerous privileges; but to the very extent that the regime is authoritarian, there is a social instability, intermixing among different strata, demotion of leaders, a constant influx of newcomers from the base to the summit. If any conflicts were to occur in the USSR they would have the aspect of a reformism and not of a revolution." (Thus the very arbitrariness serves to prove that there is no ruling class in the USSR. At this level of insult to one's intelligence, one could just as well argue that the free-enterprise capitalism of Marx's day was also socialist, since its economic laws ruined many industrialists and it sometimes happened that a worker would become a boss; hence the social instability, class intermixing, etc.)

But the idea of a pure imbecile of this dimension would only be a "pure idea." Since such an imbecile actually exists, he must also firmly identify with a repressive power. After the armed revolt of the Hungarian proletariat -- in one of those "socialist countries" where "one would have to prove" that class struggles could now exist -- this same imbecile was so set on defending the interests of the Russian bureaucracy that he took a position to the right of Khrushchev: "The most serious mistake was probably Khrushchev's Report [on Stalin], for the solemn public denunciation, the detailed exposure of all the crimes of a sacred personage who has represented the regime for so long, is a folly when such frankness is not made possible by a previous substantial rise in the standard of living of the population. . . . The result was to reveal the truth to masses who were not ready to receive it."

The thinker we have been talking about is Sartre. And anyone who still wants to seriously discuss the value (whether philosophical or political or literary -- one can't separate the aspects of this hodgepodge) of such a nullity, so puffed up by the various authorities that are so satisfied with him, thereby reveals himself as not worth being taken seriously by those who refuse to renounce the potential consciousness of our time.

SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL (1966)

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

Comments

Covers of Planete magazines

Criticisms of the journals Planète and Socialisme ou Barbarie. From Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966).

Submitted by Fozzie on March 29, 2023

We put forward several apparently risky assertions with the assurance of subsequently seeing an historical display of their undeniable seriousness. The more limited our remarks — for example when we analyse a detail of the pseudo-critique that attempts to cover the [entire] field of the real criticism of the present — the quicker [such] demonstrations naturally follow, even though the same objective limits in such cases lead only to demystification in some restricted milieus, with which we are justly concerned. Such is the result now evident of the boycott launched by the S.I. against the journal Arguments (1956-1962), [a] journal that was also the European concentrate of this pseudo-critique.[1]

Arguments, as we know, had two very big heads, [Kostos] Axelos and Edgar Morin.[2] Since the collapse of their highest undertaking, their careers have been speaking. Starting in July 1964, Axelos threw himself into Planète no. 17, presented by its editorial board as swimming “in a meditation that is ours”, and attempting to promote “an open and multi-dimensional thought, questioning and global”.[3] In the following year, in several issues of Le Monde, Morin seriously examined the doctrines and methods of Planète (this pseudo-impartiality before the void being already unanimity). He had elsewhere concluded rather positively, not before inviting Planète to improve itself by becoming still more “planetary”, and he designated his acolyte, Axelos, as [the] already-present sign of this progress. The rewards for his good offices in “public relations” hardly had to wait. One could read in Le Monde of 28 January 1966: “In the offices of the journal Planète, Louis Pauwels and Claude Planson, the old director of the Theatre of Nations, installed the headquarters of a new association, l’A.R.C. (Association pour la recherche des cultures).[4] In the directorial committee we find the names of Maurice Béjart, Jean Duvignaud, Edgar Morin, Jean Vilar, Jan Kott”.[5] Sub-intellectual manifestations of the Planète type are only the extreme products of the decomposition of the totality of culture. Those who do not know how to refuse the totality of the politico-cultural spectacle — and who do not want to practically break with its numerous defenders — cannot even, finally, refuse the monstrous evidence of the stupidity spread by Planète. The very frontier of this “Planetism” is not evident to [those] who have truly broken with nothing of the organised confusion of today. Such [people], who certainly will not accept all of Planetism, will accept some Planetism, like some Godard, or some psycho-sociology, or some bureaucratic “orthodoxy”. Already, back in the day, it accepted some confused critique from some leftovers. All respectful contestation will end by accepting cohabitation with Planetism, because the many hollow intentions that those people oppose to almost everything [will] not hold them back from practically juxtaposing themselves, with reciprocal support, in an identical framework of spectacular-confusionist thought. This juxtaposition is the same principle of the present intellectual spectacle, the schizophrenic false consciousness of our time (cf. the works of J[oseph] Gabel).[6] The breaking up of Arguments also illuminated its past as the “university of left Planetism” by also revealing the process of contamination by osmosis of all the half-critiques that conceal themselves before a totally clear option, inseparable from acts themselves clearly decided [tranchés] in all areas of activity (including the tastes and encounters of everyday life).

The group associated with the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie have taken over from Arguments. They will end like Arguments. In Socialisme ou Barbarie, no. 39 (March 1965) the same Morin — [who is there] without doubt due to the shortage of more mediocre editors, and in any case he no longer had to fear compromising himself by appearing there — can legitimately feel at home in the entourage of a [Paul] Cardan, theoretician of the bread crumb who wanted, two years ago, “to recommence the revolution”; and who, in fact, accomplished his reconversion to the common culture of middle management particularly badly.[7] [Daniel] Mothé, the exemplary worker of this old revolutionary group, announced in his book Militant chez Renault (Seuil) his joyous membership in the ex-French Confederation of Christian Workers, whose democracy strongly attracts him.[8] As a result, here he is in the journal Esprit (February 1966), which reveals, apropos the presidential election: “It is the privatisation of the citizen and his reduction to a consumer of spectacle that obliges him to transfer the political to the level of household problems.” Here is the usual development of the Argumentist[9]: to circulate in polite society a little diffuse “situationism”, which is to say degraded critical thought, but on a degraded basis — one baseness compensating the other! The ex-Argumentist Yvon Bourdet, in the same issue of Socialisme ou Barbarie, no. 39, unleashes himself [se déchaîne] against the First International, confusing it so much with the bureaucratic powers that dominated the subsequent two Internationals — notwithstanding the differences between them — that he audaciously concludes: “In fact, the three are the same.” Furthermore, for him, closed to all the historical proofs (the place of Poland and of Polish exiles in all the struggles of the 19th century would have in itself been sufficient), the notion of internationalism would never have been “lived, except at the level of the apparatus (the general council) composed principally of émigrés”.[10] We see the two-fold delirium that transfers the modern reality of the apparatus, in the form of a timeless concept eternally rich from all of its crimes, to a time that has not known it[11] and that, on the other hand, succeeds in isolating the quality of émigré from its origin: a struggle spontaneously born in many countries, from similar conditions, and tending toward a community of international action, towards a party in the spontaneous sense that Marx then gave to this term. The measure of internationalism is exactly the measure of the consciousness of the revolutionary reality, a consciousness that has always been weak, repressed by all the mental and morale organisations of the dominant society, by a thousand defeats, and by one hundred thousand Cardan-Bourdets. But the return of what is repressed has its domain in all modern society. It is the end of its spectacle that will reveal it. Meanwhile Socialisme ou Barbarie thinks like the historian [Jacques] Rougerie does in the special number of Mouvement Social on the I.W.A. (April 1965).[12] The prudence of his scholarly conclusion, with one hundred years of hindsight, results in this admirable, involuntary parody, this masterpiece of questioning: “The problem remains open; momentarily, we have for the sole proof of the existence of worker internationalism that of the International itself.”

Similarly we have for the sole proof of the existence of Cardanism the thought of Cardan himself. This is not much! The disorder of current ideas mixed together in an interminable article by Cardan — who always fallaciously announces its end from one number to the next, and who restarts [it] in an incessant flight onward, without having ever commenced — marked the definitive impossibility of the existence of a group tolerating this.[13] The Macedonian Ideology of Cardan is such that ten individuals, themselves very close to mental debility, could not agree on a text whose own author decomposed it into scattered islands.[14] The dissipation of ideas goes so far that Cardan henceforth can no longer be satisfied with a five-year pseudonym; to hide his incoherent variations and the consequences of his poverty, he would need a different pseudonym every five pages.

Cardan, who no doubt believes, here as elsewhere, that it suffices to speak of something in order to possess it, vaguely gargles about “the imaginary”, thus wanting to justify, more or less, his gelatinous inconsistency of thought. He grasps hold of — following the example of the now-official world — psychoanalysis as a justification of the irrational and the profound reasons of the unconscious; whereas in fact the discoveries of psychoanalysis are a reinforcement — still unused, for evident socio-political motives — of the rational critique of the world. Psychoanalysis deeply tracks down the unconscious, its misery and its miserable repressive instances, which only derives their strength and magical pageantry from a very common practical repression in everyday life. Cardan immediately looses himself, before seeing that there is always a constituted imaginary that hides the actual imaginable. The social imaginary never has the pure innocence, the independence, attributed to it by its neophyte Cardan. For example, the greatest political problem of the century is an imaginary affair: we have imagined that the socialist revolution was successful in the U.S.S.R. The imagination is not free in an enslaved society. Without it, why would we imagine not only Planète, [but] so many Cardaneries?[15]

In Socialisme ou Barbarie, no. 40, Cardan sumptuously extended his questioning to “the fabrication of needs” in the advanced capitalist society. Cardan is a questioner of size; he sees far; one does not deceive him with the common idea of “true needs”; he seeks the highest assurance of the fundamental uncertainty of human enterprises. He writes (our emphasis): “It is vain to present this situation exclusively as a ‘replacement response’, as the offer of substitutes for other needs, ‘true’ needs, which the present society leaves unsatisfied. Because, by admitting that such needs exist and that we can define them, it can only become more striking that such a reality can be totally covered by a ‘pseudo-reality’.” Thus the same oppression and all its precisely oriented lies, all its spectacular organisation of the “pseudo-reality”, become problematic for Cardan and are absolved, from the moment that he completely passed from [the side of] critique to the side of the pseudo-reality. In place of trying to explain the astonishing, the “striking” function of social appearance in modern capitalism (key to all new revolutionary attempts), Cardan has the flat positivist self-confidence of the comic bourgeois who says “this would be all the same” [in order] to deny a problem that upsets his great common sense. Not only is he blind here, but he also denies that there is anything to see. However, pseudo-reality itself shows, negatively, what it hides. That all the needs that solicit or could solicit the production of commodities are equally artificial or arbitrary is what belies the dazzling contradiction of advertising in the social spectacle, which speaks of what it does not sell and does not sell that which it speaks of. It is easy, even for sociologists, to see what advertising promises and does not give publicity to — effective for the diffusion of some commodity or another: it promises security and adventure; the novel development of personality and recognition by others; communication and, above all, the fulfilment of erotic desires. For example, after Freud and Reich, we effectively know more than before about what are sexual “true needs,” and their dominant role in advertising imagery is manifestly intended to sell to people the market substitution for what they don’t have, rather than an infinity of equally acceptable imaginary possibilities. The existing imaginary of which Cardan speaks is not beyond some elementary needs, but an obstacle on the same side as them. These needs are still in no way transcended [dépassés] (except simple dietary needs in only a part of the world). But all of these truths that elude Cardan still do not mean that there existed this “essentially unalterable human nature in which the predominant motivation would be the economic motivation” — [an] error that Cardan, in his total ignorance of dialectical thought, believed can be revealed as the “hidden postulate” of Marxism (cf. our citation in S.I. 9, page 18).[16] We think, like Marx, that “the whole of history is only the progressive transformation of human nature”.[17] [And] the whole is understood in the moment of history that is here and now. All those who understand it at the same time understand very well the incomprehension of Morin and Cardan, and their effective fraternization. Even the rout of Socialisme ou Barbarie is nothing original: it faithfully follows Arguments into the dustbin that we have been able, in advance, to assign it.


LAST EDIT: 27 January 2017

First published in Internationale Situationniste no. 10, March 1966, pp. 77-79. Translated from the French by Anthony Hayes, October 2013. Thanks to Not Bored! and Marblepunk for help with the translation. Translator's footnotes below.

[1] This boycott was announced in I.S. no 5 (December 1960), in ‘Renseignements situationnistes’ (‘Situationist News’), p. 13: “the [Central] Council [of the S.I.] has decided to take advantage, without delay, of progress made by the S.I. and the support that it has begun to gain, to make an example of the most representative tendencies of the pseudo-leftist and conformist intelligentsia who have painstakingly organised so far the silence around us; and whose resignation in all fields begins to appear before the eyes of informed people: [i.e.,] the French journal Arguments. The Council has decided that all people who collaborate with the journal Arguments starting from January 1st, 1961, cannot be admitted under any circumstances, now or in the future, among the Situationists. The announcement of this boycott draws its force from the importance that we know the S.I. secures at least in the culture of the years ahead. Interested parties can bet, on the contrary, on the dubious company it will attract.”

[2] Morin and Axelos were the chief editors and animating ‘spirits’ of Arguments during its entire run (1957-62).

[3] “The journal Planète often incurred the criticism of the S.I. […] Planète, a magazine that combined science fiction stories with articles on speculative ‘science’, is perhaps the progenitor of such English language magazines as Omni and Wired, and is indeed the forerunner of the ideological function of such magazines. In their article Ideologies, Classes, and the Domination of Nature from I.S. no. 8, the Situationists compared Planète’s function to that of the journal Arguments. Whereas Arguments, under the guise of being a journal of ‘eclectic’ and ‘critical’ Marxist theory, was criticized for producing ‘the futile questioning of pure speculation’ (and thus played an important role in the spectacle of criticism), Planète was criticized for haranguing ‘ordinary people with the message that henceforth everything must be changed — while at the same time taking for granted 99% of the life really lived in our era.’ Thus the similarity of function – both journals were mouthpieces of the ideology of ‘progressive’ change (a central tenant of bourgeois ideology in its ‘free market’ and ‘state capitalist’ variants), whilst operating within and by virtue of the parameters of the bourgeois market. Their function as commodities that offered non-threatening change was central to the Situationist critique of them. Thus it was this appearance of modernity that was effectively non-threatening vis-à-vis capitalist modernity that was most egregious in the eyes of the Situationists, whose alternative was encapsulated in their conception of a coherent revolutionary project. Such an appearance would soon be shifted into the spectacle of post-modernism; the babble of ultra-modern theoretical radicalism that apparently interrogated everything all the better to hide the unitary nature of capitalist exploitation and alienation.” (from fn. 5, Well Said S.I.! (I.S. No. 9)

[4] Association for the Study of Cultures.

[5] In I.S. no. 9 under the title of ‘Les Mois Les Plus Longs’ (‘The Longest Months’), the names of Jean Duvignaud, Edgar Morin and many others were listed as ‘collaborators of Arguments’.

[6] Joseph Gabel was one of the Argumentists whose name was published in I.S. no. 9 (see footnote 5). Nonetheless his work on false consciousness, which he argued manifested as the non-dialectical ‘schizophrenic’ character of capitalist subjects, was used critically by the SI. See in particular Gabel’s book False Consciousness: An Essay on Reification (translated by Margaret A. Thompson, New York: Harper & Row, 1975), ‘Quelques recherches sans mode d’emploi’ (‘Investigations without a Guidebook’) in I.S. no. 10, p. 73, and Guy Debord The Society of the Spectacle, Chapter 9, ‘Ideology Materialised’, Theses nos. 217-220.

[7] Paul Cardan was one of several pseudonyms used by Cornelius Castoriadis. In Socialisme ou Barbarie, no. 35 (January 1964), Castoriadis’ article ‘Recommencer la révolution’ (‘Recommencing the Revolution’) was published. ‘Recommencing the Revolution’ was written by Castoriadis in the midst of what would shortly become the formalisation of a ‘de facto scission within the group’ in July 1963 — cf. Cornelius Castoriadis ‘Postface to “Recommencing the Revolution”’ in Cornelius Castoriadis, Political and Social Writings, Volume 3, translated and edited by David Ames Curtis, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, pp. 80-88.

[8] Daniel Mothé, Militant chez Renault (Militant at Renault) published by Seuil, October 1965. In this work Mothé (pseudonym for Jacques Gautrat), detailed his recent membership of the C. F. D. T. (Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail, i.e. French Democratic Confederation of Labour), which had only the year before, in 1964, been immaculately conceived from the C. F. T. C. (Confédération Française des Travailleurs Chrétiens, i.e. French Confederation of Christian Workers).

[9] I.e. a member or follower of the journal Arguments.

[10] Solidarity with the Polish uprising of January 1863 – and indeed with the question of Polish freedom throughout the nineteenth century – was instrumental in forging the links between French and English workers that led to the founding of the International Workingmen’s Association: “Henri Tolain, Perrachon, and Limousin visited London in July 1863, attending a meeting held in St. James’ Hall in honour of the Polish uprising. Here there was discussion of the need for an international organisation, which would, amongst other things, prevent the import of foreign workers to break strikes. In September, 1864, some French delegates again visited London with the concrete aim of setting up a special committee for the exchange of information upon matters of interest to the workers of all lands.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workingmen%27s_Association)

Indeed attention was drawn to Poland in the Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association written by Marx.

[11] ‘Apparatus’ from the French ‘appareil’. ‘Appareil’ can also denote in French, the ‘machinery of power’ or ‘political machinery’. The point the S.I. are making here is that it is questionable if the General Council of the First International (called an apparatus by Bourdet) can be classified as a part of the ‘machinery of political power’ simply because (and unlike the Second and Third Internationals), it was first of all, so singly opposed to the existence of such political machinery in its own time; secondly even in the 1860s and 70s the bourgeois machinery of power was still primitive in comparison to the political machinery of state of the 20th century — and particularly of the 1960s; and finally the First International, unlike the Second and Third, was never embroiled in the political and economic management and defence of capitalist states (e.g. the leading Second International party, the German S.P.D., and its counter-revolutionary role in saving the German state against the revolutionary wave of 1918-21, and of course the Third International’s role in defending and exporting the state-capitalist dogma of the ‘Soviet’ state).

[12] I.W.A.: the International Workingmen’s Association, aka the First International (1864-1876).

[13] The reference is to Cardan’s/Castoriadis’ article ‘Marxisme et Théorie Révolutionnaire’ (‘Marxism and Revolutionary Theory’) published in no less than 5 issues of the Socialisme ou Barbarie journal between April 1964 and June 1965. This article later formed the first part of Castoriadis’ 1975 work, L’institution imaginaire de la societé (The Imaginary Institution of Society — translated by Kathleen Blamey, 1987). Castoriadis even refers to the original article in his 1974 preface as “itself the never-ending development” of an earlier article. The S.I. also reference the conditions under which this long article was written, i.e. the ‘de facto scission’ of 1963 (cf. footnote 7).

[14] Here the reference must be to the remaining members of Socialisme ou Barbarie. By 1966 the journal had ceased publication the year before, effectively ending the group’s activity even though it was only formally dissolved in 1967. There were, however, several groupuscules influenced by Socialisme ou Barbarie left in its wake.

[15] The S.I.’s joke at the expense of Cardan/Castoriadis, ‘Cardaneries’, is difficult to translate. We assume it means in this case organisations or metaphorical shops peddling the ideas of Cardan, thus ‘Cardaneries’.

[16] Cf. ‘La Contestation en Miettes’ (‘Critique in Shreds’), I.S. no. 9, pp. 17-18. Translated by the Thomas Y. Levin, the citation reads: “The Marxist theory of history . . . is ultimately based on the hidden postulate of an essentially unchangeable human nature whose overriding motivation is an economic one. — Paul Cardan, Socialisme ou Barbarie, no. 37, July 1964.” The SI had briefly commented, in the same section: “[Paul] Cardan, when he is not organizing votes for or against the meaning of the Realm of God, presents to his movement (whose mission is to “recommence the revolution”) the same anti-Marxist and grossly falsifying platform that was proclaimed by the professors of philosophy in 1910” (ibid.).

[17] Cf. Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Third Manuscript under the title ‘Private Property and Communism’. Here is the entire sentence from the 1974 English translation by Gregor Benton: “But since for socialist man the whole of what is called world history is nothing more than the creation of man through human labour, and the development of nature for man, he therefore has palpable and incontrovertible proof of his self-mediated birth, of his process of emergence.” (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/epm/3rd.htm#s2)

Comments

cover of guerin pamphlet

Mustapha Khayati responds to Daniel Guerin's writing on Algeria. From International Situationniste #10 (March 1966).

Submitted by libcom on September 5, 2005

In December 1965 Daniel Guérin published a pamphlet entitled L'Algérie caporalisée? which contains a rather bizarre analysis of Boumédienne's regime. According to Guérin, nothing happened in June. Faithful to an old schema, he sees only a "Bonapartism" in power both before and after the coup d'état, struggling classically on two fronts: against the "counterrevolution of the indigenous propertied classes" and against the threatening enthusiasm of the workers striving for self-management. And in foreign affairs he finds "the same desire on the part of both regimes for an adroit balancing act between capitalist and socialist countries" (p. 6). "None of the declarations of the so-called 'Council of the Revolution' contains any innovations whatsoever or any hints of an original program" (p. 10). However, when he drafted his main text, dated November 5, Guérin thought he detected some potential new developments as the putchists were being pushed, as if despite themselves, to the "right" -- developments that "seem to foreshadow an antisocialist policy" (p. 11, our emphasis). One might suppose that Guérin disregards the considerable differences between the two regimes because he is carried away by the equal contempt that Ben Bella and Boumédienne might well arouse in a revolutionary who is a declared partisan of "libertarian socialism" and self-management. Unfortunately, this is not at all the case! He has no other revolutionary solution to recommend than the restoration of Ben Bella: "To rally a popular opposition to the colonels' regime in Algeria today without reference to Ben Bella, or while making a total political critique of Ben-Bellaism, would be an undertaking doomed to failure" (p. 17). And before June 19 the Ben Bella regime's numerous attacks on the workers, the exploits of its police and army -- the same police and army that are still in place today, in fact -- were for Guérin only "mistakes, weaknesses and omissions" of an acceptable orientation. The king was badly advised or misinformed; never responsible. Since Guérin cannot be unaware of the open struggles of Ben Bella's regime against the masses (he himself provides some excellent documentation of them, notably apropos of the Congress of Agricultural Workers), he has to reconstruct history by totally separating Ben Bella from his regime. Page 12: "The sabotage of self-management, organized, of course, without Ben Bella's knowledge." Page 2: "As we can see more clearly today, Ben Bella never had his hands free: for nearly three years he was the tool, the prisoner, the hostage of Boumédienne." In other words, people thought Ben Bella was in power, but his downfall has shown that he wasn't. Such an astonishing retroactive demonstration could just as well be applied to the Czar, who was believed to be an autocrat before 1917. But Guérin overlooks this question: Who besides Ben Bella made Boumédienne, by hoisting himself into power with the aid of Boumédienne's arms? That Ben Bella later made some half-hearted and very inept attempts to get rid of his tool is another matter. It is because he was above all a bureaucrat that he was at first essentially in solidarity with, and eventually the victim of, bureaucrats more rational than he.

What, then, is the secret of this aberration of one of our famous leftist intellectuals, and one of the most ostensibly "libertarian" among them at that? With him it is no different than with all the others: it is the decisive influence of their vainglorious participation in high society; their common tendency, even more servile than a lackey's, to be swept off their feet with joy because they have spoken with the greats of this world; and the imbecility that makes them attribute such greatness to those who have condescended to talk to them. Whether they are partisans of the self-managing masses or of police-state bureaucracies, the "leftist intellectuals" of the period from which we are just emerging always have the same rapt admiration for power and government. The closer they are to a governmental position, the more the leaders of the "underdeveloped" countries fascinate these ridiculous professors of leftist museology. In Simone de Beauvoir's memoirs, so revealing of the fundamental degradation of a whole generation of intellectuals, her narration of a dinner at the Soviet Embassy exposes a pettiness so irremediable and so shameless that she isn't even aware of it.

So here is the secret: Guérin "knew" Ben Bella. He "listened" to him from time to time: "When I had the privilege, at the beginning of December 1963, of a brief audience at the Villa Joly in order to present to the President a report resulting from my month of traveling around the country observing the self-managed enterprises, I had the impression that he had been prejudiced against my conclusions by Ali Mahsas and the Minister of Industry and Commerce, Bachir Boumaza" (p. 7).

Guérin really is for self-management, but, like Mohammed Harbi, it is in the pure form of its Spirit incarnated as a privileged hero that he prefers to meet it, recognize it and aid it with his sage advice. Daniel Guérin met the Weltgeist of self-management over a cup of tea, and everything else follows.

SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL (1966)

Translated by Ken Knabb (slightly modified from the version in the Situationist International Anthology). A postscript to this article appeared in the following issue.

Comments

From Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966).

Submitted by libcom on September 5, 2005

"Alienation, that key word for a whole system of politics, sociology, and critical thought -- what does it cover? J.M. Domenach traces the astonishing itinerary of this concept of such diverse meanings, from Hegel to Jacques Berque. Then he takes another look at its content. It seems to him that the moment has come to renounce this 'hospital concept' where all the maladies of the century are lumped together, and to call into question the philosophy that developed it."

This prefatory note from the journal Esprit (December 1965) is not betrayed by the extraordinary impudence of Domenach's article, "Let's Get Rid of Alienation," which opens the same issue. Domenach, prince of that notable province of contemporary confusionism, Christian leftism, reproaches the concept of alienation for being confused, for being used improperly, for having considerably evolved historically, and for having given rise to too many "vague and outmoded" formulas. If everything that was vague was therefore outmoded, religious thought would not have survived the rationalist clarification brought into the world by bourgeois society. But in a materially divided society, vague ideas and the vague use of precise concepts serve definite forces. The history of the concept of alienation, as Domenach recounts it in a few pages, is itself a perfect example of vague thought serving a specific confusionism. [...]

Domenach does not even want to "get rid of" the concept of alienation like that philosopher depicted in The German Ideology who wanted to liberate humanity from the idea of gravity so that there would be no more drownings. Domenach wants people to stop talking about alienation so that they will become resigned to it. [...] The alienation banished from consciousness is to be replaced by the more "precise" concept of exploitation. While it is true that the general alienation in the East and the West is effectively based on the exploitation of the workers, the evolution of modern capitalism -- and still more, bureaucratic ideology -- have largely succeeded in masking the Marxist analyses of exploitation at the stage of free competition and in making the handling of them less precise. In contrast, these parallel evolutions have brought alienation -- which was originally a philosophical concept -- into the reality of every hour of daily life. [...]

To be sure, in a society that needs to spread a mass pseudoculture and to have its spectacular pseudointellectuals monopolize the stage, many terms are naturally rapidly vulgarized. But for the same reasons, perfectly simple and illuminating words tend to disappear: such as the word priest; so that Domenach and his friends come to think that no one will ever again remind them of this embarrassing vulgarity. They are mistaken. Just as the secular efforts of a Revel (En France) to compile a list of words to forbid, a list that mixes a few fashionable trivialities with important contested terms, are ridiculous because one cannot hope to simultaneously suppress the theoretical discoveries of our time and the interested confusion to which they give rise in order to "return" to some simplified rationalism which never had the efficacy the nostalgic liberals now attribute to it. [...]

People like Domenach, being themselves valets of the establishment's cultural spectacle, which wants to quickly coopt for its own use the most crucial terms of modern critical thought, will never want to admit that the truest and most important concepts of the era -- alienation, dialectics, communism -- are precisely marked by the organization around them of the greatest confusions and the worst misinterpretations. Vital concepts are simultaneously subject to the truest and the most false uses, along with a multitude of intermediary confusions, because the struggle between critical reality and the apologetic spectacle leads to a struggle over words, a struggle that is more bitter the more those words are central. The truth of a concept is not revealed by an authoritarian purge, but by the coherence of its use in theory and in practical life. It is not important that a priest at the pulpit renounces the use of a concept that he would in any case never case have known how to use. Let us speak vulgarly since we're dealing with priests: alienation is the point of departure for everything -- providing that one departs from it.

SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL (1966)

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

Comments

a photograph of an article in the Times Literary Supplement about the Situationist International

An update on publications of the SI, including the exclusion of Uwe Lausen. From Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966).

Submitted by Fozzie on March 1, 2023

Michèle Bernstein's article, The Situationist International, published in September 1964 in a special issue of Times Literary Supplement devoted to the avant-garde, ended as follows:

In a short space it is obviously impossible to develop any argument about situationist principles, or even to explain them with the necessary precision . . . Among the first intellectual groups who have so far had a chance to get to know these theses, the usual reaction is to ask if the situationists are serious, or if they are utterly mistaken and destined for unparalleled depths of stupidity. The situationists can guarantee that none of these doubts about them will be tenable in a hundred years' time.

*

Upon the appearance in London in fall 1964 of the first publications by Alexander Trocchi's ‘Project Sigma,’ it was mutually agreed that the SI could not involve itself in such a loose cultural venture, in spite of the interest we have in dialogue with certain of the individuals who may be drawn to it, notably in the United States and England. It is therefore no longer as a member of the SI that our friend Alexander Trocchi has since developed this activity, several aspects of which meet our complete approval.

*

Also in 1964, the notes and texts of three films Guy Debord were collected in the book Contre le Cinéma [Against Cinema], which was published in Aarhus by the Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism. It should be noted that despite the laudatory character of this edition, no truly sufficient means of cinematic self-expression has ever presented itself to the situationists (it's still the age of Godard, you know).

*

In Denmark in February 1965, J.V. Martin published his comments — weighed down by worsening conditions — on the proceedings instituted against the SI by the local branch of "Moral Rearmament" (Im Namen des Volkes). Danish translations of these texts were published by the Left socialist journal Aspekt: in its first issue, under the title To Realize Philosophy, To Realize Art, the "response to a questionnaire" from I.S. #9; and in issue 3, Theses on the Paris Commune from the tract Into the Trashcan of History. The same journal published some of the Spanish comics, reproduced many times in the European press, that gave rise to Moral Rearmament's charges.

*

On 17 March 1965, situationists in Strasbourg interrupted a conference that attempted to honor the cyberneticist [Abraham] Moles and the sculptor [Nicolas] Schöffer. Our comrades used this occasion to distribute the pamphlet The Tortoise in the Window (Dialectic of the Robot and the Signal), as well as a reprinted Correspondence with a Cyberneticist, which featured in I.S. #9. According to the local paper of 28-3-65 (which must have expected an execution), "a tomato thrown in pure wastefulness at the beginning of the evening by a mentally limited situationist commando failed to disrupt the course of the conference . . ."

*

Also in March, Uwe Lausen was excluded from the SI when he informed us of his intention to organize a happening in Munich.

*

In July 1965, the SI clandestinely published a mimeographed Address to Revolutionaries, describing Boumedienne's recent putsch.

*

The SI has not had the material capacities to continue publishing either the German language journal Der Deutsche Gedanke or the Danish Situationistisk Revolution, although a forthcoming issue of the latter is now on the drawing board. The much postponed project of a Dictionary of Situationist Concepts is currently underway in a more expanded form, under the direction of Mustapha Khayati (see his Preface published this issue).

*

In November, the SI reissued the text of the Address in French, German, Spanish, English and Arabic. The following month, two supplements reprinted in the present issue were produced separately: The Class Struggles in Algeria, distributed in pamphlet form in that country; and an analysis of the Los Angeles riots, the English language brochure The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy.

*

All correspondence for the journal Internationale Situationniste should now be directed to Boîte Postale 307-03, Paris. For the journal Acción Comunista (cf. our Contribution to a Program . . .): c/o F. Lardinois, 13 rue de Géron, Liège, Belgium. For the Zengukaren Federation: Hirota Building, 2-10 Kandajimbo-cho, Chiyoda Ku, Tokyo, Japan.

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

Comments

cover of IS #11 in fetching metallic dark green

Issue 11 of the journal of the Situationist International.

Submitted by libcom on September 1, 2005

October 1967
Director: Debord
Mail: B.P. 307-03 Paris
Editorial Committee: Mustapha Khayati, J.V. Martin, Donald Nicholson-Smith, Raoul Vaneigem.

All texts published in Internationale Situationniste may be freely reproduced, translated or adapted, even without indication of origin.

Comments

The Situationists analyse the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. The Maoist regime was confronted with both faction fighting within its ruling bureaucracy and with a massive wave of class struggle challenging its power. Written with an unfulfilled optimism typical of its times.

Submitted by libcom on September 1, 2005

The international association of totalitarian bureaucracies has completely fallen apart. In the words of the Address published by the situationists in Algiers in July 1965, the irreversible “collapse of the revolutionary image” that the “bureaucratic lie” counterposed to the whole of capitalist society, as its pseudonegation and actual support, has become obvious, and first of all on the terrain where official capitalism had the greatest interest in upholding the pretense of its adversary: the global confrontation between the bourgeoisie and the so-called “socialist camp.” This camp had in any case never been socialist; now, in spite of all sorts of attempts to patch it up, it has ceased even to be a camp.

The disintegration of the Stalinist monolith is already manifested in the coexistence of some twenty independent “lines,” from Rumania to Cuba, from Italy to the Vietnamese-Korean-Japanese bloc of parties. Russia, having this year become incapable of holding a joint conference of merely all the European parties, prefers to forget the era when Moscow reigned over the Comintern. Thus the Izvestia of September 1966 blames the Chinese leaders for bringing “unprecedented” discredit to “Marxist-Leninist” ideas, and virtuously deplores the confrontational style “in which insults are substituted for an exchange of opinions and revolutionary experiences. Those who choose this method confer an absolute value on their own experience and reveal a dogmatic and sectarian mentality in their interpretation of Marxist-Leninist theory. Such an attitude is inevitably accompanied by interference in the internal affairs of fraternal parties.” In the Sino-Soviet polemic, in which each power is led to impute to its opponent every conceivable antiproletarian crime, being only obliged not to mention the real crime (the class power of the bureaucracy), each side can only arrive at the sobering conclusion that the other’s revolutionariness was only an inexplicable mirage, a mirage which, lacking any reality, has now reverted to its old point of departure. Thus in New Delhi last February the Chinese ambassador described Brezhnev and Kosygin as “new czars of the Kremlin,” while the Indian government, an anti-Chinese ally of this Muscovy, discovered that “the present masters of China have donned the imperial mantle of the Manchus.” This denunciation of the new Middle Kingdom dynasty was further refined the following month in Moscow by the modernist state poet Voznesensky, who, evoking the menace of a new invasion of “the hordes of Kuchum,” counts on “eternal Russia” to build a rampart against the Mongols who threaten to bivouac among “the Egyptian treasures of the Louvre.”

The accelerating decomposition of bureaucratic ideology, as evident in the countries where Stalinism has seized power as in the others where it has lost every chance of seizing it, naturally began around issues of internationalism; but this is only the beginning of a general and irreversible disintegration. For the bureaucracy, internationalism could be nothing but an illusive proclamation in the service of its real interests, one ideological justification among others, since bureaucratic society is the total opposite of proletarian community. Bureaucratic power is based on possession of a nation-state and it must ultimately obey the logic of this reality, in accordance with the particular interests imposed by the level of development of the country it possesses. Its heroic age passed away with the ideological golden age of “socialism in a single country” that Stalin was shrewd enough to maintain by destroying the revolutions in China in 1927 and Spain in 1937. The autonomous bureaucratic revolution in China — as already shortly before in Yugoslavia — introduced into the unity of the bureaucratic world a dissolutive germ that has broken it up in less than twenty years. The general process of decomposition of bureaucratic ideology is now attaining its supreme stage in the very country where that ideology was most necessary, the country where, because of its general economic backwardness, the remaining ideological pretensions of revolution had to be pushed to their extreme: China.

The crisis that has continually deepened in China since the spring of 1966 constitutes an unprecedented phenomenon in bureaucratic society. The bureaucratic state-capitalist ruling class of Russia and East Europe, continually and necessarily exerting terror over the exploited majority, has of course often been torn apart by rivalries and antagonisms stemming from the objective problems it runs into as well as from the subjectively delirious style that a totally mendacious power is led to assume. But up till now the bureaucracy — which must be centralized due to its mode of appropriation of the economy, since it must draw from itself the hierarchical guarantee to all participation in its collective appropriation of the social surplus production — has always made its purges from the top down. The summit of the bureaucracy has to remain fixed, for the whole legitimacy of the system depends on a fixed summit. It must keep its dissensions to itself (as it always has from the time of Lenin and Trotsky). Those who hold office may be replaced or liquidated, but the office itself must always retain the same indisputable majesty. The unexplained and unanswerable repression can then normally descend to each level of the apparatus as a mere implementation of what has been instantaneously decided at the top. Beria(1) must first be killed; then judged; then his faction can be hunted down; or in fact anybody can be hunted down because the power that is doing the liquidating thereby defines who and what that faction consists of and at the same time redefines itself as the sole power. This is what is not happening in China. The persistency of the declared adversaries, in spite of the fantastic raising of bids in the struggle for total power, clearly shows that the ruling class has split in two.

A social disaster of such magnitude obviously cannot be explained, in the anecdotal style of bourgeois observers, as being the result of dissensions over foreign policy (on the contrary, the Chinese bureaucracy is quite unified in the docility with which it tolerates the insult of the crushing of Vietnam on its own doorstep). Neither could personal quarrels over succession to power have caused so much to be put at stake. When certain leaders are accused of having “kept Mao Tse-tung from power” since the end of the 1950s, everything leads one to believe that this is one of those retrospective crimes frequently fabricated during bureaucratic purges — Trotsky conducting the civil war on orders from the Mikado, Zinoviev supporting Lenin in order to work for the British Empire, etc.(2) The man who could have taken power from someone as powerful as Mao would not have slept as long as Mao was still around to come back. Mao would have died that very day, and nothing would have prevented his faithful successors from attributing his death to, say, Khrushchev. If the rulers and polemicists of the bureaucratic states certainly have a much better understanding of the Chinese crisis, their statements cannot for all that be taken any more seriously, for in talking about China they have to guard against revealing too much about themselves. The most deluded are the leftist debris of the Western countries, who are always the willing dupes of moldy sub-Leninist propaganda. They solemnly evaluate the role in Chinese society of the continuation of allowances to the capitalists who rallied to the “Communist” regime, or scrutinize the fray trying to figure out which leader represents genuine radicalism or workers’ autonomy. The most stupid among them thought there was something “cultural” about this affair, until January when the Maoist press pulled the dirty trick on them of admitting that it had been “a struggle for power from the very beginning.” The only serious debate consists in examining why and how the ruling class could have split into two hostile camps; and any investigation of this question is naturally impossible for those who don’t recognize that the bureaucracy is a ruling class, or who ignore the specificity of this class and reduce it to the classical conditions of bourgeois power.

On the why of the breach within the bureaucracy, it can be said with certainty only that it was a matter in which the ruling class’s very domination was at stake since in order to settle it each side remained unyielding and neither hesitated to immediately risk their joint class power by jeopardizing all the existing conditions of their administration of the society. The ruling class must thus have known that it could no longer govern as before. There is no question that the conflict involved the management of the economy, and that the collapse of the bureaucracy’s successive economic policies is the cause of that conflict’s extreme acuteness. The failure of the “Great Leap Forward” — mainly because of the resistance of the peasantry — not only put an end to the prospect of an ultravoluntarist takeoff of industrial production, but led to a disastrous disorganization whose effects were felt for several years.(3) Even agricultural production has scarcely increased since 1958 (the increase of food supplies does not even match the rate of population growth).

It is less easy to say over what specific economic options the ruling class split. Probably one side (consisting of the majority of the Party apparatus, the union leaders and the economists) wanted to continue, or increase more or less considerably, the production of consumer goods and to sustain the workers’ efforts with economic incentives; this policy would imply making some concessions to the peasants and especially to the factory workers, as well as increasing a hierarchically differentiated consumption for a good part of the bureaucracy. The other side (including Mao and a large segment of the higher-ranking army officers) probably wanted to resume at any price the effort to industrialize the country through an even more extreme recourse to terror and ideological energy, an unlimited superexploitation of the workers, and perhaps an “egalitarian” sacrifice in consumption for a considerable segment of the lower bureaucracy. Both positions are equally oriented toward maintaining the absolute domination of the bureaucracy and are calculated in terms of the necessity of erecting barriers against any class struggles that threaten that domination. In any case, the urgency and vital character of this choice was so evident to everyone that both camps felt they had to run the risk of immediately aggravating the conditions in which they found themselves by the disorder of their very schism. It is quite possible that the obstinacy on both sides is justified by the fact that there is no satisfactory solution to the insurmountable problems of the Chinese bureaucracy; that the two options confronting each other were thus equally unfeasible; and that some choice nevertheless had to be made.

As for figuring out how a division at the summit of the bureaucracy was able to descend from level to level — recreating at every stage remote-controlled confrontations which in turn incited or exacerbated oppositions throughout the Party and the state, and finally among the masses — it is probably necessary to take into account the survival of aspects of the ancient manner of administering China by provinces tending toward semiautonomy. The Peking Maoists’ denunciation in January of “independent fiefs” clearly suggests this reality, and the development of the disturbances over the last few months confirms it. It is quite possible that the phenomenon of regionally autonomous bureaucratic power, which during the Russian counterrevolution was manifested only weakly and sporadically by the Leningrad organization, found firm and multiple bases in bureaucratic China, resulting in the possibility of a coexistence within the central government of clans and constituents holding entire regions of bureaucratic power as their personal property and bargaining with each other on this basis. Bureaucratic power in China was not born out of a workers movement, but out of the military regimentation of peasants during a 22-year war. The army has remained closely interlinked with the Party, all of whose leaders have also been military chiefs, and it remains the principal training school of the peasant masses from which the Party selects its future cadres. It seems, moreover, that the local administrations installed in 1949 were largely based on the regions traversed by the different army regiments moving from the north to the south, leaving in their wake at every stage men who were linked to those regions by geographical origin (or by family ties: the propaganda against Liu Shao-ch’i and others has fully exposed this nepotistic factor in the consolidation of bureaucratic cliques). Such local bases of semiautonomous power within the bureaucratic administration could thus have been formed by a combination of the organizational structures of the conquering army with the productive forces it found to control in the conquered regions.

When the Mao faction began its public offensive against the entrenched positions of its adversaries by dragooning and indoctrinating students and schoolchildren, it was in no way for the purpose of directly initiating a “cultural” or “civilizing” remolding of the mass of workers, who were already squeezed as tightly as possible into the ideological straitjacket of the regime. The silly diatribes against Beethoven or Ming art, like the invectives against a supposed occupation or reoccupation of positions of power by a Chinese bourgeoisie that has obviously been annihilated as such, were only presented for the benefit of the spectators — though not without calculating that this crude ultraleftism might strike a certain chord among the oppressed, who have, after all, some reason to suspect that there are still several obstacles in their country to the emergence of a classless society. The main purpose of this operation was to make the regime’s ideology, which is by definition Maoist, appear in the street in the service of this faction. Since the adversaries could themselves be nothing other than officially Maoist, imposing a struggle on this terrain immediately put them in an awkward position. It forced them to make “self-critiques,” the insufficiency of which, however, expressed their actual resolution to hold on to the positions they controlled. The first phase of the struggle can thus be characterized as a confrontation of the official owners of the ideology against the majority of the owners of the economic and state apparatus. But the bureaucracy, in order to maintain its collective appropriation of society, needs the ideology as much as it does the administrative and repressive apparatus; the venture into such a separation was thus extremely dangerous if it was not quickly resolved.

The majority of the apparatus, including Liu Shao-ch’i himself despite his shaky position in Peking, resisted obstinately. After their first attempt to block the Maoist agitation at the university level by setting up effectively anti-Maoist “work groups” among the students, that agitation spread into the streets of all the large cities and everywhere began to attack, by means of wall posters and direct action, the officials who had been designated as “capitalist-roaders” — attacks that were not without errors and excesses of zeal. These officials organized resistance wherever they could. It is likely that the first clashes between workers and “Red Guards”(4) were in fact initiated by Party activists in the factories under orders from local officials. Soon, however, the workers, exasperated by the excesses of the Red Guards, began to intervene on their own. When the Maoists spoke of “extending the Cultural Revolution” to the factories and then to the countryside, they gave themselves the air of having decided on a movement which had in fact come about in spite of their plans and which throughout autumn 1966 was totally out of their control. The decline of industrial production; the disorganization of transportation, irrigation and state administration (despite Chou En-lai’s efforts); the threats to the autumn and spring harvests; the halting of all education (particularly serious in an underdeveloped country) for more than a year — all this was the inevitable result of a struggle whose extension was solely due to the resistance of the sector of the bureaucracy in power that the Maoists were trying to make back down.

The Maoists, who have virtually no experience with struggles in urban environments, will have had good occasion to verify Machiavelli’s precept: “One should take care not to incite a rebellion in a city while imagining that one can stop it or direct it at will” (History of Florence). After a few months of pseudocultural pseudorevolution, real class struggle has appeared in China, with the workers and peasants beginning to act for themselves. The workers cannot be unaware of what the Maoist perspective means for them; the peasants, seeing their individual plots of land threatened, have in several provinces begun to divide among themselves the land and equipment of the “People’s Communes” (these latter being merely the new ideological dressing of the preexisting administrative units, generally corresponding to the old cantons). The railroad strikes, the Shanghai general strike (denounced, as in 1956 Budapest, as a favored weapon of the capitalists), the strikes of the great Wuhan industrial complex, of Canton, of Hupeh, of the metal and textile workers in Chungking, the peasants’ attacks in Szechwan and Fukien — these movements came to a culmination in January, bringing China to the brink of chaos. At the same time, following in the wake of the workers who in September 1966 in Kwangsi had organized themselves as “Purple Guards” in order to fight the Red Guards, and after the anti-Maoist riots in Nanking, “armies” began to form in various provinces, such as the “August 1st Army” in Kwangtung. The national army had to intervene everywhere in February and March in order to subdue the workers, to direct production through “military control” of the factories, and even (with the support of the militia) to control work in the countryside. The workers’ struggles to maintain or increase their wages — that famous tendency toward “economism” denounced by the masters of Peking — was accepted or even encouraged by some local cadres of the apparatus in their resistance to rival Maoist bureaucrats. But the main impetus of the struggle was clearly an irresistible upsurge from the rank-and-file workers — the authoritarian dissolution in March of the “professional associations” that had formed after the first dissolution of the regime’s labor unions, whose bureaucracy had been deviating from the Maoist line, is a good demonstration of this. In Shanghai that same month the Jiefang Ribao condemned “the feudal tendencies of these associations, which are formed not on a class basis (i.e., not on the basis of a Maoist total monopoly of power) but on the basis of trades and which struggle for the partial and immediate interests of the workers in those trades.” This defense of the real owners of the general and permanent interests of the collectivity was also distinctly expressed on February 11 in a joint directive from the Council of State and the Military Commission of the Central Committee: “All elements who have seized or stolen arms must be arrested.”

While the settlement of this conflict — which has certainly cost tens of thousands of lives and involved fully equipped regiments and even warships — is being entrusted to the Chinese army, that army is itself divided. It has to ensure the continuation and intensification of production at a time when it is no longer in a position to ensure the unity of power in China. Moreover, the army’s direct intervention against the peasants would present the gravest risks because it has been recruited largely from the peasantry. The truce sought by the Maoists in March and April, when they declared that all Party personnel were redeemable with the exception of a “handful” of traitors, and that the principal menace was now “anarchism,” expressed not merely the anxiety over the difficulty of reining in the liberatory desires that the Red Guard experiences had awakened among the youth; it expressed the ruling class’s anxiety at having arrived at the brink of its own dissolution. The Party and the central and provincial administration were falling apart. “Labor discipline must be reestablished.” “The idea of excluding and overthrowing all cadres must be unconditionally condemned” (Red Flag, March 1967). A month earlier New China declared: “You smash all the officials . . . but when you have taken over some administrative body what do you have besides an empty room and some rubber stamps?” Rehabilitations and new compromises are following one another erratically. The very survival of the bureaucracy has ultimate priority, pushing its diverse political options into the background as mere means.

By spring 1967 it was evident that the “Cultural Revolution” was a disastrous failure and that this failure was certainly the most colossal of the long line of failures of the bureaucratic regime in China. In spite of the extraordinary cost of the operation none of its goals has been attained. The bureaucracy is more divided than ever. Every new power installed in the regions held by the Maoists is dividing in its turn: the “Revolutionary Triple Alliance” — Army-Party-Red Guard — has not ceased falling apart, both because of the antagonisms between these three forces (the Party, in particular, tending to remain aloof, getting involved only to sabotage the other two) and because of the continually aggravated antagonisms within each one. It seems as difficult to patch up the old apparatus as it would be to build a new one. Most importantly, at least two-thirds of China is in no way controlled by the regime in Peking.

Besides the governmental committees of partisans of Liu Shao-ch’i and the movements of workers’ struggles that continue to assert themselves, the warlords are already reappearing in the uniforms of independent “Communist” generals, negotiating directly with the central power and following their own policies, particularly in the peripheral regions. General Chang Kuo-hua, master of Tibet in February, after street fighting in Lhasa used armored cars against the Maoists. Three Maoist divisions were sent to “crush the revisionists.” They seem to have met with limited success since Chang Kuo-hua still controlled the region in April. On May 1 he was received in Peking, with negotiations ending in a compromise: he was entrusted to form a Revolutionary Committee to govern Szechwan, where in April a “Revolutionary Alliance” influenced by a certain General Hung had seized power and imprisoned the Maoists; since then, in June, members of a People’s Commune seized arms and attacked the army. In Inner Mongolia the army, under the direction of Deputy Political Commissar Liu Chiang, declared itself against Mao in February. The same thing happened in Hopeh, Honan and Manchuria. In May, General Chao Yungshih carried out an anti-Maoist putsch in Kansu. Sinkiang, where the atomic installations are located, was neutralized by mutual agreement in March, under the authority of General Wang En-mao; the latter, however, is reputed to have attacked “Maoist revolutionaries” in June. Hupeh was in July in the hands of General Chen Tsai-tao, commander of the Wuhan district, one of the oldest industrial centers in China. In the old style of the “Sian Incident,”(5) he arrested two of the main Peking leaders who had come to negotiate with him. The Prime Minister had to go there in person, and his obtaining the release of his emissaries was announced as a “victory.” During the same period 2400 factories and mines were paralyzed in that province following an armed uprising of 50,000 workers and peasants. At the beginning of summer the conflict was in fact continuing everywhere: in June “conservative workers” of Honan attacked a textile mill with incendiary bombs; in July the coal miners of Fushun and the oil workers of Tahsing were on strike, the miners of Kiangsi were driving out the Maoists, there were calls for struggle against the “Chekiang Industrial Army” (described as an “anti-Marxist terrorist organization”), peasants threatened to march on Nanking and Shanghai, there was street fighting in Canton and Chungking, and the students of Kweiyang attacked the army and seized Maoist leaders. The government, having decided to prohibit violence “in the regions controlled by the central authorities,” seems to be having a hard time of it even there. Unable to stop the disorders, it is stopping the news of them by expelling most of the rare foreigners in residence.

But at the beginning of August the fractures in the army have become so dangerous that the official Peking publications are themselves revealing that the partisans of Liu are “trying to set up an independent reactionary bourgeois kingdom within the army” and that “the attacks against the dictatorship of the proletariat in China have come not only from the higher echelons, but also from the lower ones” (People’s Daily, August 5). Peking has gone so far as to openly admit that at least a third of the Army has declared itself against the central government and that even a large part of the old China of eighteen provinces is out of its control. The immediate consequences of the Wuhan incident seem to have been very serious: an intervention of paratroopers from Peking, supported by gunboats ascending the Yangtze from Shanghai, was repulsed after a pitched battle; arms from the Wuhan arsenal are also reported to have been sent to the anti-Maoists of Chungking. It should be noted, moreover, that the Wuhan troops belonged to the army group under the direct authority of Lin Piao, the only one considered completely loyal. Toward the middle of August the armed struggles have become so widespread that the Maoist government has come around to officially condemning this sort of continuation of politics by means that are turning against it, stating its firm conviction that it will win out by sticking to “struggle with the pen” instead of the sword.(6) Simultaneously it is announcing distribution of arms to the masses in the “loyal zones.” But where are such zones? Fighting has broken out again in Shanghai, which had been presented for months as one of the rare strongholds of Maoism. In Shantung soldiers are inciting the peasants to revolt. The leaders of the Air Force are denounced as enemies of the regime. And as in the days of Sun Yat-sen,(7) Canton, toward which the 47th Army is moving in order to reestablish order, stands out as a beacon of revolt, with the railroad and transit workers in the forefront: political prisoners have been liberated, arms destined for Vietnam have been seized from freighters in the port, and an undetermined number of individuals have been hung in the streets. Thus China is slowly sinking into a confused civil war, which is both a confrontation between diverse regions of fragmented state-bureaucratic power and a clash of workers’ and peasants’ demands with the conditions of exploitation that the fragmented bureaucratic leaderships have to maintain everywhere.

Since the Maoists have presented themselves as the champions of absolute ideology (we have seen how successfully), they have so far naturally met with the most extravagant degree of respect and approbation among Western intellectuals, who never fail to salivate to such stimuli. K.S. Karol, in the Nouvel Observateur of February 15, learnedly reminds the Maoists not to forget that “the real Stalinists are not potential allies of China, but its most irreducible enemies: for them, the Cultural Revolution, with its antibureaucratic tendencies, is suggestive of Trotskyism.” There were, in fact, many Trotskyists who identified with it — thereby doing themselves perfect justice! Le Monde, the most unreservedly Maoist paper outside China, day after day announced the imminent success of Monsieur Mao Tse-tung, finally taking the power that had been generally believed to have been his for the past eighteen years. The sinologists, virtually all Stalino-Christians — this combination can be found everywhere, but particularly among them — have resurrected the “Chinese spirit” to demonstrate the legitimacy of the new Confucius. The element of silliness that has always been present in the attitude of moderately Stalinophile leftist bourgeois intellectuals could hardly fail to blossom when presented with such Chinese record achievements as: This “Cultural Revolution” may well last 1000 or even 10,000 years. . . . The Little Red Book has finally succeeded in “making Marxism Chinese.” . . . “The sound of men reciting the Quotations of Chairman Mao with strong, clear voices can be heard in every Army unit.” . . . “Drought has nothing frightening, Mao Tse-tung Thought is our fertilizing rain.” . . . “The Chief of State was judged responsible . . . for not having foreseen the about-face of General Chiang Kai-shek when the latter turned his army against the Communist troops” (Le Monde, 4 April 1967; this refers to the 1927 coup, which was foreseen by everyone in China but which had to be awaited passively in order to obey Stalin’s orders).(8) . . . A chorale sings the hymn entitled One Hundred Million People Take Up Arms To Criticize The Sinister Book “How To Be A Good Communist” (a formerly official manual by Liu Shao-ch’i). . . . The list could go on and on; we can conclude with this gem from the People’s Daily of July 31: “The situation of the Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China is excellent, but the class struggle is becoming more difficult.”

After so much ado the historical conclusions to be drawn from this period are simple. No matter where China may go from here, the image of the last revolutionary-bureaucratic power has shattered. Its internal collapse is added to the continuing disasters of its foreign policy: the annihilation of Indonesian Stalinism;(9) the break with Japanese Stalinism; the destruction of Vietnam by the United States; and finally Peking’s proclamation in July that the Naxalbari “insurrection” was the beginning of a Maoist-peasant revolution throughout India (this a few days before it was dispersed by the first police intervention). By adopting such a delirious position Peking broke with the majority of its own Indian partisans — the last large bureaucratic party that remained loyal to it. At the same time, China’s internal crisis reflects its failure to industrialize the country and make itself a credible model for the underdeveloped countries.

Ideology, pushed to its extreme, shatters. Its absolute use is also its absolute zero: the night in which all ideological cows are black. When, amidst the most total confusion, bureaucrats fight each other in the name of the same dogma and everywhere denounce “the bourgeois hiding behind the red flag,” doublethink has itself split in two. This is the joyous end of ideological lies, dying in ridicule. It is not just China, it is our whole world that has produced this delirium. In the August 1961 issue of Internationale Situationniste we said that this world would become “at all levels more and more painfully ridiculous until the moment of its complete revolutionary reconstruction.” This process now seems to be well on its way. The new period of proletarian critique will learn that it must no longer shelter from criticism anything that pertains to it, and that every existing ideological comfort represents a shameful defeat. In discovering that it is dispossessed of the false goods of its world of falsehood, it must understand that it is the specific negation of the totality of the global society. And it will discover this also in China. The global breakup of the Bureaucratic International is now being reproduced at the Chinese level in the fragmentation of the regime into independent provinces. Thus China is rediscovering its past, which is once again posing to it the real revolutionary tasks of the previously vanquished movement. The moment when Mao is supposedly “recommencing in 1967 what he was doing in 1927” (Le Monde, 17 February 1967) is also the moment when, for the first time since 1927, the intervention of the worker and peasant masses has surged over the entire country. As difficult as it may be for them to become conscious of their autonomous objectives and put them into practice, something has died in the total domination to which the Chinese workers were subjected. The proletarian “Mandate of Heaven” has expired.(10)

SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL
16 August 1967

================================

[TRANSLATOR’S NOTES]

1. Lavrenti Beria, head of Soviet secret police, was arrested and executed immediately after Stalin’s death in 1953.

2. Accusations fabricated during the Moscow Trials of 1936-1938 in which Stalin eliminated virtually all the former Bolshevik leaders except himself.

3. Great Leap Forward (1958-1962): Mao’s pet scheme for ultrarapid industrialization, which resulted in economic chaos and famines killing millions of people. Its failure caused Mao to be replaced as president of China by Liu Shao-chi (though he retained the powerful post of Chairman of the Communist Party).

4. Red Guards: youth enlisted by the Mao faction to attack the rival “revisionist” bureaucrats. Some groups of Red Guards, however, were actually set up and controlled by the anti-Mao faction. Others, though originally pro-Mao, ended up overflowing the control of the Maoist bureaucracy by taking the Maoist radical rhetoric seriously.

5. Sian Incident: In 1936 Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-chek was imprisoned in Sian (Xi’an) by one of his own generals, who was in favor of an alliance with the Communist Party against the Japanese invaders. On Stalin’s insistence Chiang was turned loose in exchange for his agreement to the united front between the CP and the Kuomintang that was effected a few months later.

6. Reference to Clausewitz’s maxim, “War is a continuation of politics by other means,” with perhaps also an ironic allusion to Mao’s saying, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

7. Sun Yat-sen: leader of the Chinese nationalist movement until his death in 1925.

8. On the advice of the Chinese Communist Party, the workers who had revolted and taken over Shanghai in 1927 welcomed Chiang Kai-chek’s army into the city and allowed themselves to be disarmed; after which they were massacred. See Harold Isaacs’s The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution.

9. “None of these disasters, however, are so gross as the bloody downfall of Indonesian Stalinism, whose bureaucratic mania blinded it to the point of expecting to seize power only by way of plots and palace revolution, although it was in control of an immense movement — a movement it led to annihilation without ever having led it into battle (it is estimated that there have been over 300,000 executions)” (Internationale Situationniste #10, p. 65).

10. The “Mandate of Heaven” is the traditional right of Chinese emperors to rule. When this mandate is lost — as revealed by inauspicious signs expressing the disfavor of Heaven — it is time for a revolution to establish a new dynasty.

General notes:

For simplicity’s sake I have left all the Chinese proper names in the Wade-Giles system of romanization that was used in the original SI article, instead of the now-standard Pinyin system. (Peking is now Beijing, Mao Tse-tung is now Mao Zedong, etc.) A few of the alternative forms are indicated in the Index.

For an excellent later and more detailed account of the Cultural Revolution, see Simon Leys’s The Chairman’s New Clothes: Mao and the Cultural Revolution.

---------------------------

“Le point d’explosion de l’idéologie en Chine” was originally published as a pamphlet August 1967, then reprinted in Internationale Situationniste #11 (Paris, October 1967). This translation by Ken Knabb is from the Situationist International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition, 2006). [http://bopsecrets.org/cat.htm] No copyright.

Comments

The Arab-Israel war was a dirty trick pulled by modern history on the good conscience of the Left, which was communing in the great spectacle of its protest against the Vietnam war. The false consciousness that saw in the NLF the champion of "socialist revolution" against American imperialism could only get entangled and collapse amidst its insurmountable contradictions when it had to decide between Israel and Nasser. Yet throughout all its ludicrous polemics it never stopped proclaiming that one side or the other was completely in the right, or even that one or another of their perspectives was revolutionary.

Submitted by libcom on September 1, 2005

In immigrating into underdeveloped regions, the revolutionary struggle was subjected to a double alienation: that of an impotent Left facing an overdeveloped capitalism it was in no way capable of combating, and that of the laboring masses in the colonized countries who inherited the remains of a mutilated revolution and have had to suffer its defects. The absence of a revolutionary movement in Europe has reduced the Left to its simplest expression: a mass of spectators who swoon with rapture each time the exploited in the colonies take up arms against their masters, and who cannot help seeing these uprisings as the epitome of Revolution. At the same time, the absence from political life of the proletariat as a class-for-itself (and for us the proletariat is revolutionary or it is nothing) has allowed this Left to become the "Knight of Virtue" in a world without virtue. But when it bewails its situation and complains about the "world order" being at odds with its good intentions, and when it maintains its poor yearnings in the face of this order, it is in fact attached to this order as to its own essence. If this order was taken away from it, it would lose everything. The European Left is so pitiful that, like a traveler in the desert longing for a single drop of water, it seems to aspire for nothing more than the meager feeling of an abstract objection. From the little with which it is satisfied one can measure the extent of its poverty. It is as alien to history as the proletariat is alien to this world. False consciousness is its natural condition, the spectacle is its element, and the apparent opposition of systems is its universal frame of reference: wherever there is a conflict it always sees Good fighting Evil, "total revolution" versus "total reaction."

The attachment of this spectator consciousness to alien causes remains irrational, and its virtuous protests flounder in the tortuous paths of its guilt. Most of the "Vietnam Committees" in France split up during the "Six Day War" and some of the war resistance groups in the United States also revealed their reality. "One cannot be at the same time for the Vietnamese and against the Jews menaced with extermination," is the cry of some. "Can you fight against the Americans in Vietnam while supporting their allied Zionist aggressors?" is the reply of others. And then they plunge into Byzantine discussions . . . Sartre hasn't recovered from it yet. In fact this whole fine lot does not actually fight what it condemns, nor does it really know much about the forces it supports. Its opposition to the American war is almost always combined with unconditional support of the Vietcong; but in any case this opposition remains spectacular for everyone. Those who were really opposed to Spanish fascism went to fight it. No one has yet gone off to fight "Yankee imperialism." The consumers of illusory participation are offered a whole range of spectacular choices: pacifist demonstrations; Stalino-Gaullist nationalism against the Americans (Humphrey's visit was the sole occasion the French Communist Party has demonstrated with its remaining faithful); the sale of the Vietnam Newsletter or of publicity handouts from Ho Chi Minh's state . . . Neither the Provos (before their dissolution) nor the Berlin students have been able to go beyond the narrow framework of anti-imperialist "action."

The antiwar movement in America has naturally been more serious since it finds itself face to face with the real enemy. Some young people, however, end up by simplistically identifying with the apparent enemies of their real enemies; which reinforces the confusion of a working class already subjected to the worst brutalization and mystification, and contributes to maintaining it in that "reactionary" state of mind from which one draws arguments against it.

Guevara's critique seems to us more important since it has its roots in real struggles, but it falls short by default. Che is certainly one of the last consistent Leninists of our time. But like Epimenides, he seems to have slept for the last fifty years to be able to believe that there is still a "progressive bloc," which for some strange reason is "lapsing." This bureaucratic and romantic revolutionary only sees in imperialism the highest stage of capitalism, struggling against a society that is socialist in spite of its imperfections.

The USSR's embarrassingly evident defects are coming to seem more and more "natural." As for China, according to an official declaration it remains "ready to accept all national sacrifices to support North Vietnam against the USA" (in lieu of supporting the workers of Hong Kong) "and constitutes the most solid and secure rear guard for the Vietnamese people in their struggle against imperialism." In fact, no one doubts that if the last Vietnamese were killed, Mao's bureaucratic China would still be intact. (According to Izvestia, China and the United States have already concluded a mutual nonintervention pact.)

Neither the manichean consciousness of the virtuous Left nor the bureaucracy are capable of seeing the profound unity of today's world. Dialectics is their common enemy. Revolutionary criticism begins beyond good and evil; it is rooted in history and operates on the totality of the existing world. In no case can it applaud a belligerent state or support the bureaucracy of an exploiting state in the process of formation. It must first of all lay bare the truth of present struggles by putting them back into their historical context, and unmask the hidden ends of the forces officially in conflict. The arm of critique is the prelude to the critique by arms.

The peaceful coexistence of bourgeois and bureaucratic lies ended up prevailing over the lie of their confrontation. The balance of terror was broken in Cuba in 1962 with the rout of the Russians. Since that time American imperialism has been the unchallenged master of the world. And it can remain so only by aggression since it has no chance of seducing the disinherited, who are more easily attracted to the Sino-Soviet model. State capitalism is the natural tendency of colonized societies where the state is generally formed before the historical classes. The total elimination of its capital and its commodities from the world market is the deadly threat that haunts the American propertied class and its free-enterprise economy -- this is the key to its aggressive rage.

Since the great crisis of 1929, state intervention has been more and more conspicuous in market mechanisms; the economy can no longer function steadily without massive expenditures by the state, the main "consumer" of all noncommercial production (especially that of the armament industries). This does not save it from remaining in a state of permanent crisis and in constant need of expanding its public sector at the expense of its private sector. A relentless logic pushes the system toward increasingly state-controlled capitalism, generating severe social conflicts.

The profound crisis of the American system lies in its inability to produce sufficient profits on the social scale. It must therefore achieve abroad what it cannot do at home, namely increase the amount of profit in proportion to the amount of existing capital. The propertied class, which also more or less possesses the state, relies on its imperialist enterprises to realize this insane dream. For this class, pseudocommunist state capitalism means death just as much as does authentic communism; that is why it is essentially incapable of seeing any difference between them.

The artificial functioning of the monopolistic economy as a "war economy" ensures, for the moment, that the ruling-class policy is willingly supported by the workers, who enjoy full employment and a spectacular abundance: "At the moment, the proportion of labor employed in jobs connected with national defense amounts to 5.2% of the total American labor force, compared with 3.9% two years ago. . . . The number of civil jobs in the national defense sector has increased from 3,000,000 to 4,100,000 over the last two years." (Le Monde, 17 September 1967.) Meanwhile, market capitalism vaguely feels that by extending its territorial control it will achieve an accelerated expansion capable of balancing the ever-increasing demands of non-profit-making production. The ferocious defense of regions of the "free" world where its interests are often trifling (in 1959 American investments in South Vietnam did not exceed 50 million dollars) is part of a long-term strategy that hopes eventually to be able to write off military expenditures as mere business expenses in ensuring the United States not only a market but also the monopolistic control of the means of production of the greater part of the world. But everything works against this project. On one hand, the internal contradictions of private capitalism: particular interests conflict with the general interest of the propertied class as a whole, as with groups that make short-term profits from state contracts (notably arms manufacturers), or monopolistic enterprises that are reluctant to invest in underdeveloped countries, where productivity is very low in spite of cheap labor, preferring instead the "advanced" part of the world (especially Europe, which is still more profitable than saturated America). On the other hand, it clashes with the immediate interests of the disinherited masses, whose first move can only be to eliminate the indigenous strata that exploit them, which are the only strata able to ensure the United States any infiltration whatsoever.

According to Rostow, the "growth" specialist of the State Department, Vietnam is for the moment only the first testing ground for this vast strategy, which, to ensure its exploitative peace, must start with a war of destruction that can hardly succeed. The aggressiveness of American imperialism is thus in no way the aberration of a bad administration, but a necessity for the class relations of private capitalism, which, if not overthrown by a revolutionary movement, unrelentingly evolves toward a technocratic state capitalism. The history of the alienated struggles of our time can only be understood in this context of a still undominated global economy.

The destruction of the old "Asiatic" structures by colonial penetration gave rise to a new urban stratum while increasing the pauperization of a large portion of the super-exploited peasantry. The conjuncture of these two forces constituted the driving force of the Vietnamese movement. Among the urban strata (petty bourgeois and even bourgeois) were formed the first nationalist nuclei and the skeleton of what was to be, from 1930 on, the Indochinese Communist Party. Its adherence to Bolshevik ideology (in its Stalinist version), which led it to graft an essentially agrarian program onto the purely nationalist one, enabled the ICP to become the leading force of the anticolonial struggle and to marshal the great mass of peasants who had spontaneously risen. The "peasant soviets" of 1931 were the first manifestation of this movement. But by linking its fate to that of the Third International, the ICP subjected itself to all the vicissitudes of Stalinist diplomacy and to the fluctuations of the national and state interests of the Russian bureaucracy. After the Seventh Comintern Congress (August 1935) "the struggle against French imperialism" vanished from the program and was soon replaced by a struggle against the powerful Trotskyist party. "As for the Trotskyists, no alliances, no concessions; they must be unmasked for what they are: the agents of fascism" (Report of Ho Chi Minh to the Comintern, July 1939). The Hitler-Stalin Pact and the banning of the Communist Party in France and its colonies allowed the ICP to change its line: "Our party finds it a matter of life or death . . . to struggle against the imperialist war and the French policy of piracy and massacre" (i.e. against Nazi Germany), "but we will at the same time combat the aggressive aims of Japanese fascism."

Toward the end of World War II, with the effective help of the Americans, the Vietminh was in control of the greater part of the country and was recognized by France as the sole representative of Indochina. It was at this point that Ho preferred "to sniff a little French shit rather than eat Chinese shit for a lifetime" and signed, to make the task of his colleague-masters easier, the monstrous compromise of 1946, which recognized Vietnam as both a "free state" and as "belonging to the Indochinese Federation of the French Union." This compromise enabled France to reconquer part of the country and, at the same time the Stalinists lost their share of bourgeois power in France, to wage a war that lasted eight years, at the end of which the Vietminh gave up the South to the most retrograde strata and their American protectors and definitively won the North for itself. After systematically eliminating the remaining revolutionary elements (the last Trotskyist leader, Ta Tu Thau, was assassinated by 1946) the Vietminh bureaucracy imposed its totalitarian power on the peasantry and started the industrialization of the country within a state-capitalist framework. Improving the lot of the peasants, following their conquests during the long liberation struggle, was, in line with bureaucratic logic, subordinated to the interests of the rising state: the goal was to be greater productivity, with the state remaining the uncontested master of that production. The authoritarian implementation of agrarian reform gave rise in 1956 to violent insurrections and bloody repression (above all in Ho Chi Minh's own native province). The peasants who had carried the bureaucracy to power were to be its first victims. For several years afterwards the bureaucracy tried to smother the memory of this "serious mistake" in an "orgy of self-criticism."

But the same Geneva agreements enabled the Diem clique to set up, south of the 17th parallel, a bureaucratic, feudal and theocratic state in the service of the landowners and compradore bourgeoisie. Within a few years this state was to nullify, by a few suitable "agrarian reforms," everything the peasantry had won. The peasants of the South, some of whom had never laid down their arms, were to in the grip of oppression and superexploitation. This is the second Vietnam war. The mass of the insurgent peasants, taking up arms once more against their old enemies, also followed once again their old leaders. The National Liberation Front succeeded the Vietminh, inheriting both its qualities and its grave defects. By making itself the champion of national struggle and peasant war, the NLF immediately won over the countryside and made it the main base of armed resistance. Its successive victories over the official army provoked the increasingly massive intervention of the Americans, to the point of reducing the conflict to an open colonial war, with the Vietnamese pitted against an invading army. Its determination in the struggle, its clearly antifeudal program and its unitary perspectives remain the principal qualities of the movement. But in no way does the NLF's struggle go beyond the classical framework of national liberation struggles. Its program remains based on a compromise among a vast coalition of classes, dominated by the overriding goal of wiping out the American aggression. It is no accident that it rejects the title "Vietcong" (i.e. Vietnamese communists) and insists on its national character. Its structures are those of a state-in-formation: in the zones under its control it already levies taxes and institutes compulsory military service.

These minimal qualities in the struggle and the social objectives that they express remain totally absent in the confrontation between Israel and the Arabs. The specific contradictions of Zionism and of splintered Arab society add to the general confusion.

Since its origins the Zionist movement has been the contrary of the revolutionary solution to what used to be called the "Jewish question." A direct product of European capitalism, it did not aim at the overthrow of a society that needed to persecute Jews, but at the creation of a Jewish national entity that would be protected from the anti-Semitic aberrations of decadent capitalism; it aimed not at the abolition of injustice but at its transfer. The original sin of Zionism is that it has always acted as if Palestine were a desert island. The revolutionary workers movement saw the answer to the Jewish question in proletarian community, that is, in the destruction of capitalism and "its religion, Judaism"; the emancipation of the Jews could not take place apart from the emancipation of humanity. Zionism started from the opposite hypothesis. As a matter of fact, the counterrevolutionary development of the last half century proved it right, but in the same way as the development of European capitalism proved right the reformist theses of Bernstein. The success of Zionism and its corollary, the creation of the state of Israel, is merely a miserable by-product of the triumph of world counterrevolution. To "socialism in a single country" came the echo "justice for a single people" and "equality in a single kibbutz." It was with Rothschild capital that the colonization of Palestine was organized and with European surplus-value that the first kibbutzim were set up. The Jews recreated for themselves all the fanaticism and segregation they had been victims of. Those who had suffered mere toleration in their society were to struggle to become in another country owners disposing of the right to tolerate others. The kibbutz was not a revolutionary supersession of Palestinian "feudalism," but a mutualist formula for the self-defense of Jewish worker-settlers against the capitalist exploitative tendencies of the Jewish Agency. Because it was the main Jewish owner of Palestine, the Zionist Organization defined itself as the sole representative of the superior interests of the "Jewish Nation." If it eventually allowed a certain degree of self-management, it is because it was sure that this would be based on the systematic rejection of the Arab peasant.

As for the Histadrut [the Israeli labor union], it was since its inception in 1920 subjected to the authority of world Zionism, that is, to the direct opposite of workers' emancipation. Arab workers were statutorily excluded from it and its activity often consisted of forbidding Jewish businesses to employ them.

The development of the three-way struggle between the Arabs, the Zionists and the British was to be turned to the profit of the Zion