Leaving the 20th Century has assumed almost mythical status since its disappearance from circulation some twenty years ago.

However, its position as one of the seminal texts of situationist ideas is peculiar to English readers, as only 4.000 copies were ever produced and its distribution was mainly limited to the cognoscenti of the urban centres of Britain. There is no doubt that its scarcity increased its value.

Chris Gray’s compilation still resonates as a component of my youthful Arcadia. I recall my delight on capturing the book, my elation in soaking up texts that were a fusion of lyricism and dialectics.

I managed to obtain a last, dog-eared copy from a battered box found in a dusty corner of Compendium Bookshop, north London, in the winter of 79.

Devouring the book within twenty-four hours, the energy of the text almost physically warmed me — such was its transparent passion and scathing critique. I was to experience the same feeling in more magnified form on reading Vaneigem’s magnificent Revolution of Everyday Life. Two true love affairs.

Leaving the 20th Century contains most of the important lexis from ihe SI’s journal Internationale Situationniste, and arguably the best chapters of Vaneigem’s Traite and Debord's Societe du Spectacle. Subtitled ‘The Incomplete Work of the SI', it never pretended to be more than a basic but powerful and, above all, accessible, introduction to situationist ideas.

There is no doubt in my mind that the book's popularity lay in the way it so easily engaged the reader. Bound in a lurid green cover with an unusual format, printed on strange, satin-sheened paper and liberally illustrated with press cuttings, photos from May '68 in Paris, quotes and cartoon strips, it had a playful, poetic quality that translated the anarchic spirit of smashing the state, while keeping a smile on the lips and a song in the heart.

Gray was assisted in the layout and graphics by members of Suburban Press, a group based in Croydon. just south of London, who had links with a north-London-based group of situationist squatters. One of the first graphics in the book was supplied by Jamie Reid and later illustrated the picture sleeve of the Sex Pistols' fourth single, ‘Holidays in the Sun’, released in 1978.

Chris Gray's occasionally idiosyncratic, but undogmatic commentary exhibited an honesty that was endearing, although the source of much criticism - as were his translations. Certainly they were a little free, but the sense came through strongly enough, even where they may not have been sufficiently accurate for some. In some ways it is almost refreshing to reread the ‘bad' old translations, given the current, almost scholastic, approach to situationist texts. They are now ‘authorised’, revised and soon, no doubt to be the subject ol textual analysis and deconstruction in learned academic theses.

Ken Knabb derisively dismisses Leaving the 20th Century as a “confusionist hodgepodge”. His Situationist Anthology, published in 1981, is exemplary, and his translations to be praised for their accuracy of style and lexicography. But his was clearly a very different project and he forgets that for several years Leaving the 20th Century was the only good source of situationist texts in the U.K. Indeed, the Anthology reproduces all but four of the twenty SI texts compiled by Chris Gray, showing that the latter was not entirely injudicious in his selection. And Knabb makes no concessions to the uninitiated. He does not attempt to seduce the new reader, simply proclaiming, “Here are the texts. Now read!”

Furthermore, to understand the significance of Leaving the 20th Century, it has to be placed in its historical context.

The first situationist book published in England, it appeared at a time when the class struggle was still much more alive in England than it was perhaps in France or North America, where the heyday had been the Sixties. In 1974, the year of its publication, the second miners' strike effectively brought down the Tory government. The early Seventies were marked by mass and wildcat strikes, street fighting and terrorism in Ireland, and political protest in England from mass demonstrations to attacks by the Angry Brigade.

While the movement in England was still dominated by the trade unions and the Labour Party, it showed increasing signs of getting out of control, as evidenced by the growth of direct action and the increasing numbers of wildcat strikes. This was a development also opposed by the various (mostly Leninist) leftist parties, who sought to bring the movement under party control and whose obsolescence had been clearly demonstrated, yet again, in France in 1968.

Situationist ideas and texts had only been poorly disseminated in England and North America before 1974, although not without consequence. In England the Angry Brigade began a series of allacks on various manifestations of the spectacle, from cabinet ministers to trendy boutiques, and their communiques were littered with situationist references. But their methods were not emulated and clearly failed to ignite the proletariat.

It was into this melting pot that Chris Gray threw Leaving the 20th Century, an astringent to burn away the tired old dogmas of the left, as well as the pretensions of modernism.

In 1974, the SI had been defunct for two years, and had done little but wrangle internally since 1970. The last edition of International Situationniste, no. 12. came off the press in a print run of 10,000 in September 1969. And from there it was all downhill . Future texts — The Real Splits in the International, On Terrorism, and Vaneigem's Book of Pleasures — did not carry the weight of the earlier classics. A spate of resignations decimated the French and Italian sections in 1970, and by the end of 1971 only Debord and Sanguinetti were left.

The two members of the U.S. section were excluded in January 1970, and the other two split off in December. The English section had already been terminated by the exclusions of Chris Gray and two others as far back as December 1967. It’s not surprising, therefore, that most of the translations from the original French were
carried out by various American radicals from Detroit, Seattle, Berkeley and New York, before being imported into the U.K.

At the time Leaving the 20th Century was published there was little in the way of situationist literature circulating in the U.K. Society of the Spectacle was available as an import from Detroit, where it had been published by Black and Red in 1970 in a much-criticised translation by Fredy Perlman.

On the Poverty of Student Life was reprinted by the same group in 1973. Samizdat versions of Vienet's Enrages and Situationists in May 68, parts of Vaneigem's Traite and the whole of his Banalities de Base (translated by Chris Gray in 1966) were in limited circulation. Anything other than these had to be obtained from the USA .

All this further explains why, for those of us who were able to scrounge, thieve or even buy a copy before they all disappeared, this book was a revelation, a work of empowerment, a text that was sorely needed, and which required emulation and improvement.

Chris Gray took the title from one of the key early lexls, ‘Now, the SI!' which appeared in the 1964 edition of the IS magazine:

We think it is high time to put an end to the dead time that has dominated this century and to finish 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 towards leaving the twentieth century."

This claim may have sounded precocious in 1964, two years before the Strasbourg scandal, three before the publication of Society of the Spectacle and The Revolution of Everyday Life, and almost four befoie the revolutionary upsurge of May 68. But it was prescient.

As a point of departure that year for their revolutionary critique of existing conditions, the SI redefined themselves in this article as having superseded their former ‘artistic’ incarnation and as being in opposition to all forms of modernist recuperation. It is therefore all the more surprising that Chris Gray failed to include this text, for it perfectly articulates the division between the two halves of his book.

The 1964 article perhaps assumes more relevance with hindsight, for in the last decade of the twentieth century there have been increasing attempts to portray and recuperate the SI as an essentially artistic movement located firmly within the cultural fold of modern art. The post-'64 theoretical development of the SI as a profoundly political movement aiming at the overthrow of capitalist social relations has been largely glossed over or treated as an aberration. This has been the theme and result of the exhibitions mounted at the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Institute of Contemporary Art in London.

The response to those who would portray the SI in such a fashion is best contained in the opening statement from the original 1964 text. It deals neatly with any second rate plagiarists who champion the primacy of the artistic faction (the ‘Nashists', excluded in 1962) over the situationist project of the SI's ‘heroic’ years:

The SI's element of failure is what is commonly considered 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 any situationist as soon as he is excluded. Our element of success, which is more profound, is the fact that we have not clung to our original pilot program but have proved that is main avant-garde character, in spite of some 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 current order.

The original 1952 project to search for the supersession of art had moved too far ten years later for the SI to look back. Those who wished to remain artists tout simple were quite rightly abandoned.

Debord characterised the SI as an extremist group that did most to bring back revolutionary contestation to modern society, imposing its victory on the terrain of critical theory. The difficulty now is to uphold that victory. The texts gathered here are a testament to the first ideas in the period of reappearance of the modern revolutionary movement, the last of which has hopefully not yet been heard.

As we leave the twentieth century this book is presented lo the reader both as historical tribute and as revolutionary inspiration for the present.

Richard Parry, May 1998

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

- Internationale Situationniste 1, 1958

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Formula for a New City)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

graffiti, Censier, '68

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By the mid sixties the situationist project had taken on its definitive form. The SI was to be a small, tightly knit group of revolutionaries devoted to forging a critique of contemporary, that is to say, consumer capitalism—and to publicising this critique by every form of scandal and agitation possible. All practical experiment with art went by the board. Everything depended on universal insurrection. Poetry could only be made by everyone.

Over 1965, 66 and 67 they put forward an analysis of life in the West more incisive than any made since the twenties. Lefebvre, the only thinker on the same level in France, was left looking distinctly pedestrian, as was Marcuse in the States. And both for the same reason. Because the SI refused to define themselves as detached observers. They knew that in the last analysis they were as proletarianised as everyone else, and because of this they were able to detect and identify with the unacknowledged and snowballing 'revolt of youth' of the early and mid-sixties in both its middle-class 'dropout' and its working-class 'delinquent' forms. At the same time they were among the very few revolutionary groups both to understand the crucial importance of the wildcat strikes and to see that this whole new stage of industrial struggle was in no way incompatible with the psychological distress experienced by the younger generation.

They did a far better job on the newspapers than Private Eye: repeatedly quoting the growing number of openly acknowledged signs of utter worldweariness and bitter anger spreading throughout Europe and the States. And they used these explosions of genuine revolt as a stick with which to still further belabour 'revolutionary' intellectuals: anyone who thought that revolution was only possible somewhere on the other side of the planet—which meant that they couldn't see anything wrong with contemporary society and its consumer goods; anyone who bemoaned the absence of a revolutionary movement in Europe without doing anything about it themselves. They really were incredibly rude, and rude in the worst possible taste, to the entire political and cultural avant-garde establishment. MR GEORGES LAPASSADE IS A CUNT, in huge letters, filled one page of the magazine. In return French culture boycotted them completely. The censorship of the SI has probably been the most blatant case of cultural repression since before the War.

July 1965, the first copies of a cheaply duplicated magazine called PROVO appeared on the streets in Amsterdam—and were promptly seized by the police owing to the unusual precision of their recipe for homemade bombs. The torchlight meetings, the street demonstrations, the smoke-bombs, the white bicycles, the sabotage of state occasions, etc. that followed marked the first eruption into public consciousness of precisely what the situationists had been heralding for years: an anarchic, festive attack on the quality of life organised as a political movement. The Provos were the occasion of the situationists' first appearance in the French press—as the 'occult international', the theoretical driving force behind the Provos' political carnival. Exactly how much influence the SI had on the Provos is difficult to ascertain. In a loose sense, a good deal: Amsterdam had been one of the hubs of situationist activity a few years before and at least one of the Provo leaders, Constant the architect, was ex-SI. There wasn't, however, any constructive interaction between the two groups: the SI was as haughty with the Provos as with everyone else. All they had to say was that unless the Provo street lumpenproletariat shook off its own bureaucracy and star system and fused with the Dutch working class the whole episode would end like a damp squib—which was precisely what did happen. Be that as it may, it was only after the Provos that situationist-type politics began to gain any real credibility.

The same year saw an even more violent corroboration of their theses: the Watts riots in the States. The SI's analysis of these riots—The Decline and Fall of the 'Spectacular' Commodity Economy—was translated and distributed in England and the States even before it appeared in French. The text achieved some notoriety, though largely for its violence and incomprehensibility—the idea that there was a revolutionary crisis brewing in America and that the blacks would play any part in it being obviously out of the question. As for the enthusiastic analyses of violence, looting and arson, let alone the discovery of poetry within them (poetry . .. ?) the good pacifist souls of the Anglo-American Left simply threw up their hands and fled. During the summer of 1966 an embryonic English section was formed, translated Vaneigem's Banalites de Base as The Totality for Kids, ran a magazine, Heatwave, and began to make contact with other lunatic fringe groups in London and the States.

By this time the situationist critique of society was almost complete. The problem before them was one of publicising their position: of breaking the very real conspiracy of silence against them. Some publicity came from the fact that their main base in Denmark was blown up and burnt down—to the situationists' great delight—apparently by the extreme right-wing for the role they had played in fomenting a series of riots in the Danish town of Randers. However it was the 'occupation' of Strasbourg University in November 1966 that finally rocketed the SI to national headlines. A small group of students from Strasbourg University approached the SI in early 1966. Over the summer they worked out their tactics.

This small group got itself elected, amidst the apathy of Strasbourg's 16,000 students, to the committee of the left-wing students' union. Once in this position of power they began to put union funds to good use. They founded a Society for the Rehabilitation of Karl Marx and Ravachol. They plastered the walls of the city with a Marxist comic-strip: 'The Return of the Durruti Column'. They proclaimed their intention to dissolve the union once and for all. Worst of all, they enlisted the aid of the notorious Situationist International and ran off ten thousand copies of a lengthy pamphlet which poured shit on student life and loves (and a few other things). When this was handed out at the official ceremony marking the beginning of the academic year, only de Gaulle was unaffected. The press—local, national and international—had a field-day. It took three weeks for the local Party of Order—from right-wing students to the official left via Alsation mill-owners—to eject these fanatics. The union was closed by a court order on the 14th of December. The judge's summing up was disarmingly lucid:

The accused have never denied the charge of misusing the funds of the students' union. Indeed they openly admit to having made the union pay some £500 for the printing and distribution of 10,000 pamphlets, not to mention the cost of other literature insed by 'Internationale Situationniste'. These publications express ideas and aspirations which, to put it mildly, have nothing to do with the aims of a student union. One has only to read what the accused have written for it to be obvious that these five students, scarcely more than adolescents, lacking all experience of real life, their minds confused by ill-digested philosophical, social, political and economic theories, and perplexed by the drab monotony of their everyday life, make the empty, arrogant and pathetic claim to pass definitive judgements, sinking to outright abuse, on their fellow-students, their teachers, God, religion, the clergy, the governments and political systems of the whole world. Rejecting all morality and restraint, these cynics do not hesitate to commend theft, the destruction of scholarship, the abolition of work, total subversion and a world-wide proletarian revolution with 'unlicensed pleasure' as its only goal. In view of their basically anarchist character, these theories and propaganda are eminently noxious. Their wide diffusion in both student circles and among the general public by the local, national and foreign press are a threat to the morality, the studies, the reputation and thus the very future of the siutdents of the University of Strasbourg.

(from the first English version of Ten Days That Shook The University)

This was Europe's first university occupation and for weeks the scandal echoed through all the student unions in France. The pamphlet referred to, Of Student Poverty, became a bestseller over-night and there can hardly have been a single left-wing student in France who didn't hear of the SI. Over 1967 the pamphlet was translated into half a dozen European languages; the English version, Ten Days That Shook The University, was reproduced several times in the States both in the underground press and as a pamphlet. In France the court cases dragged on for several months and the scandal was still further exacerbated by another batch of exclusions (`the Garnautins'), a nasty and protracted business this time solely about the supposed authoritarian role played by Debord. Their new-found fame, however, remained untarnished. The SI had become synonomous with the utmost extremism. It bathed in revolutionary charisma.

The whole of that year the SI gained greater and greater influence in French universities. They made personal contact with a fair number of students (via their official P.O. Box no., the only way they made contact with anyone) but always insisted that the people they met developed on their own and formed autonomous and self-sufficient groups. Of all these students the ones they became closest to were a group from Nanterre—a handful of anarchists destined, the following year, to become almost as notorious as the SI itself. The situationists' theoretical expression was completed by the publication of two full length books, Raoul Vaneigem's Traite de savoir-vivre a l'usage des jeunes generations and Debord's La Societe du Spectacle, treating what could be called the subjective and objective aspects of alienation respectively. Both books were almost enitrely ignored by the French press until the following summer.

What can the revolutionary movement do today? Everything. What is it turning into in the hands of the parties and the unions? Nothing. What does it want? The realisation of a classless society through the power of the workers' councils.

Counseil pour le maintien des occupations, Paris, May/June 1968

Yet for all this there was a growing desire for direct action within the group itself. Amongst many plans there was one particularly good one to cause a massive scandal in the heart of Paris by staining the Seine blood-red and dumping the bodies of a couple of hundred vaguely Vietnamese Asiatics in it, so they floated downstream past Notre Dame and Cite Saint-Louis. The corpses were a cinch: one of the main medical schools in Paris bought dead Chinamen by the ton for dissection. The route taken by the refrigerated truck was known and quite sensible plans for highjacking it were worked out. The bodies were to be dropped into the Seine upstream in the suburbs. The fuck-up was the red industrial dye. The quantities necessary seemed enormous. The connection didn't come through and the whole thing petered out...

Much as been made, both in the newspapers at the time and in subsequent sociological studies, of the situationists' influence on May '68: on the first general wildcat strike in history and the wave of occupations that left France tottering on the brink of a revolutionary crisis more vertiginous than anything since the Spanish Civil War. This influence can't be measured in any meaningful way. In the first place the SI never claimed to stand for more than the consciousness of a real social and historical process embodied by millions of people; nor to act as more than a catalyst in certain quite specific social areas. However, once that has been said, one can only add that the extent to which they had prefigured everything that materialised that May was little short of clairvoyant.

More specifically: it should be remembered that the first spark that set off the whole gunpowder keg came from the handful of Enrages—a group which had adopted the theses of the SI and who turned the University of Nanterre upside down in early 1968. Several of them were disciplined by university authorities along with other radicals and this action precipitated the immediate crisis at the university level. The 22nd March Movement had been thoroughly impregnated with situationist ideas by the Enrages, although they had walked out of it at its inception because of its mish-mash composition and its refusal to expel certain known Stalinists. Situationist ideas had also spread far among many students, 'artists' and politicos in the Latin Quarter and throughout the entire French university system. (After it was all over, Vaneigent's Traite turned out to be the most widely ripped off book in France in 1968.)

As the crisis developed the SI and the Enrages played a decisive part: the Enrage Riesel and others were elected to the Sorbonne Occupation Committee and were the first to communicate the call for self-management and the creation of workers' councils after the first factories were occupied by French workers. But they were unable to prevent the steady encroachment of the various bureaucratic leftist sects and the endless verbalisation so beloved of students; and so they left in disgust.

On May 17th they founded the Council for the Maintenance of Occupations (CMDO) which occupied the National Pedagogical Institute on rue d'Ulm, and then, from the end of May, the basement of a 'School of Decorative Arts' next door. The CMDO dissolved itself on June 1 5th with the nationwide ebbing of occupations. About forty people made up the permanent base of the CMDO, who were joined for a while by other revolutionaries and strikers coming from various industries, from abroad or from the provinces, and returning there, The CMDO was more or less constantly made up of about ten situationists and Enrages (among them Debord, Khayati, Reisel and Vaneigem), and as many respectively from the workers, high school students or 'students', and other councilists without specific social functions, Throughout its existence it was a successful experiment in direct democracy, guaranteed by an equal participation of everyone in debates, decisions and their execution. It was essentially an uninterrupted genera] assembly deliberating day and night. No faction or private meetings ever existed outside the common debate.

A unit spontaneously created in the conditions of a revolutionary moment, the CMDO was obviously less of a council than a councilist organisation, thus functioning on the model of soviet democracy; As an improvised response to that precise moment, the CMDO could neither present itself as a permanent councilist organisation nor, as such, attempt to transform itself into an organisation of that kind. Nonetheless general agreement on the major situationist theses reinforced its cohesion. Three committees had organised themselves within the general assembly to make possible its practical activity. The Printing Committee took charge of the writing and printing of the CMDO's publications, both using the machines to which it had access and in collaboration with certain occupied print shops whose workers gladly put back into operation the excellent equipment at their disposal. The Liaison Committee, with ten cars at its disposal, took care of contacts with occupied factories and the delivery of material for distribution, The Requisitions Committee, which excelled during the most difficult period, made sure that paper, petrol, food and money were never lacking- There was no permanent committee to ensure the rapid writing of the texts, whose content was determined by everyone, but on each occasion several members were designated, who then submitted the result to the assembly,

The CMDO printed a series of very curt, simple posters; and a series of leaflets and throwaways—amongst which were an Address To All Workers and a reprinting of the Minimum Definition of a Revolutionary Organisation. The major texts had printings of between 150,000 and 200,000 copies, and responsibility was taken for translation into English, German, Spanish, Italian, Danish and Arabic. They also published several appropriate songs and about forty comic-strips, which seem to have been popular (at any rate several of the occupied factories produced their own), though the massive use of graffiti was a more successful medium, indeed the first new form of expression since the twenties: the spray can, far more than the street poster, offers the writer the one way he can be certain of being read by everyone.

The CMDO recognised that what had initially been a student revolt now contained, because of the factory occupations, the possibilities for a social revolution. As such it attempted to show what prevented the May movement from becoming revolutionary; in its interventions it denounced the recuperators of the parties, Stalinist unions and the confusion of the ‘groupuscules' (Trotskyists, Maoists and Anarchists who formed 'action committees' of militants united only on the most immediate particulars—the banal demands of 'reform the university' and 'end police repression') who sought to impose their `non'-leadership on the movement. But more importantly, the CMDO posed the issue of self-management concretely as an immediate possibility; revolution was the only demand to be made by the French proletariat.

The occupations were the reappearance, out of the blue, of the proletariat as a historic class—suddenly enlarged to include almost everyone working for someone else—inevitably bent on the real abolition of the class system and of wage-labour. The occupations were a rediscovery of history, personal and social history at one and the same time, a rediscovery of the sense that 'history' can lie in the hands of ordinary people, of the sense of irreversible time—above all of the sense that 'things just can't go on in the same old way'. The alien life everyone had been living eight days before just seemed ridiculous. The occupations were a total attack on every form of alienation, on every form of ideology, on the whole straitjacket into which real life has been crammed. Everything radiated the desire to unify; to make one. Inevitably property rights were trampled underfoot. Everything belonged to everybody. Frankly confessed desire to meet people, to be completely honest with them, to enjoy a real community, were fostered by occupied buildings whose sole purpose was to make people meet, fostered by fighting side by side in the streets. The telephones, among the few public services still functioning, the number of messengers and of people just generally on the road throughout Paris and all over the country, prefigured something of what real 'communications' could be. The occupations, to say the least of it, were a rejection of all that's understood by work today: they were exuberance, they were playfulness, they were the real dance of men and time. Authority was rejected in all its forms. So was specialisation. So was hierarchical rip-off. So was the State. So were political parties. So were trades unions. So were sociologists. So were professors. So were moralists. So were doctors. 'Quick' advised perhaps the best of all the graffiti—and everyone that the occupations had awoken to themselves felt nothing but embarrassment and contempt for the way of life they had been leading and for all those, from superstars to town-planners, who had done their best to keep them bogged down in it. It was an end to bullshit: in particular all the CP bullshit from Castro to Sartre. Real internationalism sprang up overnight. Workers and intellectuals from all over Europe came to fight. The importance of the role played by women throughout the whole of May is a clear indication of the extent of the revolutionary crisis. Free love began to become something real. The occupations for all their chaos were an attack on the commodity form (even if this was still understood crudely and 'sociologically' as an attack on 'consumer society'). Art was also put down pretty heavily though few people actually realised that they had reached the stage where the abolition of art had become the next logical thing to do. The best anyone came up with was the abstract and somewhat vague slogan 'All power to the imagination'. But there wasn't any idea of how this power could be put into effect: how everything could be reinvented. Once it ran out of power it ran out of imagination. Utter detestation of recuperators, though felt by everyone, failed to reach a level of theoretico-practical consciousness sufficient to liquidate them: neo-artists and neo-political road-managers, neo-spectators of the very movement that had them up against the wall. If this active criticism of the spectacle of non-life failed to become its revolutionary supersession, it was only because the May insurrection's 'spontaneous orientation towards the Workers' Councils' was in advance of almost all concrete preparations for it, amongst which the theoretical and organisational consciousness which would have allowed it to express itself as power: as the only power...

'The dawn which in a single moment lights up the whole shape of the new world'—that was what we saw that May in France. The red and black flags of workers' democracy flew together in the wind. The axe is laid to the root of the tree. And if we, to however small an extent, have emblazoned our name on the reawakening of this movement, it is not to preserve any single moment of it nor to attain any particular celebrity. Now we are sure of a satisfactory conclusion to all we have done: the SI will be superseded.

IS no.12, 1969

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

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

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

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

Yet there were thousands and thousands of people there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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