Preface - Richard Parry

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