International Situationist #1

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International Situationist #1

(from Situationist International Onlinehttp://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/index.html)

central bulletin published by the sections of the situationist international

June 1958

Director: G.-E. DebordEditorial Committee: Mohamed Dahou, Giuseppe Pinot Gallizio, Maurice Wyckaert

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

Editorial Notes:

The Bitter Victory of Surrealism

The very success of surrealism has a lot to do with the fact that the most modern side of this society's ideologyhas renounced a strict heirarchy of factitious values and openly uses the irrational, including

vestiges of surrealism.

Report on the Construction of Situations, June 1957

SURREALISM IS A SUCCESS but only in the context of a world that has yet to be fundamentally

transformed. Having expected nothing less than the overthrow of the dominant social order, this

success has turned surrealism against itself. Meanwhile, the continuing delay in the mass action

devoted to this overthrow, along with the inadequacies of cultural production and other

contradictions of advanced capitalism have reduced surrealism to an endless parade of degraded

repetitions.In the conditions of life that it has encountered and prolonged scandalously up to now,

surrealism cannot overcome its unfortunate character, because it is already, in its entirety, asupplement to the art and poetry liquidated by dadaism, and because all its overtures are beyond

the surrealist epilogue to the history of art on the problems of a real life to construct. All those

who attempt to situate themselves after surrealism once again discover questions which predate it

(dadaist poetry and theater, formal investigations into the style of the "Mont-de-Pit"

collection). For the most part, then, the pictorial novelties through which they have attracted

attention to themselves since the end of the war are merely isolated and magnified details, caught

secretly in the turgid morass of surrealist contributions (Max Ernst on the occasion of an

exhibition in Paris at the beginning of 1958 pointed out what he had learnt from Pollock in1942).The modern world has caught up with the formal lead that surrealism once had on it. The

manifestations of novelty in effectively advanced disciplines (every scientific technique) haveassumed a surrealist appearance: in 1955, a robot at the University of Manchester wrote a love

letter that could quite easily have passed for an example of automatic writing by a gifted

surrealist. But the reality that controls this evolution is that in the absence of a revolution,

everything that once constituted a margin of freedom for surrealism has been co-opted andutilized by the repressive world that the surrealists fought against.
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The use of a tape recorder to teach sleeping subjects reduces the richness of dreams to derisory and repugnant

utilitarian ends. Nothing, however, constitutes such a clear co-optation of the subversive

discoveries of surrealism as much as the exploitation of automatic writing, and the collective

games founded on it, in a method of idea mining known in the United States as "brainstorming." In

France Observateur, Grard Lauzun writes of the function:

In one session of limited duration (ten minutes to an hour) a limited number of people (6 to 15) have everyliberty to express their ideas, the most ideas possible, no matter how outlandish, without risk of

censure. The quality of the ideas is not as important as the quantity. It is absolutely forbidden to

criticize an idea expressed by one of the participants, or even to smile while they are speaking.

Moreover, each one has the most absolute right, the very duty, to pillage the preceding ideas in

order to lend credence to them... The army, the administration, and the police have also found uses

for it. Scientific research is itself substituted for brainstorming sessions at conferences and 'round-

tables'... If a film producer at the CFPI needs a title, eight people can propose seventy in around

fifteen minutes! Next, a slogan: one hundred and four in thirty four minutes; two are kept...Thoughtlessness, irrationality, absurdity, and sudden changes of subject are the rule. Quality makes

way for quantity. The main goal of this method is the elimination of the various barriers of social

constraint, timidity and stage fright that often forbid some people from speaking up at meetings or

during administrative conferences, from advancing ludicrous suggestions that may still contain

buried treasure! With these barriers down, we can now see that people talk and, above all, that

everyone has something to say...

A few American managers have been quick to see the interest of such a technique at the level of employee

relations: those who can express themselves can have more. "Organize brainstorming sessions for

us!" they tell the specialists: "this will show our employees that we care about their ideas, because

we're asking them what they think!" The technique is rapidly becoming a vaccine against the

revolutionary virus.

The Sound and the Fury


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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 Englands

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 surrealisms 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-Prs 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 (Franoise 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 Americas 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 thatEnglandhad managed to completely hide from them all this time; and theythink theyre 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 fearand respect the Crown, the Empire, the Church, the University and Polite Society. This statement

is indicative of how tepidly literary the Angry Young Mens 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 ofsurrealism 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 surrealisms 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 presentwithin 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 surrealisms arc de triomphe, so long

after the period of real struggle. There they will remain, says Grard Legrand proudly (Surralisme

mme #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 wereto 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 onlybecome 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.


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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 classs 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 becausesurrealism 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.

Freedom to Read, but to read What?

THE ESCAPISM OF art and literature, the overestimation of the importance of these definite activities

according to the old bourgeois perspective, appears in the European Workers' States where, in

reaction against the police dtournements of an attempt at real change in the world, disappointed

intellectuals have come to demonstrate a nave indulgence for the by-products and reissues of a

decomposing Western culture. In a parallel illusion they have rediscovered the subject of thedemocratic parliamentary system. The young Polish writer Marek Hlasko, interviewed in

L'Express (of 17 April 1958), justified his intention to return to Poland where, according to the

assured opinions he himself has expressed, life is unbearable and no improvement is possible for this stupefying reason: "Poland is an extraordinary country for a writer, and the consequences

of living there are worth suffering."

We have no regrets about the decline of Zhdanovism, despite the stupid interest in Czechoslovakia and Poland

in the more miserable aspects of the end of Western culture: expressions which are no longer at the

extreme of formal decomposition, but which have reached a pure neutrality Sagan-Drouet, for

example, or the artistic motivations of the journalPhases. We understand the necessity of assertinga total freedom of information and creation against the still powerful doctrine of socialist-realism.

But this freedom should in no way be confused with allegiance to the "modern" culture that can

currently be found in Western Europe. This culture is the historical opposite of creation, and it isnecessary to seek superior constructions of life. In the Workers' States and here, real freedom is the

same and so are its enemies.

The Struggle for the Control of the New Techniques of Conditioning

"IT IS NOW POSSIBLE for human reactions to be triggered in a predetermined direction," writes Serge

Tchakotine on the methods of influence used on the community by revolutionaries and fascists alike between

the two world wars (Le viol des foules par la propaganda politique, Gallimard). Scientific progress since thattime has been constant, with advances in the experimental study of the mechanisms of behavior; the discovery

of new uses for existing systems; and the continuous appearance of new inventions. For many years,

experiments have been conducted into subliminal advertising (with the insertion into films of unrelated

images at one twenty-fourth of a second, undetectable to conscious perception but nevertheless sensible to the

retina) and silent advertising (with ultrasonics). In 1957 Canada's National Defense Research Service carriedout an experimental study into boredom, in which subjects were isolated in a hermetically sealed environment

(a constantly lit cell with clear walls, furnished only with a comfortable sofa, rigorously devoid of sound,

smell or variations in temperature). Extensive behavioral disturbances were noted by researchers. In theabsence of external stimuli the brain was incapable of remaining in the state of regular excitement necessary

for its normal functioning. They could therefore conclude that boring surroundings have a negative influence

human behavior. This would certainly explain the unpredictable accidents that occur in monotonous labor,

which would no doubt increase in frequency with the extension of current forms of automation.


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A report by Lajos Ruff, published in the French press at the beginning of 1958, takes all this a step further.

His account, suspicious in some regards but not lacking in detail, describes the "brainwashing" he

underwent at the hands of the Hungarian police in 1956. Ruff said that after having spent six

months imprisoned in a cell where a combined use of well-known methods was aimed and

finally succeeded at making him lose all belief in his perception of the outside world and even

in his own personality. These methods included: the resolutely otherfurnishing of this closed room

(transparent furniture, a curved bed); the lighting, with the addition each night of a rayon glow

from outside whose psychic effects had been deliberately intended, but could not be determined;

psychoanalytic procedures used by a doctor in everyday conversation; various drugs; basic

mystifications enhancing the effects of these drugs (so that he would believe that he had been ableto leave his cell for weeks, waking up with damp clothes and dirty shoes); projections of absurd

and erotic films, mixed with other scenes often produced in his cell; and finally, visitors who

addressed him as if he was the Hungarian Resistance hero of an adventure story from another

series of films that he was forced to watch (from the details of these films and in his lived

encounters, he ended up feeling proud to have taken part in the action).

We must recognize here the repressive use of ambient construction realized at a rather complex level. Free

artists have neglected every discovery of disinterested scientific research, which has then been put

to immediate use by the police. With subliminal advertising giving rise to some concern in the

United States, everyone has been reassured by the announcement that the first two slogans to be

used will be completely innocuous, saying more or less: "Don't drive too fast" and "GO TOCHURCH."

It is the humanist, artistic and juridical conception of the unalterable, inviolable personality that is utterly

condemned here, and we watch its departure with pleasure. But it should be understood that we

plan to dive headlong into the race between free artists and the police to experiment with and

develop the use of the new techniques of conditioning. The police already have a considerable head

start. The outcome depends on the appearance of passionate and liberating environments, or the

reinforcement controllable scientifically, smoothly of the environment of the old world of

oppression and horror, whichever comes first. We talk of free artists, but no artistic freedom ispossible until we seize the accumulated means of the 20th century, which we see as the real means

of artistic production, and which condemn those who have no inclination to be artists of the times.

If the control of these new means is not totally revolutionary, we can be led towards the police-

state ideal of a society organized like a beehive. The domination of nature must be revolutionary orit will become the weapon of the forces of the past. The situationists place themselves at the

service offorgetting. The only force capable of doing anything is the proletariat, theoretically

without a past, which in Marx's words "is revolutionary or it is nothing." When will it be then

now or never? This question is of the utmost importance: the proletariat must realize art.

In and against Cinema


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IN THE SENSE that its development shows a continuous tendency toward integrating new mechanical

technologies, cinema is the central art of our society. It is therefore the best representation of an

era of anarchically juxtaposed interventions (not articulated, merely added) not only as

anecdotal and formal expression, but also in its material infrastructure. Following on from the big

screen, the introduction of stereophonics, and experiments with three dimensional pictures, the

latest development was revealed by the United States at the Brussels exposition. By means of a

process called "Circarama," reported inLe Monde on April 17, "we find ourselves in the center of

the spectacle, living it we have been integrated into it. When the sights of San Francisco's

Chinatown are captured by a camera mounted in a car, we experience reflexes and sensations as if

we were passengers." What's more, recent applications of aerosols have given rise to experimentswith aromatic cinema, the realism of their effects expected without objection.

Cinema is thus presented as a passive substitute for the unitary artistic activity that is now possible. It is the

raw material used by reactionary forces for thespectacle of non-participation. We are not afraid of

saying that onepreviously livedin the world because we know that one finds oneself withoutfreedom in the center of a miserable spectacle having "been integrated into it." But that isn't living,

and the spectators are likewise not in-the-world. Those who wish to construct the world must fight

cinema's tendency toward constituting the anti-construction of a situation (the construction of a

slave ambiance, a worthy successor to cathedrals), while at the same time recognizing the interest

that worthwhile technological applications such as stereo and scenting may contain in themselves.

Certain modern symptoms of art have yet to make their appearance in cinema. For example, certain formallydestructive works, concurrent with what has been accepted for twenty or thirty years in literature

and the plastic arts, are still rejected even in the cinema clubs. This delay follows not only directly

from economic channels or from its being made up of such idealisms as moral censure, but also

from thepositive importance of cinematic art in modern society. Such importance is due to the

superior means of influence present in cinematic works, leading necessarily to the increasing

control of the medium by the dominant classes. These circumstances therefore demand that the

struggle for the seizure of a truly experimental sector of the cinema must now be waged.

We can envisage two distinct uses for cinema: firstly, its utilization as a form of propaganda in the pre-

situationist transitional period; and secondly, its direct employment as a constituent element of

realized situations.

In its current importance in the lives of everyone, the limitations that ferment its renewal, and the immense

significance of not doing without the freedom that this renewal can bring, cinema is somewhat

comparable to architecture. It is necessary to take advantage of the progressive aspects of industrial

cinema, and, just as in the organization of architecture in favor of psychological ambiance, we can

extract the hidden gem from the dungheap of absolute functionalism.

Contribution to a Situationist Definition of Play

THE NOTION OF PLAY can only escape the linguistic and practical confusion surrounding it by being

considered in its movement. After two centuries of negation by the continuous idealization of production, the

primitive social functions of play are presented as no more than decaying relics mixed with inferior forms thatproceed directly from the necessities of the current organization of production. At the same time, the

progressive tendencies of play appear in relation to the development of these very forces of production.

The new phase of affirmation of play seems to be characterized by the disappearance of any element of

competition. The question of winning or losing, previously almost inseparable from ludic activity, appears

linked to all other manifestations of the tension between individuals for the appropriation of goods. The

feeling of the importance of winning in the game, that it is about concrete satisfactions or, more often than

not, illusions is the wretched product of a wretched society. This feeling is naturally exploited by all the

conservative forces that serve to mask the atrocious monotony of the conditions of life they themselves

impose. One has only to think of all the claims dtournedby competitive sports that are imposed in their


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precisely modern form in Great Britain with the expansion of the factories. Not only do crowds identify with

professional players or clubs, which assume the same mythic role as movie stars and statesmen making all the

decisions; but the infinite series of results of these competitions do not let their observers feel any of their

passion. Direct participation in a game, even between those requiring a little intellectual exercise, ceases to be

interesting as soon as competition for its own sake enters the framework of fixed rules. Where the idea of play

is involved, nothing arouses so much scorn these days as the declaration that opens [Sawielly] Tartakower's

The Chess Bible: "The game of chess is universally recognized as the king of games."

The element of competition must disappear in favor of a more authentically collective concept of play: the

common creation of selected ludic ambiances. The central distinction that must be transcended is

that established between play and ordinary life, play kept as an isolated and provisory exception.

"Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life," writes Johan Huizinga, "it brings a

temporary, a limited perfection." Ordinary life, previously conditioned by the problem of survival,

can be dominated rationally this possibility is at the heart of every conflict of our time and

play, radically broken from a confined ludic time and space, must invade the whole of life.Perfection will not be its end, at least to the degree that this perfection signifies a static

construction opposed to life. But one may propose to push to its perfection the beautiful confusion

of life. The baroque elegantly described by Eugnio d'Ors as "the vacancy of history" and its

organized beyond, play a major role in the coming reign of leisure.

In this historical perspective, play the permanent experimentation with ludic novelties appears to be notat all separate from ethics, from the question of the meaning of life. The only success that can beconceived in play is the immediate success of its ambiance, and the constant augmentation of its

powers. Thus, even in its present co-existence with the residues of the phase of decline, play cannot

be completely emancipated from a competitive aspect; its goal must be at the very least to provoke

conditions favorable to direct living. In this sense it is another struggle and representation: the

struggle for a life in step with desire, and the concrete representation of such a life.

Due to its marginal existence in relation to the oppressive reality of work, play is often regarded as fictitious.

But the work of the situationists is precisely the preparation of ludic possibilities to come. One can

thus attempt to neglect the Situationist International to the degree that one easily recognizes a few

aspects of a great game. "Nevertheless," says Huizinga, "as we have already pointed out, the

consciousness of play being 'only a pretend' does not in any way prevent it from proceeding with

the utmost seriousness. . . ."

Preliminary Problems in Constructing a Situation

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 becalled 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


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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, alongwith projects to dynamize these elements.


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This kind of research is meaningful only for individuals working practically toward a construction of

situations. Such people arepresituationists (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 gatheringof 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 others 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 permanentspecialization. Its 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 andfulfillis obviously

poetry, which burned itself out by taking its position at the vanguard of our time and has nowcompletely 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 realindividuals, but only specters haunting the things anarchically presented to them by others. Inchance 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 agreater 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

peoples playful tendencies. At the same time, industrial commerce crudely exploits thesetendencies 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 nave indignation of the theorists of industrial design will notchange 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 necessaryto promote the experimental forms of a game of revolution.


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Definitions

constructed situation

A moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary

ambiance and a game 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 meaningless term improperly derived from the above. There is no such thing as situationism,

which would mean a doctrine for interpreting existing conditions. The notion of situationism is

obviously devised by antisituationists.

psychogeography

The study of the specific effects of the geographical environment (whether consciously organized or

not) on the emotions and behavior of individuals.

psychogeographical

Relating to psychogeography. That which manifests the geographical environments direct emotionaleffects.

psychogeographer

One who explores and reports on psychogeographical phenomena.drive

A mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid

passage through varied ambiances. The term also designates a specific uninterrupted period of

driving.

unitary urbanism

The theory of the combined use of arts and techniques as means contributing to the construction of aunified milieu in dynamic relation with experiments in behavior.

dtournement

Short for dtournement of preexisting aesthetic elements. The integration of present or past artistic

productions into a superior construction of a milieu. In this sense there can be no situationist paintingor music, but only a situationist use of those means. In a more elementary sense, dtournement

within the old cultural spheres is a method of propaganda, a method which reveals the wearing out

and loss of importance of those spheres.

culture

The reflection and prefiguration of the possibilities of organization of everyday life in a given

historical moment; a complex of aesthetics, feelings and mores through which a collectivity reacts on

the life that is objectively determined by its economy. (We are defining this term only in the

perspective of creating values, not in that of teaching them.)

decomposition

The process in which traditional cultural forms have destroyed themselves as a result of the

emergence of superior means of dominating nature which make possible and necessary superior

cultural constructions. We can distinguish between the active phase of the decomposition and

effective demolition of the old superstructures which came to an end around 1930 and a phaseof repetition that has prevailed since that time. The delay in the transition from decomposition to newconstructions is linked to the delay in the revolutionary liquidation of capitalism.

Formulary to a New UrbanismGilles Ivain [Ivan Chtcheglov]


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Sire, I am from another country

WE ARE BORED in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun. Between the legs of the women

walking by, the dadaists imagined a monkey wrench and the surrealists a crystal cup. Thats lost.

We know how to read every promise in faces the latest stage of morphology. The poetry of the

billboards lasted twenty years. We are bored in the city, we really have to strain to still discover

mysteries on the sidewalk billboards, the latest state of humor and poetry:

Showerbath of the Patriarchs

Meat Cutting Machines

Notre Dame Zoo

Sports PharmacyMartyrs Provisions

Translucent Concrete

Golden Touch Sawmill

Center for Functional Recuperation

Sainte Anne Ambulance

Caf Fifth Avenue

Prolonged Volunteers Street

Family Boarding House in the Garden

Hotel of StrangersWild Street

And the swimming pool on the Street of Little Girls. And the police station on Rendezvous Street. The

medical-surgical clinic and the free placement center on the Quai des Orfvres. The artificial

flowers on Sun Street. The Castle Cellars Hotel, the Ocean Bar and the Coming and Going Caf.

The Hotel of the Epoch.

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

Exploring Paris.

And you, forgotten, your memories ravaged by all the consternations of two hemispheres, stranded in the Red

Cellars of Pali-Kao, without music and without geography, no longer setting out for the hacienda

where the roots think of the child and where the wine is finished off with fables from an oldalmanac. Thats all over. Youll never see the hacienda. It doesnt exist.

The hacienda must be built.

*

All cities are geological. You cant take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of

their legends. We move within a closedlandscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the

past. Certainshiftingangles, certain recedingperspectives, allow us to glimpse original

conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales

of fairy tales and surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns,

casino mirrors.

These dated images retain a small catalyzing power, but it is almost impossible to use them in a symbolic

urbanism without rejuvenating them by giving them a new meaning. Our imaginations, haunted by

the old archetypes, have remained far behind the sophistication of the machines. The various

attempts to integrate modern science into new myths remain inadequate. Meanwhile abstraction

has invaded all the arts, contemporary architecture in particular. Pure plasticity, inanimate and

storyless, soothes the eye. Elsewhere other fragmentary beauties can be found while thepromised land of new syntheses continually recedes into the distance. Everyone wavers between

the emotionally still-alive past and the already dead future.


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We dont intend to prolong the mechanistic civilizations and frigid architecture that ultimately lead to boring

leisure.

We propose to invent new, changeable decors. . . .

Darkness and obscurity are banished by artificial lighting, and the seasons by air conditioning. Night and

summer are losing their charm and dawn is disappearing. The urban population think they have

escaped from cosmic reality, but there is no corresponding expansion of their dream life. The

reason is clear: dreams spring from reality and are realized in it.

The latest technological developments would make possible the individuals unbroken contact with cosmic

reality while eliminating its disagreeable aspects. Stars and rain can be seen through glass ceilings.

The mobile house turns with the sun. Its sliding walls enable vegetation to invade life. Mounted on

tracks, it can go down to the sea in the morning and return to the forest in the evening.

Architecture is the simplest means ofarticulatingtime and space, ofmodulatingreality and engenderingdreams. It is a matter not only of plastic articulation and modulation expressing an ephemeral

beauty, but of a modulation producing influences in accordance with the eternal spectrum of

human desires and the progress in realizing them.

The architecture of tomorrow will be a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space. It will be ameans ofknowledge and a means of action.

Architectural complexes will be modifiable. Their aspect will change totally or partially in accordance with

the will of their inhabitants. . . .

Past collectivities offered the masses an absolute truth and incontrovertible mythical exemplars. The

appearance of the notion ofrelativity in the modern mind allows one to surmise the

EXPERIMENTAL aspect of the next civilization (although Im not satisfied with that word; I

mean that it will be more supple, more fun). On the bases of this mobile civilization, architecture

will, at least initially, be a means of experimenting with a thousand ways of modifying life, with a

view to an ultimate mythic synthesis.

A mental disease has swept the planet: banalization. Everyone is hypnotized by production and conveniences sewage systems, elevators, bathrooms, washing machines.

This state of affairs, arising out of a struggle against poverty, has overshot its ultimate goal the liberationof humanity from material cares and become an omnipresent obsessive image. Presented with

the alternative of love or a garbage disposal unit, young people of all countries have chosen the

garbage disposal unit. It has become essential to provoke a complete spiritual transformation by

bringing to light forgotten desires and by creating entirely new ones. And by carrying out an

intensive propaganda in favor of these desires.

We have already pointed out the construction of situations as being one of the fundamental desires on which

the next civilization will be founded. This need fortotalcreation has always been intimately

associated with the need toplay with architecture, time and space. . . .

Chirico remains one of the most remarkable architectural precursors. He was grappling with the problems of

absences and presences in time and space.


13/24

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 indefinable

impression: as a result of this sighting backward in time, the absence of

the object becomes a presence one can feel. More precisely: although

the quality of the impression generally remains indefinite, it

nevertheless varies with the nature of the removed object and the

importance accorded it by the visitor, ranging from serene joy to terror.

(It is of no particular significance that in this specific case memory is

the vehicle of these feelings; I only selected this example for its

convenience.)

In Chiricos paintings (during his Arcade period) an empty space creates a richly

filled time. It is easy to imagine the fantastic future possibilities of such

architecture and its influence on the masses. We can have nothing but

contempt for a century that relegates such blueprints to its so-calledmuseums.

This new vision of time and space, which will be the theoretical basis of future

constructions, is still imprecise and will remain so until

experimentation with patterns of behavior has taken place in cities specifically established for this

purpose, cities assembling in addition to the facilities necessary for basic comfort and security buildings charged with evocative power, symbolic edifices representing desires, forces andevents, past, present and to come. A rational extension of the old religious systems, of old tales,

and above all of psychoanalysis, into architectural expression becomes more and more urgent as all

the reasons for becoming impassioned disappear.

Everyone will live in their own personal cathedral. There will be rooms more conducive to dreams than anydrug, and houses where one cannot help but love. Others will be irresistibly alluring to

travelers. . . .

This project could be compared with the Chinese and Japanese gardens of illusory perspectives [en trompe

loeiI] with the difference that those gardens are not designed to be lived in all the time orwith the ridiculous labyrinth in the Jardin des Plantes, at the entry to which is written (height of

absurdity, Ariadne unemployed): Games are forbidden in the labyrinth.

This city could be envisaged in the form of an arbitrary assemblage of castles, grottos, lakes, etc. It would be

the baroque stage of urbanism considered as a means of knowledge. 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 enhance the Castlepoetic power(by the conservation of a strict minimum of lines, the transposition of certain others, the

positioning of openings, the topographical location, etc.).

The districts of this city could correspond to the whole spectrum of diverse feelings that one encounters by

chance in everyday life.

Bizarre Quarter Happy Quarter (specially reserved for habitation) Noble and Tragic Quarter (for good

children) Historical Quarter (museums, schools) Useful Quarter (hospital, tool shops) Sinister Quarter, etc. And anAstrolarium which would group plant species in accordance with the

relations they manifest with the stellar rhythm, a planetary garden along the lines the astronomer

Thomas wants to establish at Laaer Berg in Vienna. Indispensable for giving the inhabitants a

consciousness of the cosmic. Perhaps also a Death Quarter, not for dying in but so as to havesomewhere to live in peace Im thinking here of Mexico and of a principle of cruelty in

innocence that appeals more to me every day.


14/24

The Sinister Quarter, for example, would be a good replacement for those hellholes, those ill-reputed

neighborhoods full of sordid dives and unsavory characters, that many peoples once possessed in

their capitals: they symbolized all the evil forces of life. The Sinister Quarter would have no need

to harbor real dangers, such as traps, dungeons or mines. It would be difficult to get into, with a

hideous decor (piercing whistles, alarm bells, sirens wailing intermittently, grotesque sculptures,

power-driven mobiles, calledAuto-Mobiles), and as poorly lit at night as it was blindingly lit

during the day by an intensive use of reflection. At the center, the Square of the Appalling

Mobile. Saturation of the market with a product causes the products market value to fall: thus, as

they explored the Sinister Quarter, the child and the adult would learn not to fear the anguishing

occasions of life, but to be amused by them.

The main activity of the inhabitants will be CONTINUOUS DRIFTING. The changing of landscapes from

one hour to the next will result in total disorientation. . . .

Later, as the gestures inevitably grow stale, this drifting [drive] will partially leave the realm of direct

experience for that of representation. . . .

The economic obstacles are only apparent. We know that the more a place isset apart for free play, the more

it influences peoples behavior and the greater is its force of attraction. This is demonstrated by theimmense prestige of Monaco and Las Vegas and of Reno, that caricature of free love though

they are mere gambling places. Our first experimental city would live largely off tolerated and

controlled tourism. Future avant-garde activities and productions would naturally tend to gravitate

there. In a few years it would become the intellectual capital of the world and would be universally

recognized as such.

*

In October 1953 the Lettrist International adopted this report by Gilles Ivain on urbanism, which constituted

a decisive element of the new direction then being taken by the experimental avant-garde. Thepresent text was drawn up from two successive drafts containing minor differences in

formulation, preserved in the LI archive, which have become documents 103 and 108 of the

Situationist Archives.

Theses on Cultural RevolutionGuy Debord


15/24

1

THE TRADITIONAL GOAL of aesthetics is to make one feel, in privation and absence, certain past elements

of life that through the mediation of art would escape the confusion of appearances, since

appearance is what suffers from the reign of time. The degree of aesthetic success is measured by a

beauty inseparable from duration, and tending even to lay claim to eternity. The Situationist goal is

immediate participation in a passionate abundance of life, through the variation of fleetingmoments resolutely arranged. The success of these moments can only be their passing effect.

Situationists consider cultural activity, from the standpoint of totality, as an experimental method

for constructing daily life, which can be permanently developed with the extension of leisure and

the disappearance of the division of labor (beginning with the division of artistic labor).

2

ART CAN CEASE to be a report on sensations and become a direct organization of higher sensations. It is a

matter of producing ourselves, and not things that enslave us.

3

MASCOLO IS RIGHT in saying (inLe Communisme) that the reduction of the working day by the regime of

the dictatorship of the proletariat is "the most certain assurance that it can give of its revolutionaryauthenticity." Indeed, "if man is a commodity, if he is treated as a thing, if the general relations of

men among themselves are the relations of thing to thing, it is because it is possible to buy his time

from him." Mascolo, however, 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 is no freedom in the

employment of time without the possession of modern instruments for the construction of daily

life. The use of such instruments will mark the leap of a utopian revolutionary art to an

experimental revolutionary art.

4

AN INTERNATIONAL association of Situationists can be seen as a union of workers in an advanced sector

of culture, or more precisely as a union of all those who claim the right to a task now impeded by

social conditions; hence as an attempt at an organization of professional revolutionaries in culture.

5

WE ARE SEPARATED in practice from true control over the material powers accumulated by our time. The

Communist revolution has not occurred, and we still live within the framework of the

decomposition of old cultural superstructures. Henri Lefebvre correctly sees that this contradiction

is at the heart of a specifically modern discordance between the progressive individual and the

world, and calls the cultural tendency based on this discordance revolutionary-romantic. The defect

in Lefebvre's conception lies in making the simple expression of discordance a sufficient criterion

for revolutionary action within the culture. Lefebvre renounces beforehand all experiments toward

profound cultural change while remaining satisfied with a content: awareness of the (still tooremote) impossible-possible, which can be expressed no matter what form it takes within the

framework of decomposition.

6


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THOSE WHO WANT to overcome the old established order in all its aspects cannot attach themselves to the

disorder of the present, even in the sphere of culture. One must struggle and not go on waiting, in

culture as well, for the moving order of the future to make a concrete appearance. It is its

possibility, already present in our midst, that devalues all expression in known cultural forms. One

must lead all forms of pseudocommunication to their utter destruction, to arrive one day at real and

direct communication (in our working hypothesis of higher cultural means: the constructed

situation). Victory will be for those who will be able to create disorder without loving it.

7

IN THE WORLD of cultural decomposition we can test our strength but not employ it. The practical task of

overcoming our discordance with the world, i.e., of surmounting the decomposition by some higherconstructions, is not romantic. We will be "revolutionary romantics," in Lefebvre's sense, precisely

to the degree of our failure.

The Situationists and AutomationAsger Jorn


17/24

IT IS 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 devaluation of all human goods to the level of

"perfect neutrality," so to speak, will be the unavoidable consequence of a purely scientific socialistdevelopment. 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 bad 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 anecdpte is pertinent here. Last year, in the journal Quatrime Internationale, the militant marxist LivioMaitan reported that an Italian priest had 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 oldsociety," 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 thedebate.

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 thevery 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 orsuppresses."What does automation, in itself, add to thepossibility 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 moreimportant 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 toautomated production, which is afixation 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.


18/24

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 ofSurralisme Mme, the latest expression of the movement: "The problem of leisure

is already tormenting sociologists... We no longerput 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 ofthe 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 theHochschule fr Gestaltungat Ulm, explainsthat 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, guttedof 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, whichwould 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, 1957Le Monde on the growth of hobbies as the realization ofvirtualities which workers can no longer find use for in their professional activity, concludes that inevery man "there is a creator sleeping." This old clich 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 totaldegradation 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.

No Useless Leniency (excerpt)Michle Berstein


19/24

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 its 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. And given the current state of affairs, they probably won't even be able to make a

career out of it: Franois Giroud isn't particularly likely get out of the way for the first unemployedwould-be genius to come along. So much so that one of them,

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 dArroscia 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 ofthe 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 dont want innocuous relationships and we dont

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 haveever been forced to despise. But we dont 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 becomepossible 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.

News of the International

Publications for Situationist Agitation


20/24

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 Einheitsstuhl1come 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 bookPour 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 ofReport 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.

The Second SI Conference

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 drive by several groups in radio contact, and preliminary positions on the application ofcertain 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 refutedand 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.

Venice has Vanished Ralph Rumney

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.


21/24

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 inPotlatch #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 completestandstill.

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 differentnature: 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.

Action in Belgium against the International Assembly of Art Critics

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 todays 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 criticsassembling 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 theycannot 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.


22/24

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 andthrew 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.

A Civil War in France

Raoul Vaneigem

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.


23/24

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 aparliamentary 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 putsch3by 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 hadnot 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's4 failure on the evening of29 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 thedeath 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,5 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.

3 Kapp 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.

4CGT: Confdration Gnrale du Travail, the General Confederation of Labor, France's largest

trade union, closely allied with the French Communist Party.

5Poujadism: Right-wing protest movement led by French politician Pierre Poujade (b.1920),

enjoying massive popularity in the 1950's.


24/24

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 unopposedin 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.6A 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 mightserve to further weaken the people, or even to sell them out, but nothing will hold off the

dnouement.

*

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 qualificationsWhether 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-Genevive, Paris 5e.

6FLN: Front de Libration Nationale, National Liberation Front, the Algerian revolutionary group

that led the War of Independence against France from 1956 until 1962.

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