What Is Situationism
What Is Situationism
What Is Situationism
A READER
Stewart Home, editor
What Is
Situationism ?
A Reader
Stewart Home,
editor
AK
PRESS
Individual contributors.
ISBN 1-873176-13-9
Selected Bibliography iv
Introduction 1
Stewart Home
Essays from Leaving the 20th Century 3
edited and translated by Christopher Gray
Critique of the Situationist International 24
Jean Barrot
The End of Music 63
Dave and Stuart Wise
Basic Banalities 103
Stewart Home
The Situationist International:
Its Penetration into British Culture 107
George Robertson
The Situationist International and its Historification:
Ralph Rumney in conversation with Stewart Home 134
Stewart Home
Introduction 1
within the key British and American markets. Back issues of King
Mob - particularly the two numbers dedicated to the Motherfuckers
- give a valuable insight into how these entrepreneurs developed
their promotional skills.
Jean Barrot is the political theorist most likely to inherit the 51's
mantle as guru to those anglo-american ultra-left obscurantists who
look to France for intellectual leadership - although he faces stiff
opposition from Jacques Camatte. The pieces by George Robertson,
Bob Black, Sadie Plant and myself represent the attempts of innumer
able cultural hacks to create an orthodox interpretation of situationism.
Both Sadie Plant and 1 have written books on the 51 - these being The
Most Radical Gesture and The Assault on Culture. Having read my
Stimer carefully, I'm forced to conclude that mine is the better of the
two works. While Plant's tome is a very good introduction to
situationist theory, 1 adopt a far more subjective approach. The task
of historification having been successfully completed, Jimmie Martin
and Alastair Bonnett are both looking for fresh takes on the 51 - the
former by using a compare and contrast method with Wilhelm Reich,
the latter by applying the conceptual tools of cultural geography to
situationist theory. 1 think the Reich analogy is particularly satisfying,
since the ideas of 'spectacle' and 'emotional plague' function in an
identical fashion, providing the true believer with a universal cat
egory that is to be attackeo enolel';l';ly, relentlessly and -most impor
tantly - everywhere!
And so, to the future. I am, of course, looking forward to yet more
books about the 51. I'm also hoping to see an ever greater abundance
of situationist translations - all of which ought to be published as
very slim and expensive editions. Now that it's run through the
sixties underground/avant-garde, the culture industry is diving
headlong into the seventies and eighties - which means we'll soon
be seeing much serious discussion of neoism, plagiarism and the art
strike. The tradition marches on ...
Christopher Gray
The accused have never denied the charge of misusing the funds ofthe
students' union. Indeed they openly admit to having made the union
This was Europe's first university occupation and for weeks the
scandal echoed through all the student unions in France. The p am
phlet referred to, Of Student Poverty, became a bestseller overnight
and there can hardly have been a single left-wing student in France
who didn't hear of the SL 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 i n 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 authori
tarian role played by Debord. Their new-found fame, however,
remained untarnished. The SI had become synonymous 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 num-
Much has 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.
'Those who make half a Revo lution only dig their own
graves ': The Situationists since 1 969
What then remains of the 51? What is still relevant? Above all, I
think, its iconoclasm, its destructivity. What the 51 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 remain
ing completely oblivious, to the terrible state they were in themselves. The
51 showed exactly how loneliness and anxiety and aimlessness have
replaced the nineteenth century s truggle 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 desper
ately wanted to transform.
Rediscovering poverty cannot be separated from rediscovering
what wealth really means. The 51 rediscovered the vast importance of
visionary politics, of the Utopian tradition - and included art, in all its
p ositive aspects, in this tradition. People today will never break out
of their stasis for the sake of a minor rearrangement. There have been
too m any 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 . . .
Jean Barrot
summarizes and assures the relations between Man and the universe,
between society and the supernatural world, between the living and the
dead (Levi-Strauss).
The notion of the spectacle unites a large number of given basic facts
by showing society - and thus its revolutionary transformation - as
activity. Capitalism does not 'mystify' the workers . The activity of
revolutionaries does not demystify; it is the expression of a real social
movement. The revolution creates a different activity whose estab
lishment is a condition of what classical revolutionary theory called
'political' tasks (destruction of the State). But the SI was not able to
conceive in this way of the notion which it had brought to light. It
invested so much in this notion that it reconstructed the whole of
revolutionary theory around the spectacle.
In its theory of 'bureaucratic capitalism', Socialisme ou Barbarie
had capital rest on the bureaucracy. In its theory of 'spectacular
commodity society', the SI explained everything from the spectacle.
One does not construct a revolutionary theory except as a whole, and
by basing it on what is fundamental to social life. No, the question of
'social appearances' is not the key to any new revolutionary endeavor (1. S.
#10, p . 79).
The traditional revolutionary groups had only seen new means of
conditioning. But for the SI, the mode of expression of the 'media'
corresponds to a way of life which did not exist a hundred years ago.
Television does not indoctrinate, but inscribes itself into a mode of
being. The SI showed the relationship between the form and founda
tion, where traditional marxism saw nothing but new instruments in
the service of the same cause.
Meanwhile, the notion of the spectacle elaborated by the SI falls
behind what Marx and Engels understood by the term 'ideology' .
Debord's book The Society of the Spectacle presents itself as an attempt
to explain capitalist society and revolution, when in fact it only
considers their forms, important but not determinant phenomena. It
robes the description of them in a theorization which gives the
impression of a fundamental analysis, when in fact the method, and
Thefeeble quality of the spectacle and ofeveryday life becomes the only
sign.
a revolt against the spectacle situates itself at the level of the totality . . .
it proves that it is making the spectacle into the totality. In the same
way its 'management-ist' illusions led it to distort the facts concern
ing Algeria after Boumedienne's coup d'etat:
The only program ofthe Algerian socialist elements is the defense of the
self-managed sector, not only as it is, but as it ought to be (#9, 1 964,
p. 21).
Positive Utopia
The 51 allows the recognition at the level of revolutionary activity of
the implications of the development of capital since 1914, already
recognized by the communist left insofar as this development in
volved reformism, nations, wars, the evolution of the state, etc. The 51
had crossed the path of the communist left.
The 51 understood the communist movement and the revolution
as the production by the proletarians of new relations to each other and
to 'things' . It rediscovered the Marxian idea of communism as the
movement of self-creation by men of their own relations. With the
exception of Bordiga, it was the first to connect again with the utopian
tradition. This was at once its strength and its ambiguity.
The 51 was initially a revolt which sought to take back the cultural
means monopolized by money and power. Previously the most lucid
artists had wanted to break the separation between art and life: the 51
raised this demand to a higher level in their desire to abolish the distance
The culture to be overthrown will not reallyfall except along with the
totality of the socioeconomicformation which upholds it. But, without
further ado, the SI proposes to confront it throughout its length and
breadth, up to and including the imposition of an autonomous
situationist control and experimenta tion against those who hold the
existing cultural authority(ies), i.e. up to and including a state of
dual power within culture . . . The center ofsuch a development within
culture would first of all have to be UNESCO once the 51 had taken
command of it: a new type of popular university, detached from the old
culture; lastly, utopian centers to be built which, in relation to certain
existing developments in the social space ofleisure, would have to be more
completely liberated from the ruling daily life . . . would function as
bridgeheads for a new invasion of everyday life (#5, 1 960, pp. 5 & 31).
A significant fact: the critique of this article in the following issue did
not pick up on this aspect (#8, pp. 3-5). Trocchi was to realize this
program in his own way in Project Sigma: the SI did not disavow it, but
only stated that Trocchi was not undertaking this project in his
capacity as a member of the SI (#9, p. 83).
The ambiguity was brought to a head by Vaneigem who in fact
wrote a treatise on how to live differently in the present world while
setting forth what social relations could be. It is a handbook to
violating the logic of the market and the wage system wherever one
can get away with it. La Veritable Scission has some harsh words for
Vaneigem and his book. Debord and Sanguinetti were right to speak
of exorcism:
ideological use to which 1. S. was put, its being turned into a spectacle,
says the b ook, by half the readers of the journaL This was p artly
inevitable (see below on recuperation ) but in part also due to its own
nature. Every radical theory or movement is recuperated by its
minds of its a uthors. Their cri tique of Vaneigem is made as if his ideas
were foreign to the SI. To read Debord and Sanguinetti, one would
think that the S1 had no responsibility for the Traite: Vaneigem's
weakness, one would think, belongs to him alone. One or the other:
either the S1 did indeed take his faults into account - in which case
why didn't it say something about them? - or else it ignored them.
The S1 here inaugurates a practice of organization (which S ou B
would have qualified with the word 'bureaucratic' ) : one does not
learn of the deviations of members until after their exclusion. The
organization retains its purity, the errors of its members do not affect
it. The trouble comes from the insufficiencies of the members, never
from on high, and not from the organization. As the eventual mega
lomania of the leaders does not explain everything, one is obliged to
see in this behavior the sign of a mystified coming-to-consciousness
of the group's impasse, and of a magical way of solving it. Debord was
the SI. He dissolved it: this would have been proof of a lucid and
honest attitude if he had not at the same time eternized it. He
dissolved the S1 so as to make it perfect, as little open to criticism as
he was little able to criticize it himself.
In the same way, his film Society of the Spectacle is an excellent
means of eternizing his book. 1mmobilism goes side by side with the
absence of summing-up. Debord had learned nothing. The book was
a partial theorization: the film totalizes it. This sclerosis is even more
striking in what was added for the film's re-release in 1976. Debord
replies to a series of criticisms of the film, but says not a word about
various people (some of them very far removed from our own
conceptions) who judged the film severely from a revolutionary point
of view. He prefers to take on Le Nouvel Observateur . 16 More and more,
his problem is to defend his past. He runs aground of necessity,
because all he can do is re-interpret it. The S1 no longer belongs to him.
The revolutionary movement will assimilate it in spite of the
situationists.
movement18 had situationist ideas: when one knows that almost all
the strikers left control of the strike to the unions, unless one mytholo
gizes the occupation movement, this shows only the limits of
When the workers are able to assemble freely and without mediations
to discuss their reai problems, the state begins to dissolve (The Real
Split, p.33).
Recup eration
At the same moment, Jaime Semprun, the author of La Guerre sociale
au Portugal, published a Precis de recuperation. Here is what the 5I once
said about 'recuperation':
The 51 always valued its trademark and did its own publicity. One of
its great weaknesses was wanting to appear to be without weak
nesses, without faults, as if it had developed the 5uperman within
itself. Today it is no more than that. As a critique of traditional groups
and of militantism, the 51 played at being an International, turning
politics into derision. The rejection of the pseudo-serious militant
who achieves only the spirit of the cloister today serves to evade
serious problems. Voyer22 practices derision only to become derisory
himself. The proof that the 51 is finished is that it continues in this
form. As a critique of the spectacle, the 5I shows off its bankruptcy by
making a spectacle of itself, and ends up as the opposite of what it was
born for.
For this reason, the 51 continues to be appreciated by a public in
desperate need of radicality of which it retains only the letter and the
tics. Born from a critique of art, the 51 winds up being used (despite
and because of itself) as a work of literature. One takes pleasure in
reading the 5I or its successors, or the classics which it appreciated, as
others take pleasure in listening to the Doors. In the period when the
5I was really searching and self-searching, when the practice of
derision clothed real theoretical and human progression, when hu
mor did not serve merely as a mask, the 51's style was much less fluid
and facile than that of these current writings. The rich text resists its
author as well as its readers. The text which is nothing but style flows
smoothly.
The 51 contributed to the revolutionary common good, and its
weaknesses also have become fodder for a public of monsters, who
are neither workers nor intellectuals, and who do nothing. Barren of
practice, of passion, and often of needs, they have nothing between
them but psychological problems. When people come together with
out doing anything, they have nothing in common but their subjectiv
ity. The 51 is necessary to them; in its work, they read the ready-made
theoretical justification for their interest in these relations. The 51
gives them the impression that the essential reality resides in imme
diate intersubjective relations, and that revolutionary action consists
in developing a radicality at this level, in particular in escaping from
wage labor, which coincides with their existence as declasses. The
Radica l Subjectivity
The 51 had in relation to classical revolutionary marxism (of which
Chaulieu was a good example) the same function, and the same
limits, as Feuerbach had in relation to Hegelianism. To escape from
the oppressive dialectic of alienation/ objectification, Feuerbach con
structed an anthropological vision which placed Man, and in particu
lar love and the senses, at the center of the world. To escape from the
economism and factory-fetishism (usinisme) of the ultra-left, the 51
elaborated a vision of which human relations were the center and
which is consonant with 'reality', is materialist, if these relations are
given their full weight so that they include production, labor.
Feuerbachian anthropology prepared the way for theoretical com
munism such as Marx was able to synthesize during his own time, via
The new philosophy rests on the truth offeelings. In love, and in a more
general way, in his feelings, every man affirms the truth of the new
philosophy.
Notes
1 . Invariance: journal published by a group which split from the International
Communist Party, itself the most dogmatic and voluntarist byproduct of the
'Bordiguist' Italian left. After several years of obscure, though occasionally
brilliant theoretical involutions, Invariance's editor Jacques Camatte arrived
at the position that capital has 'escaped the law of value' and that therefore
the proletariat has disappeared. For a presentation in English of his views,
see The Wandering of Humanity published by Black and Red, Detroit. (Tr.)
2. The term 'sign" is used in structuralist writing to mean a signifier
(representation) that has become separated from what it originally signified
(a phenomenon in the world. A 'sign' thus implies a representation which
refers only to itself, i.e. is 'tautological'. One example of a 'sign' would be the
credit extended in ever greater quantities to bankrupt nations by large banks,
credit which cannot possibly be repaid: it is a representation of commodities
which will never be produced.) (Tr.)
3 . Joseph Dejacque: French communist artisan active in the 1 848 rising. A
collection of his writings is available under the title A Bas les chefs (Champ
Libre, Paris 1974) .
4. Translator's footnote: The struggle over Radio Renascensa in Portugal
during 1 975 bears out this point.
5. Appeared in English as The Totality for Kids.
Any person in today's music scene knows that rock, classical,folk and
jazz are all yesterday's titles.
- sleeve cover remark on Ornette Colman's
new LP Dancing In Your Head.
Even such a jazz superstar, has been forced to accept some of the
inevitable but leaves a suitable opening back into the artistic fold.
At such an impasse where to turn? Part of the answer came from
a not totally unexpected quarter. The most revolutionary critique of
the late '60s - that of the Situationists - suddenly had a raisnn d'ptrp
for capital. After being suitably doctored, such a critique could be
used as a force able to keep pop music kicking as a pacification agent
of the young proletariat both in terms of channeling energy into
hierarchical aspiration, fake liberation from drudgery and the goal of
a higher level of wage slavery with all its alluring but alienated
sexual appeal.
A musical situation ism was born in a dressed up rebel imagery of
punk and new wave. While, the situationist influence can only be
thoroughly credited in the one specific instance of the Sex Pistols, the
rebellion of modern art forms, first expressed pictorially and in
literature, though now recuperated, have increasingly been applied
to the production of music through intermediaries like The Velvet
Underground and Lou Reed. Antecedents from the old cultural
avant-garde run into and feed the musical new. Ms. Patti Smith,
'radical' star, all the way from New York to Barcelona, quotes on the
I don 't want a holiday in the sun, I wanna go to the new Belsen
The E n d of Music 73
Intervention against music was almost totally absent, as far as
can be ascertained. Frank Zappa, at the LSE was heckled and dis
rupted, to the point where he could no longer perform and shouts of
Up against the wall Mothers were heard at Newcastle-Upon-Tyne.
In this identification, the participants were still marked by the
pop era. A number of pro-situ's hung for awhile expectantly around
Max's Kansas revue bar in New York, venue of Lou Reed and The
Velvet Underground . There was no desire to negate music (great
music falls short of our desire - Rimbaud) merely to make it free, but
leaving intact the antagonistic structure which turns audience against
performer, creator against consumer and vice versa in a relationship
of near reciprocal alienation. The violent clashes at rock concerts (e.g.
the Isle of Wight 1970), were attempts to have the commodity without
the cash nexus. It was not really an active critique of the capitalization
of music. Only now, is a more developed critique shaping up.
Marley paid the price with a bullet in his head but he wasn't the
only reggae musician to be tailed by a hit man. Jah Stitch working in
Marley's Tugg Gong record shop was also shot in the head. Both
recovered. This seemed like the realization of leftist wish fulfillment
- artists for radical politics even to the death. In spite of the real
ferment below which found its musical recuperation through reggae,
the violent conflict in Jamaica is between two formations of capital.
One, the Jamaican Labour Party supported by the United States and
the CIA, the other, Manley'S Peoples Progressive Party, which seems
more 'independent' with its programme of social democratic, state
capitalist nationalizations, and increased monetary benefits for the
huge and growing surplus population. It is a social democracy which
is attractive to the economically deprived rasta base from which
reggae has largely drawn its audience and performers. Manley
merely used the music for his own electoral ends, as his strongest
constituency support comes from those Tamaican middle classes
supporting an emotionally nationalistic, primitive anti-imperialist
perspective and, more importantly, the surplus population, who
have remained more conned by him than the Jamaican middle classes
frightened by the flight of capital from the island and who may now,
prefer a more right wing solution. Manley can use reggae as a ploy to
keep in with the surplus population, precisely because reggae cannot
be a revolutionary force and is only Rastafarian chic sold under the
guise of Dred rebellion. For example, capital was made out of the
shooting of J ah Stitch by his promoter Bunny Lee who even produced
a record of the event to boost Stitch's record sales. No Gun Can't Dead
a Man Wid a Dread Pon Him Head. (Oh really.) Drama must never be
taken at face value and for good measure, the dub group, The
Revolutionaries are in every way pillars of the reggae establishment.
Rebel music has been inserted as propaganda into the State
apparatus of Jamaica - more or less - as a stabilizing ingredient,
These first troubadours had never complied with the general public
that was under the sway of the demoralizing effects of melodramatic
songs called La Habana. But in spite of it, the first troubadours
introduced newforms - its basic innovation was the 'Jilin (degenera
I
We have a new kind of rock s tar now, and - like all o ther new kinds
of s tar - it arose out of an attempt to break down the s tar system.
' S o it's not surprising that people get pissed offwith stars, except it was
exceptional naivete to believe that those folks who hit the S tardom
Jackpot wouldn 't get affected by it' (Murray ibid).
I kind of hate the way the Sex Pistols remove all musical standards
Randy Newman, NME September 24, 1 977.
Alternative Ending
Stewart Home
In the West time has always been linear. However, it was not until the
bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century that a dynamic
notion of progress was effectively coupled to this. Once the bour
geoisie installed itself in power, the implications of this coupling
invaded every area of life. In the arts, this manifested itself in a
fetishising of 'originality' in the form of stylistic innovation. The
upshot of this is that eighteenth century rationalism became nine
teenth century romanticism which, in turn, became twentieth cen
tury modernism. It should be emphasised that these 'innovations'
were always in terms of style and never in terms of content. That is
to say, they were essentially hollow and that beneath surface appear
ances, there was no change at all.
Having looked at the 'broad' categories, we will turn our atten
tion to the sub-divisions which art historians make a living from
elaborating. The first modernist sub-division of any consequence is
futurism, which was essentially a fusion of cubism, expressionism
and the ideas of Alfred Jarry. The futurist obsession with shock,
originality and innovation, mark the movement as a typical product
of bourgeois society. It was only natural that the futurists should
develop from such criteria a love of speed, machines and war.
Due to the bourgeois demand for continual pseudo-change,
futurism was soon overtaken by dada as an artistic force. Dada was
basically futurism with knobs on - but where futurism balanced its
negative aspects with a belief in technological progress, dada em
braced an entirely nihilistic perspective. Dadaistic negation reached
Basic Banalities 1 03
its peak with Club Dada in Berlin - after which its nihilism was
nega ted by the Parisian dadaists who went on to rename it surrealism.
The surrealists achieved their negation of dadaist nihilism by
rationalising the irrational with badly digested fragments of Marx
ist-Leninism and Freudian psycho-analysis. Where dada had de
stroyed the language of alienation elaborated by de Sade, Lautreamont
and Rimbaud - surrealism held up these pornographers of the
human soul as liberators of repressed desire.
As surrealism faded into academicism, it was replaced by fresh
groups of avant-gardists. The first of these, the Lettriste Movement,
was founded in 1946 by Isidore Isou - a Romanian living in Paris.
The Lettristes identified creativity as the essential human urge and
then defined this solely in terms of originality. Their interests were
initially literary and resemble inferior works of concrete poetry. Isou
believed he had superseded all aesthetic structures and re
systematised the sciences of language and sign into a single disci
pline which he named 'hypergraphology.'
The left-wing of the Lettristes, led by Guy Debord, disrupted a
Charlie Chaplin press conference at the Paris Ritz in the summer of
1952. Isou denounced them to the newspapers which resulted in the
left-wing splitting from the main body of the movement, renaming
itself the Lettriste International and issuing its own bulletin 'Potlatch.'
The main activities of the Lettriste International were 'dri fti n v'
v
Basic Banalities 1 05
completes this chain: we Nuclear painters, denounce, in order to destroy, the
final convention, STYLE.
In March 1962, the Situationist International split into two fac
tions. Most of the Situationists based in Northern Europe - slightly
more than half the movement's members - broke with the French
speaking faction and formed the 2nd Situationist International.
Those whose activities were centred on Paris, responded by 'exclud
ing' the Northern Europeans from 'their' group and became - in
effect - a fringe organisation on the margins of the French ultra-left.
Deriving their theory from Paul Cardan, Henri Lefebvre and the
Frankfurt School, this grouplet developed a politics based upon the
concept of 'the Spectacle.' The idea being that under Capital, the
consumer is reduced to the level of a passive spectator who observes
life rather than participates in it. The Spectacle is treated simulta
neously as a generalised and a localised phenomenon. By offering a
series of overlapping - but hardly regimented descriptions - the
French Situationists were unable to arrive at a uniform notion of their
theoretical construct. They appraised the various movements of the
Spectacle without demonstrating any real relationship between them.
Fortunately, the resulting theoretical fall-out has only contaminated
a very small section of the revolutionary movement.
George Robertson
What, one may well ask, are the reasons for this volte-face? I would
suggest that the reasons are threefold. Firstly, many of the 'class of
'68', whether Maois t, Althusserian Marxist or one of the fifty-seven
varieties of Trotskyist, have been exposed to the bankruptcy of their
preferred ideology. In consequence, they have been forced to recognise
The key text for this utopian project is Formulafor a New City written
in 1953 by the nineteen year-old Ivan Chtcheglov, and published in
the first issue of the journal Internationale Situationiste:14
Everyone will live in their own cathedral. There will be rooms awak
ening more vividfantasies than any drug. There will be houses where
it will be impossible not to fall in 10ve. IS
COBRA, as a body, only survived until 1951, but its aims (the unity of
deed and dream to quote Dotrement), were to surface again.
A key member of COBRA was the Danish painter Asger Jorn,
who, to cite Siedrich Diederichsen, was a ble to developfully o nly in the
realm ofthe social. He seems to have been compelled tofound movement after
movement.20 Following the dissolution of COBRA, Jom contacted the
Swiss Concrete artist Max Bill who was in the process of creating a
new Bauhaus at VIm in Germany. J om proposed a collaboration, but
was rebuffed by Bill on the grounds that the new Bauhaus had no use
for visual artists, as it hadfreed itselfofsubjectivity. In retaliation, Jorn
with the help of Enrico Baj, a member of the Italian Nuclear Art
movement, founded the Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus. The
aims and members of these various groups over-lapped to such a
degree that it was decided to hold a conference to bring together
members of the European avant-garde in a new unified body.
This conference in September 1956 in Alba, Italy was attended by
delegates from the Lettrist International, the Movement for an
Imaginist Bauhaus, Nuclear Art, the London Psychogeographical
Association21 plus assorted interested individuals. Before even the
conference began, there was a split with the ex-COBRAist Dotremont;
then, on its first day, Enrico Baj was excluded, which led to the
withdrawal of Nuclear Art. Those remaining agreed to dissolve their
various groups and replace them with a single organisation; on the
27th of July 1 957, representatives of these three groups - Lettrists,
Imaginist Bauhaus and London Psychogeography - met at Cosio
d' Arroscia in Italy, and formally amalgamated; the new movement
was to be called L'Internationale Situationiste.22
The Situationist International which emerged at this time was
still primarily an avant-garde art movement, but holding to the
thesis that all aware people of our time agree that art can no longer be
justified as a superior activity.23
However, even those members whose aim was the supercession of
art continued to produce, exhibit and sell 'art' works. An example is
Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, who, in 1958, constructed a machine for
The outcome of these debates was a break with the Spur group
{the German section of the 51),28 closely followed by the expulsion of
most of the Scandinavian section. 29 The 51 that emerged from these
ruptures was now in a position to develop a new revolutionary
critique of the totality of consumer society, a project which reached
theoretical maturity in 1966 with the publication of major works by
Debord and Vaneigem.
*****
over the coming years, all significant questions will be condensed into
one: Are you for or against the action and the programme of the
Hungarian workers ?31
And, Debord seemed to imply, that where the 51 worked for the
perpetual re-creation ofthe totality ofeveryday life, the 'sociologists' were
content to simply 'hypotheticise' it. Certainly the collaboration did
add to the eventual 'programme' which was elaborated by the 51. The
break with Lefebvre occurred when he was accused of plagiarising
the 51 Theses on the Commune in an article in the 'pseudo-leftist'
journal Arguments (of which the 51 had already initiated a boycott).35
Other 'influences' on the 51 'programme' are less easily identified
although it seems apparent that the writings of Huizinga on play, Maus
on exchange and the Gift (cf. the lettrist journal Potlatch) and Ba taille on
'expenditure'36 were assimilated. Debord does directly allude to
Daniel Boorstin's The Image, but rejects him on the grounds that he:
never reaches the concept of the spectacle because he thinks he can leave
private life, or the notion of the 'honest commodity', outside of this
disastrous exaggeration. He does not understand that the commodity
itself made the laws whose 'honest' application leads to the distinct
reality of private life as well as to its subsequent reconquest by the
social consumption of images. 37
The spectacle, grasped in its totality, is both the result and the project
of the existing mode of production . . . it is the heart of the unrealism
of the real society.39
One key tactic which the SI retained from their avant-garde past
was the concept of ' detournement', and in the months that followed
the 'Strasbourg Scandal'45 detournement became a powerful and
significant medium for the dissemination of the situationist 'message'.
Detournement -the re-use of pre-existing a rtistic elements in a new
ensemble46 - has a long history within the avant-garde, from
Lautremont, through dada and surrealism to the situationists. The
power of detournement to subvert the meaning of a text was seized
upon by the situationists and it became in effect the signature of the
situationist movement, the sign of its presence and contestation in con tem
porary cultural reality.47
'
.l\.ftcr Strazbcurg, t..is 'sign af its presence rrp'l rpci on wa l l s
and campuses throughout France (and throughout the rest o f Eu
rope), as extracts from Poverty of Student Life were inserted into
romance comics, advertisements, cartoons, pin-up photographs and
other such ephemeral products of mass-culture.48 While it may have
been the humour and playfulness of these detourned texts that
initially attracted an audience, it must be recognised that we live in
an age in which the greatest seriousness advances masked in the ambigu
ous interplay between art and its negation,49 and tha t benea th the playful
negation, they sensed that they were being presented with an inno
vative form of political action. In contrast to specialised protest
against the Bomb, hunger, automation, poverty or whatever, which
were merely symbols of a general dissatisfaction with the oppressive
monotony of everyday life, they saw in the SI texts and slogans a
totalising assault on the misery of modern existence; an assault
moreover that liberated the repressed desires of its participants.
They insisted that most of these ' contactees' should develop their own
autonomous, self-sufficient groups. One such group who they let loose
upon the world, were a few s tudents from Nanterre who were soon
destined to become almost as notorious as the 51 itself.
Enough words have been written recently about the 'events' of
May '68: the details are well enough known. The Nanterre group
Les Enrages (including the future 51 member Rene Riesel) began to
'create situations' in their bleakly functional University; demanding
reforms, threatening 'Vandal Orgies', disrupting lectures, taunting
the authorities and so on. Out of this 'situation', evolved The 22nd
March Movement which became the motivating force in spreading
the disruption to the 50rbonne and beyond. Enrages members, along
with the situationists Debord, Khayati, Riesel and Vaneigem, became
the permanent core of the Council for the Maintenance of the Occupa
tions, who, operating out of the Centre Censier, concentrated their
efforts in spreading the occupations beyond the campuses into the
factories and workplaces. During this period, when it seemed that the
world wide proletarian revolution so long desired could be realised,
Debord declared:
They saw the true artist of the twentieth century in Johann Baader,
the Berlin dadaist: the Idiot/Madman/Guerilla in life . . . the man without
aim or prospects, the 'lowest' of all, the shit of America.55
But they saw that the spirit of the 1920's negation of 'art' had been
recuperated by the museum and academy; they had emerged from
an official 'experimental' art culture, and they loathed its guts. They
did not want simply to read about or passively contemplate revolu
tion - they wanted to live it. For Black Mask, Tristan Tzara's dictum
that life and Art are one: the modern artist does not paint, he creates directly
was taken as a blue-print for a new mode of existence. To this end,
Black Mask made almost daily interventions into the heart of the
American Spectacle; 'trashing' Wall St.; forging tickets to cultural
events (gallery openings, conferences, etc.) and distributing them to
down-and-outs with the promise of free food and drinks; organising
mill-ins' at department stores, looting, damaging and 'giving away'
the commodities of the American Nightmare; releasing half-starved
dogs in expensive restaurants; 'liberating' the Fillmore East ballroom
and admitting everyone for free; the list of actions goes on and on.
With the arrival of 'youth revolt' and 'drop-outs' they decided to
move from a position of cultural critique into the streets. They
dissolved Black Mask, stopped producing their magazine of the
same name, and emerged reformed as the Lower East Side chapter of
the S.D.S. - Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers. As the Mother
fuckers, one of their prime tasks was the creation of a new form of
self-expression beyond art and politics; a new revolutionary lan
guage. Where a few months earlier they had been writing:
The poverty against which man has been struggling constantly is not
merely the poverty of material goods; in fact, in industrially advanced
countries the disappearance of material poverty has revealed the
poverty of existence itself.56
characterised King Mob and its offshoots. A later very shrewd auto
critique by two ofits instigators, Dave and Stuart Wise, sums them up
thus :
Let ten men (sic) meet who are resolved on the lightning of violence
rather than the long agony ofsurvival;from this moment, despair ends
gave a clue as to what this new form of politics would be. The Special
Branch 'homed-in' on the word 'Spectacles' and eventually identi
fied the anarcho-situ milieu as the source of the bombers. At their
trial, much was made of the 'Spectacles' 'clue' and the language and
rhetoric of their communiques; in turn the media investigated the
situationist link as a way to 'explain' the actions; in doing so the
theses and rhetoric of the SI gained a wider currency in Britain.67
Although King Mob and the Angry Brigade are the only two
groups which gained any notoriety, throughout the 1970s a range of
pro-situ 'groupescules' were active in Britain. In the late sixties, the
Manchester-based Hapt group produced a magazine which at
tempted to combine a Digger position with a King Mob style analysis;
Newcastle also had a King Mob offshoot in the community-politics
Black Hand Gang. The early seventies saw the emergence of a series of
pro-situ formations, which although representing themselves as
groups, were usually little more than one or two individual activists.
Ex-King-Mobbers, Dave and Stewart Wise as Blob issued and
continue to issue a range of texts, most recently (1988) Once Upon a
Time There Was a Place Called Notting Hill Gate. Paul Sieveking and
John Fullerton translated various SI texts which they published in
Notes
1. Art and Language, 'Ralph the Situationist', Artscribe November / Decem
ber 1987 p.59. Stuart Cosgrove's article 'Spectacle', J. D. no.58, May 1988,
Ralph Rumney in
conversation
with Stewart Home
Stewart Home: I' m curious to know how you feel about a situationist
exhibition being held at the Centre Georges Pompidou and the
Institute of Contemporary Arts.
Ralph Rumney: They all turned up at the private view and were
doing little happenings, which I rather disapproved of. I went to the
opening to see the exhibition and because I wanted to meet old friends
and learn a few things. There's a lot of work in the show which I'd not
seen before.
Stewart Home: But it's this type of painting which dominates the
exhibition.
Ralph Rumney: Yes, it does, it's very strong painting. The curators
asked me to lend paintings and I said no, my paintings aren't
anything to do with it. I would have been inclined to lend some of the
erotic things, but the dates are wrong.
Ralph Rumney: I read the visitors' book and thatwas very interesting.
Almost everyone who'd written in it had said this is disgraceful,
situationists in a museum, what a load of rubbish! I, however, believe
that history should be recorded. I have also come to believe in
museums. One of their functions is to make ideas available to people.
When we were making our work, the last place we wanted to find it
was in a museum. But it's all over now and I don't see why it shouldn't
be recorded, catalogued, documented and so on.
Ralph Rumney: That's the fault of the curators. They might have
found it very difficult to do in any other way.
Ralph Rumney: I don't feel anything one way or another, they can
present it how they like. It's their exhibition. It's not my exhibition, it's
the curators', Beaubourg, they've done the exhibition. Apparently
there was a vast shortage of money for the show. On the one hand,
Beaubourg's been crying out about this. On the other hand, they're
apparently charging the ICA an absolute fortune to have it. It seems
extremely odd that they didn't have enough money to do a little bit
more. I think the curating was wrong because whatever one says or
feels about lsou, it should have started with him. That would have
made the historical exhibition I'd have liked to see. I feel that the
situationists have somehow achieved this trick of commandeering
and imposing a version of history, rather than allowing it to be told
as it was.
Ralph Rumney: That's the curators, Peter Wollen and Mark Francis.
I met them both and neither of them struck me as a serious expert.
They were asking questions about things I'd expect them to know.
The English tend to be a bit soft intellectually. You could say they are
supermarket intellectuals, anything that'll go in the trolley, let's have
it.
Stewart Home
Bob Black
Sadie Plant
Notes
Jim Martin
From Version 90 #2
(Alls ton, 1 991)
One Monday morning, almost ten years ago, I rose t o make myself a
cup of coffee. I went to the kitchen to grab a mug from the drying rack
when I propitiously dropped a Chinese cleaver on my big toe.
Sidelined from my job as a canvasser for a community organizing
group, I spent a week off my feet reading the Situationist international
Anthology. Fantastic. Here, I finally found a voice for my own frustra
tions with bullshit reformism, and a new vocabulary to insult people
with. They appealed to me with their unitary critique, their attack on
specialization, and their ruthless rhetoric against traditional leftist
p olitics. Yet when I tried to apply these doctrines in my practical life .
I was led down a path o f futility.
I soon learned that the situationists were very hip at that time,
especially in San Francisco. There were lots of people incorporating
their ideas into detourned 1 progressive politics. There is not enough
sp ace (and I do not have the patience) to give a complete history of the
situationists here, but I highly recommend The Anthology as well as
Vague #1 6-1 7 for its Boy Scout's Guide to the Situationist International. I
will also discuss other left libertarians who wrote about Reich, as they
bear on the general discussion of Reich's ideas. Brief! y, Wilhelm Reich
(1897-1957) was one of the shining young stars of Sigmund Freud's
inner circle, until he strained the tolerance of older psychoanalysts
with his insistence that orgastic potency was essential for health. He
further strained the connection by pointing to the futility of individu
ated therapy while the larger society was a veritable factory of
neurosis . As a member of the socialist and communist parties in
The Situationists
Stewart Home, in his excellent book The Assault on Culture: Utopian
Currents from Lettrisme to Class War, connects the lineage from futur
ism and dada to surrealism, lettrisme, the situationists, mail art, punk
rock and neoism. In his introduction he states: Since 'art' as a category
been projected back onto the religious icons of the middle ages, it is not
surprising that those who oppose it should situate themselves within a
'utopian current' that they, in tum, trace back to medieval heresies.
Although the situationists had been formed in 1 957 (the very year
Reich died in prison) they did not gain notoriety until the onset of the
student occupations movement during the mid-sixties in France.
The first major incident occurred when the Minister of Sport came to
open a new swimming pool. A vandal orgy had been planned for the
opening ceremony and the minister's route was sprayed with graffi ti.
But nothing happened until the minister was about to leave. Then, so
the story goes, a red-haired youth stepped out from the crowd and
shouted:
'Minister, you 've drawn up a report on French youth 600 pages long
but there isn't a word in it about our sexual problems. Why not ?' The
minister replied, 'I'm quite willing to discuss this matter with respon
sible people, but you are certainly not one of them. I myselfprefer sport
to sexual education. If you have sexual problems, I suggest you jump
in the pool. '
The searchfor real nature,for a natural life that has nothing to do with
the lie of social ideology, is one of the most touching naivetes of a good
part of the revolutionary proletariat, not to mention the anarchists and
such notable figures as the young Wilhelm Reich.
The order of things is sick: this is what our leaders would conceal at all
costs. In a fine passage of The Function of the Orgasm, Wilhelm
Reich relates how after long months of psychoanalytic treatment he
managed to cure a young Viennese working woman. She was suffering
from depression brought on by the conditions ofher life and work. When
she recovered Reich sent her back home. A fortnight later she killed
herself. Reich's intransigent honesty condemned him: as Pl1Pryone
knows, to exclusion from the psychoanalytic establishment, to isola
tion, delusion and death in prison: the duplicity ofourneodemonologists
cannot be exposed with impunity.
There is no pleasure that does not seek its own coherence. Its interrup
tion, its lack ofsatisfaction, causes a disturbance analogous to Reichian
'stasis. ' Oppression by Power keeps human beings in a state ofperma
nent crisis. Thus the Junction of pleasure, as of the anxiety born of its
absence, is essentially a socialJunction. The erotic is the development
of the passions as they become unitary, a game of unity and variety
But the problem of tensions and their liquidation does not exist solely
on the level of sexuality. It characterizes all human relationships. And
Reich, although he sensed that this was sO,failed to emphasize strongly
enough that the present social crisis is also a crisis ofan orgastic kind.
If it is true that 'The energy source of neurosis lies in the disparity
between the accumulation and discharge of sexual energy,' it seems to
me that such neurotic energy also derives from the accumulation and
discharge of the energy set in motion by human relationships. Total
enjoyment is still possible in the moment oflove, but as soon as one tries
to prolong this moment, to extend it into social life itself, one cannot
avoid what Reich called 'stasis. The world of dissatisfaction and non
I
Here Knabb puts his finger on the heart of the matter. He restates
Reich's critique of the character rebel. He surpasses anything the
situationists ever wrote about pro-situs by this self-referential analy
sis. Unlike the French philosophers, he has been able to understand
Reich's work.
That same year Knabb published a broadside, Jean-Pierre Voyer's
Reich: How to Use. Voyer discusses the dissolution of character and its
role in the dissolution of the spectacle.
We hold that people can only dissolve their character in contesting the
entire society (this is in opposition to Reich insofar as he envisages
character analysis from a specialized point of view); whereas, on the
other hand, thefunction of character being accommodation to the state
Reich 'Delusion'
One problem that arises in a discussion of Reich and the situationists
is Reich's notion of red fascism . Philosophers have reacted with
incomprehension to Reich's critique of the character rebel, the
'movement's' emotional equivalent to the national socialist, or Nazi.
Sex-Econom y
Reich's early work as Freud's top student in the 1 920s centered on the
concept of genitality. Unlike older psychoanalysts, who focused their
typology on pathological character types, Reich attempted to identify
a picture of healthy behavior. Although psychoanalytic typology is
often taken literally, these 'types' only refer to idealized exaggera
tions. Thus Reich's genital character only approaches the ideal of
health. Genital character regulates health by complete discharge
through orgasm. Potency is not measured by the number of fre
quency or climaxes, but in the quality of the experience. Genital
orgasm is differentiated from ejaculation in the male and from clitoral
climax in the female by the total surrender to involuntary contrac
tions of the entire bodily musculature.
Reich brought psychoanalysis into the streets when he began free
sexual hygiene clinics in the working class districts of Vienna. The
work graduated into what bE'came the 'Sex-Pol' (sexual-political)
movement when Reich became convinced that individual therapy
was useless unless coupled with broad social changes. For instance,
many of the psychological problems of his working class patients
were the direct result of their economic conditions, i.e. the housing
shortages, which compressed the nuclear patriarchal family, had a
strong impact on the sexual life of the youngsters. It was at this
juncture that Reich became deeply involved in the socialist and
communist groupings of his time, which comprised a full two-thirds
majority of the parliamentary system in Austria. For this hybrid of
sexual and economic freedom Reich coined the term sex-economy.
This referred not only to the sexual nature of economics, but the
economic nature of sexuality, for Reich saw healthy sexuality as well
as a healthy economy as primarily self-regulated circulation.
Working within the framework of the parties gave Reich a plat
form to espouse his unique ideas to young, sexually active working
Orgonomy
This line of inquiry led Reich into the question of biological energy.
Was there a specifically biological energy, different from electromag
netism, that operated under comprehensible laws and that regulated
all living things? It was this line of questioning that Reich pursued as
he was expelled from Norway and emigrated to the United Sta tp
It is beyond the scope of this article to convey the entire range of
discoveries Reich stumbled onto with the advent of his new science,
orgonomy. Suffice it to say that if you mention orgone to left-wing
social gearheads, they get a rash.
The situationists also attempted to address this gap between
ideology and application of functional thinking. While they depended
on many of the ideas of Reich's (the vital importance of the subjective
alienation of working people, rather than vulgar marxism's alienation
of surplus value, for instance) it seems that they read Reich's work from
his pre-USA days. These works, largely written for the milieu of which
he was a p art, lack the comprehension Reich developed later of the
Modju,4 the Red Fascist, and the liberal recuperator. Reich's American
writings are so uncompromising on these points that it is nearly
impossible for the average liberal to get past the first few pages of any
of his books without throwing it down in disgust. Added to this
Notes
1 . From the French, meaning literally 'hijacking'. Refers to the practice of
recombining elements of popular culture with a subversive intent.
2. Stakhanov was a Stalinist-era worker who was rewarded for his
superproduction and made a national hero to be emulated by other workers.
'Stakhanovites' were often killed or disabled by their co-workers.
3. Pro-situ, or pro-situationist, was the pejorative term by which the
situationists referred to their fans; they denounced the passive idolatry of
their spectators. Yet, in the end, even the situationists became pro-situs by
their own admission.
4. Reich's term for the most virulent of emotional plague characters. Com
bines the names of Mocenigo, who persecuted medieval scientist Giordano
Bruno, and Stalin's given name Djugashvili.
5. Judi Bari, a northern California Earth First! activist and labor organizer,
was recently injured in a bombing while organizing for Redwood Summer
in Oakland, California.
10. 1 984; The Summer of Hate; by Jim Martin, Flatland Books (1989).
Alastair B onnett
From Variant #9
(Glasgow Autumn 1991)
Subversion Subverted
Visitors to the situationist exhibition held at London's leA (and in Paris
and Boston) in 1989 were presented with a seemingly endless collection
of 'revolutionary items'. Thus, for example, all 12 metallic coloured
copies of the 51's 'legendary' journal, Internationale Situationiste, were
laid out alongside wall displays reminding us of exactly who joined the
group and for what deviationist offenses they were ejected. Neatly
catalogued and under glass, the intriguing covers of these tracts were
offered for our contemplation like any other assembly of fashionably
, oppositional' art. Other products of the recent boom of interest in the
51 have fetishized their activities in similar ways. For example, in Greil
Marcus's book Lipstick Traces,3 an exhilarating survey of the 'secret
history' of obscure avant-garde activity, the situationists' political ideas
are again marginalised by an obsession with their image of desperate
extremism and glamourous wildness.
Between suitably out of focus photographs of gaunt young
situationists, Marcus details the ephemera of the group's early existence
- the poorly printed handouts, the calling cards - and calls our
attention to the 51's 'hidden' influence upon counter-cultural move
ments. One of the best known of these 'secret' connections, and the one
that Marcus is particularly interested in, is the situationists' role as
precursors to punk. Thus, for example, punk's ability to turn the com
modities of rock music and youth culture inside out through the gro
tesque caricature of these forms, is shown by Marcus to parallel and, in
part, directly draw from, the situationistmethodology of detournement.
Making Space
Although it is rarely recognised, the situationists made a potentially
politically explosive attack on the boundary between specialized, institu
tionalized creativity and the routine geography of our day-to-day lives.
Unfortunately, the constantly enjoyable games of 'psycho
geography', which first emerged out of the work of their principal
forerunners, the Lettrist International, never really complemented
the 51's earnest, if confused, critiques of 'the spectacle' and were
quietly dropped from the group's overt agenda. However today,
when political protest, from the poll tax riots to squatters fighting
eviction orders, so often seems to be about who controls city space, the
situationists' urban explorations retain a directness and political
resonance sadly missing from other parts of their project.
Psychogeography is about the instinctual exploration of the emo
tional contours of one's environment. It aims to discover and create
subversive and anti-authoritarian places and journeys that can be
used in the development of new, more liberating, kinds of locales.
5ituationist psychogeographers adopted the practice of the derive
(literally translated, 'drift') as their basic tool. To derive is to go on an
unhindered, unstructured wander through the restrictive landscapes
of everyday space. To Chtcheglov, who developed these ideas in the
late 1950s, the derive is like a political psychoanalysis of the city. Like
the psychoanalyst listening to a flow of words, Chtcheglov argued, the
person on derive goes with the flow of the city, until the moment when
he rejects or modifies.s
The practical activity that emerged from the 51's psychogeo
graphical theories ranges from seemingly inconsequential rambles
around European cities to relatively rigorous and well-documented
experiments. An interesting example of the more relaxed approach is
the Venice based derive carried out in 1957 by the English situationist
Ralph Rumney. In the photo-essay that emerged from this trip, Rumney
explains how he followed a line through ' the zones of main
psychogeographical interest' in Venice such as the 'sinister' zone of
the Arsenale and 'beautiful ambiances' of the Gheto Vechio.9
Notes
1 . G. Debord (1977) The Society of the Spectacle (Black and Red, Detroit).
2, R Vaneigem (1983) The Revolution of Everyday Life (Rebel Press and Left
Bank Books, London) page 144.
3, G. Marcus (1989) Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century
(Seeker and Warburg, London).
Ed. I. Blazwick (lCA /Verso, London). A more complete but poorly repro
duced version appears in Vague (22).
1 0. A. Khatib (1958) Essai de description psychogeographique des Halles
Internationale Situationiste (2). The whole run of Internationale Situationiste
was reprinted in one volume in 1975 by Editions Champ-Libre (paris).
1 1 . R. Hewison (1989) Future Tense: A New Art for the Nineties (Methuen,
London): page 28.
Index 203
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