Situationist International Anthology

created 2025-03-04, & modified, =this.modified

tags:y2025situationistarchitecture

Why I'm reading

Reading Dada → Surreal → Situationist? With focus on how S.I seemed to overlap with re-thinking space, and my focus on Survey of Being Lost.

Curious about “alternative experiences of life.”

Formulary for a New Urbanism

By Ivan Chtcheglov (1953)

NOTE

Ivan and his friend Henry de Béarn planned to blow up the Eiffel Tower with some dynamite they had stolen from a nearby building site, because “its reflected light shone into their shared attic room and kept them awake at night.”

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. That’s lost. We know how to read every promise in faces—the latest stage of morphology.

All cities are geological; you cannot take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, 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.

Everyone wavers between the emotionally still-alive past and the already dead future.

rel:From Light To Dark - Daylight, Illumination and Gloom 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 man of the cities thinks he has escaped from cosmic reality, but there is no corresponding expansion of his dream life. The reason is clear: dreams spring from reality and are realized in it.

The architecture of tomorrow will be a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space. It will be a means of knowledge and a means of action. The architectural complex will be modifiable. Its aspect will change totally or partially in accordance with the will of its inhabitants.

A mental disease has swept the planet: banalization. Everyone is hypnotized by production and conveniences.

NOTE

This is amazing.

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

Everyone will live in his own personal “cathedral,” so to speak. There will be rooms more conducive to dreams than any drug, and houses where one cannot help but love. Others will be irresistibly alluring to travelers…

In Chirico’s paintings (during his Arcade period) an empty space creates a full-filled time. It is easy to imagine the fantastic future possibilities of such architecture and its influence on the masses. Today we can have nothing but contempt for a century that relegates such blueprints to its so-called museums.

Districts

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.

The principal activity of the inhabitants will be the CONTINUOUS DERIVE. The changing of landscapes from one hour to the next will result in complete disorientation. …

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.

Introduction to a critique of urban geography

By Guy Debord (1955) Geography, deals with the determinant action of general natural forces, such as soil composition or climatic conditions, on the economic structures of a society, and thus on the corresponding conception that such a society can have of the world.

Psychogeography could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.

Private Cars: This present abundance of private cars is nothing but the result of the constant propaganda by which capitalist production persuades the masses—and this case is one of its most astonishing successes—that the possession of a car is one of the privileges our society reserves for its privileged members.

The revolutionary transformation of the world, of all aspects of the world, will confirm all the dreams of abundance.

People are quite aware that some neighborhoods are sad and others pleasant. The variety of possible combinations of ambiances, analogous to the blending of pure chemicals in an infinite number of mixtures, gives rise to feelings as differentiated and complex as any other form of spectacle can evoke.

The production of psychogeographic maps, or even the introduction of alterations such as more or less arbitrarily transposing maps of two different regions, can contribute to clarifying certain wanderings that express not subordination to randomness but complete insubordination to habitual influences (influences generally categorized as tourism, that popular drug as repugnant as sports or buying on credit).

“A friend recently told me that he had just wandered through the Harz region of Germany while blindly following the directions of a map of London.”

Breton quote: “The imaginary is that which tends to become real,” wrote an author whose name, on account of his notorious intellectual degradation, I have since forgotten. The involuntary restrictiveness of such a statement could serve as a touchstone exposing various farcical literary revolutions: That which tends to remain unreal is empty babble.

The first moral deficiency remains indulgence, in all its forms.

Methods of Detournement

All aware people of our time agree that art can no longer be justified as a superior activity, or even as an activity of compensation to which one could honorably devote oneself.

In the civil war phase we are engaged in, and in close connection with the orientation we are discovering for certain superior activities to come, we can consider that all known means of expression are going to converge in a general movement of propaganda which must encompass all the perpetually interacting aspects of social reality.

Duchamp’s drawing of a mustache on the Mona Lisa is no more interesting than the original version of that painting.

Transmutation and Transformation:

Any elements, no matter where they are taken from, can serve in making new combinations. The discoveries of modern poetry regarding the analogical structure of images demonstrate that when two objects are brought together, no matter how far apart their original contexts may be, a relationship is always formed.

It goes without saying that one is not limited to correcting a work or to integrating diverse fragments of out-of-date works into a new one; one can also alter the meaning of those fragments in any appropriate way, leaving the imbeciles to their slavish preservation of “ci- tations.”

Survey of Vandal, Fake and Replica

A slogan like “Plagiarism is necessary, progress implies its is still as poorly understood, and for the same reasons, as the famous phrase about the poetry that “must be made by all.”

Several laws on the use of Detournement

• It is the most distant detourned element which contributes most sharply to the overall impression, and not the elements that directly determine the nature of this impression.
• The distortions introduced in the detoured elements must be as simplified as possible, since the main force of a detournement is directly related to the conscious of vague recollection of the original contexts of the elements.
• Detournement is less effective the more it approaches a rational reply.
• Detournement by simple reversal is always the most direct and least effective.

If detournement were extended to urbanistic realizations, not many people would remain unaffected by an exact reconstruction in one city of an entire neighborhood of another. Life can never be too disorienting: detournements on this level would really make it beautiful.

Reports on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s Condition of Organization and Action

Revolution and Counter-revolution in Modern Culture: We want the most liberating change of the society and life in which we find ourselves confined. We know that this change is possible through appropriate actions.

Critique of Futurism:

Futurism’s puerile technological optimism vanished with the period of bourgeois euphoria that had sustained it. Italian futurism collapsed, going from nationalism to fascism without ever attaining a more complete theoretical vision of its time.

On Dada:

Dadaism, constituted in Zurich and New York by refugees and deserters from World War I, aimed at embodying the refusal of all the values of a bourgeois society whose bankruptcy had just become so grossly evident. Its violent manifestations in postwar Germany and France aimed mainly at the destruction of art and literature and to a lesser degree at certain forms of behavior (deliberately imbecilic spectacles, speeches, excursions). Its historic role is to have delivered a mortal blow to the traditional conception of culture. The almost immediate dissolution of dadaism was a result of its purely negative definition. But it is certain that the dadaist spirit has influenced all the movements that have come after it; and that a dadaist-type negation must be present in any later constructive position as long as the social conditions that impose the repetition of rotten superstructures—conditions that have intellectually already been definitively condemned—have not been wiped out by force.

Critique of Surrealism:

The creators of surrealism, who had participated in the dadaist movement in France, endeavored to define the terrain of a constructive action on the basis of the spirit of revolt and the extreme depreciation of traditional means of communication expressed by dadaism. Setting out from a poetic application of Freudian psychology, surrealism extended the methods it had discovered to painting, to film and to some aspects of everyday life; and its influence, in more diffuse forms, spread much further.

The error that is at the root of surrealism is the idea of the infinite richness of the unconscious imagination. The cause of the ideological failure of surrealism was its belief that the unconscious was the finally discovered ultimate force of life, and its having revised the history of ideas accordingly and stopped it there. We now know that the unconscious imagination is poor, that [automatic writing] is monotonous, and that the whole genre of ostentatious surrealist “weirdness” has ceased to be very surprising.

Lettrism:

Lettrism, in France, had started off with a complete opposition to the entire known aesthetic movement, whose continual decaying it correctly analyzed.

(The US avant-garde, which tends to congregate in the American colony in Paris, lives there in the most tame, insipidly conformist manner, isolated ideologically, socially and even ecologically from everything else going on.)

Three important factors.

• insist on a complete accord among the persons and groups that participate in this united action.
• recall that any genuinely experimental attitude is usable, that word has been often been misused in the attempt to justify some artistic action within a present structure, that is, a structure previously discovered by others. Something that is a personal expression within a framework of others, is not a creation. Creation is not the arrangement of objects and forms, it is the invention of new laws on that arrangement.
• eliminate the sectarianism among us that opposes unity of action with possible allies for specific goals and prevents our infiltration of parallel organizations.

We should collectively define our program and realize it in a disciplined manner, by all means, even artistic ones.

Architecture must advance by taking emotionally moving situations, rather than emotion- ally moving forms, as the material it works with.

The most general goal must be to extend the nonmediocre part of life, to reduce the empty moments of life as much as possible.

So far, the ruling class has succeeded in using the leisure the revolutionary proletariat wrested from it by developing a vast industrial sector of leisure activities that is an incomparable instrument for stupefying the proletariat with by-products of mystifying ideology and bourgeois tastes. The abundance of televised imbecilities is probably one of the reasons for the American working class’s inability to develop any political consciousness.

A rough experimentation toward a mode of new behavior has already been made with what we have termed dérive, which is the practice of a passional journey out of the ordinary through rapid changings of ambiances, as well as a means of study of psychogeography and of situationist psychology. The application of this will to playful creation must be extended to all known forms of human relationships, so as to influence, for example, the historical evolution of sentiments like friendship and love.

The life a person is a succession of fortuitous situations, and even if none of them is exactly the same as another the immense majority of them are so undifferentiated and so dull that they give the perfect impression of similitude.

Our situations will be ephemeral, without a future; passageways. The permanence of art or anything else does not enter into our considerations, which are serious. Eternity is the grossest idea a person can conceive of in connection with his acts.

Thought

I think there is something here, mainly with the act of the dérive, or finding passions outside of “placating” and “distracting” media systems. We should examine ourselves and break.

On my read though, I do get a sense that there’s an almost too strong pull towards novelty and an alienation of others, as if they are clueless. This is a revolutionary spirit, so it’d be reluctant to adhere to the past - but I do like aspects of dull moments, which are then punctuated by brilliance and novelty. I also feel that the brilliant moments can be spawned by dwelling in the mundane, or route, rather than just artificially living in the avant-garde.

Soundtracks of Two Films by Guy Debord

Magic Circle

When freedom is practiced in a closed circle, it fades into a dream, becomes a mere representation of itself. The ambiance of play is by nature unstable. At any moment “ordinary life” can prevail once again. The geographical limitation of play is even more striking than its temporal limitation. Any game takes place within the contours of its spatial domain.

Critique of Separation

Everything in film said other than by way of images must be repeated or the spectators will miss it. This kind of incomprehension is present everywhere in everyday encounters. There is not enough time to be sure it is made clear, or understood. Before you have done or said what is necessary, you’ve already gone.

The events that happen in individual existence as it is organized, the events that really concern us and require our participation, are generally precisely those that merit nothing more than our being distant, bored, indifferent spectators.

At the extreme, the miserable subjectivity is reversed into a certain sort of objectivity: a documentary on the conditions of noncommunication.

For example, I don’t talk about her. False face. False relationship. A real person is separated from the interpreter of that person, if only by the time passed between the event and its evocation, by a distance that continually increases, that is increasing at this very moment. Just as the conserved expression itself remains separated from those who hear it abstractly and without any power over it.

We have invented nothing. We adapt ourselves, with a few variations, into the network of possible courses. We get used to it, it seems.

No one has the enthusiasm on returning from a venture that they had on setting out on it. My dears, adventure is dead.

Who will resist? It is necessary to go beyond this partial defeat. Of course. And how to do it?

French SI Journals

In all this revolutionary babble there is a common lack of understanding of the meaning and scope of surrealism (itself naturally distorted by its bourgeois artistic success). A continuation of surrealism would in fact be the most consistent attitude to take if nothing new arose to replace it. But because the young people who now adopt it are aware of surrealism’s profound exigency while being incapable of overcoming the contradiction between this exigency and the immobility accompanying its pseudosuccess, they take refuge in the reactionary aspects present within surrealism from its inception (magic, belief in a golden age elsewhere than in history to come).

A movement more liberating than surrealism cannot easily be formed because it now depends on seizing the more advanced material means of the modern world.

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: having to do with the theory or practical activity of constructing situations. One who engages in the construction of situations. A member of the SI.
• situationism: a meaningless term improperly derived from the above. There is no such thing as situationism, which could mean a doctrine of interpretation of existing facts. The notion of situationism is obviously devised by antisituationinists.
• psychogeography: the study of the field of specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.
• psychogeographer: one who explores and reports on psychogeographical phenomenon.
• dérive: a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances. Also used to designate a specific period of dériving.
• detournement: short for detournement of preexisting aesthetic elements. The integration of present or past artistic production into superior construction of a milieu. In this sense there can be no situationist painting or music, but only a situationist use of these means. In a more primitive sense, detournement within the old cultural spheres is method of propaganda, a method which testifies to 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
• decomposition: the process in which the traditional forms have destroyed themselves are the result of the emergence of superior means of dominating nature which enable and require superior cultural constructions.

Situationists and Automation

Doubtful now:

It is rather astonishing that almost no one until now has dared to examine the ultimate implications of automation. As a result, there are no real perspectives concerning it. One has rather the impression that engineers, scientists and sociologists are trying to surreptitiously smuggle automation into the society.

The question of automation is the one most pregnant with positive and negative possibilities.

Automation thus contains two opposing perspectives: it deprives the individual of any possibility of adding anything personal to automated production, which is a fixation of progress; and at the same time it saves human energy by massively liberating it from reproductive and uncreative activities.

Thought

This “legalism” is touched on in the book, Digisprudence: Code as Law Rebooted. Use of technology reflects decisions of a designer, such as when filling a form on web application online. As a simple example, you might be given only items in a dropdown that don’t reflect your actual decision.

The new leisure time appears as an empty space that present-day society can fill only by multiplying the pseudoplay of ridiculous hobbies. But this leisure is at the same time the basis on which can be built the most magnificent cultural construction that has ever been imagined.

“a creator lies dormant” in each person. This old banality is today of vital importance if one relates it to the real material possibilities of our time. The sleeping creator must be awakened, and his waking state can be termed “situationist.”

The idea of standardization is an effort to reduce and simplify the greatest number of human needs to the greatest equality. It is up to us whether this standardization opens up domains of experience more interesting than those it closes. Depending on the outcome, we may arrive at a total degradation of human life or at the possibility of continually discovering new desires. But these new desires will not appear by themselves in the oppressive context of our world. There must be a collective action to detect, express and realize them.

Theory of the Derive

rel:Deambulation, Errance, Dérive Terrain Vague

Derive is the technique of transient passage through varied ambiances.

Awareness and playfulness is the distinction:

The dérive entails playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects; which completely distinguishes it from the classical notions of the journey and the stroll.

NOTE

It is more similar to a fugue? but a lucid fugue?

In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. The element of chance is less determinant than one might think: from the dérive point of view cities have a psychogeographical relief, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes which strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.

Ecological science (“the study of the relationships between living organisms, including humans, and their physical environment”) is a source of data for derive.

An urban neighborhood is determined not only by geographical and economical factors, but also by the image that its inhabits and those other neighborhoods have of it.

Chance plays an important role in dérives, but they must be conscious of fixating on encounters.

action of chance is naturally conservative and in a new setting tends to reduce everything to an alternation between a limited number of variants, and to habit. Progress is nothing other than breaking through a field where chance holds sway by creating new conditions more favorable to our purposes. We can say, then, that the randomness of the dérive is fundamentally different from that of the stroll, but also that the first psychogeographical attractions discovered run the risk of fixating the dériving individual or group around new habitual axes, to which they will constantly be drawn back.

Surrealist experiments:

An insufficient awareness of the limitations of chance, and of its inevitably reactionary use, condemned to a dismal failure the celebrated aimless ambulation attempted in 1923 by four surrealists, beginning from a town chosen by lot: wandering in the open country is naturally depressing, and the interventions of chance are poorer there than anywhere else.

NOTE

The dérive is primarily urban. But I think there’s some unfairness to the above? The rural environment will be different with respect to the cadence (density) of the improbable or events (only possibly so).

Chance can be internal. The walks thoughts too. Stumbling on something, after so much so of nothing, can also be meaningful as excess and overload.

Even more, look at the straight line challenges that occur where a person will attempt to cross a large body of land without deviating from a straight line. Chance is everywhere on that line, from a disgruntled farmer to a thorny bramble. It doesn’t require being induced.

I do understand the thought experiment here though. How do you dérive or drift in a featureless plane? Like imagine a simulated room, pure white and flat endlessly. First, if you are alone that is one thing (others in the room will serve as psychogeographic features).

I suspect some madness will arise otherwise.

At the opposite pole from these imbecilities, the primarily urban character of the dérive, in its element in the great industrially trans- formed cities—those centers of possibilities and meanings—could be expressed in Marx’s phrase: “Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive.”

Best suited in small groups with a debriefing:

One can dérive alone, but all indications are that the most fruitful numerical arrangement consists of several small groups of two or three people who have reached the same awakening of consciousness, since the cross-checking of these different groups’ impressions makes it possible to arrive at objective conclusions.

Larger groups are subject to further study, but tend to fragment into subdivisions of simultaneous dérives.

The average duration of a dérive is one day (bookended by sleep.) The last hours of night are generally unsuitable for dérives.

The ideal dérive rarely occurs in its pure form. Some dérives can go on many days. “Such an experience gives rise to new objective conditions of behavior, which bring about the disappearance of a good number of the old ones.”

Weather (has an effect, but prolonged rains are discouraging):

Storms or other types of precipitation are rather favorable for dérives.

Spatial field of the event

The spatial field of the dérive may be precisely delimited or vague, depending on whether the activity is aimed at studying a terrain or at emotional disorientation.

In every case the spatial field depends first of all on the point of departure—the residence of the solo dériver or the meeting place selected by a group. The maximum area of this spatial field does not extend beyond the entirety of a large city and its suburbs. At its minimum it can be limited to a small self-contained ambiance: a single neighborhood or even a single block of houses if it’s worth it (the extreme case being the static-dérive of an entire day within the Saint-Lazare train station).

Maps:

The exploration of a fixed spatial field thus presupposes the determining of bases and the calculation of directions of penetration. It is here that the study of maps comes in—ordinary ones as well as ecological and psychogeographical ones—along with their rectification and improvement.

Thus a loose lifestyle and even certain amusements considered dubious that have always been enjoyed among our entourage—slipping by night into houses undergoing demolition, hitchhiking nonstop and without destination through Paris during a transportation strike in the name of adding to the confusion, wandering in subterranean catacombs forbidden to the public, etc.—are expressions of a more general sensibility which is nothing other than that of the dérive.

One measures the distances that effectively separate two regions of a city, distances that may have little relation with the physical distance between them… one can draw up hitherto lacking maps of influences, maps whose inevitable imprecision at this early stage is no worse than that of the first navigational charts; the only difference is that it is a matter no longer of precisely delineating stable continents, but of changing architecture and urbanism.

Within architecture itself, the taste for dériving tends to promote all sorts of new forms of labyrinths made possible by modern techniques of construction.

Detournement as Negation and Prelude

The two fundamental laws of detournement are the loss of importance of each detourned autonomous element—which may go so far as to lose its original sense completely—and at the same time the organization of another meaningful ensemble that confers on each element its new scope and effect.

Detournement is thus first of all a negation of the value of the previous organization of expression.

The parodic-serious expresses the contradictions of an era in which we find ourselves confronted with both the urgent necessity and the near impossibility of bringing together and carrying out a totally in- novative collective action. An era in which the greatest seriousness advances masked in the ambiguous interplay between art and its negation; in which the essential voyages of discovery have been undertaken by such astonishingly incapable people.

Situationist Theses on Traffic

The automobile is at the center of this general propaganda, both as sovereign good of an alienated life and as essential product of the capitalist market: It is being generally said this year that American economic prosperity is soon going to depend on the success of the slogan “Two cars per family.”

Commute time is surplus labor.

We must replace travel as an adjunct to work, with travel as a pleasure.

Work zone, residence zones and then a third sphere (the sphere of freedom, of leisure - the truth of life.)

?

Those who believe that the automobile is eternal are not thinking, even from a strictly technological standpoint, of other future forms of transportation. For example, certain models of one-man helicopters presently being tested by the US Army will probably have spread to the general public within twenty years.

Revolutionary urbanists will not limit their concern to the circulation of things and of human beings trapped in a world of things. They will try to break these topological chains, paving the way with their experiments for a human journey through authentic life.

Thought

I’m conflicted here. Ideally I would not own a car, and the car landscape (though there’s a romantic notion of the open road I’d have to disabuse myself of) is an eyesore, and both burdened and underutilized space.

But as it stands, my car connects me with places I would not regularly get to, and experience them and this is invaluable to my freedom (that is privileged). I understand I could get there through mass transit, and would prefer that in certain cases, but with my necessary concerns of “fitting things into available free time in the infrastructure I live in” makes me value my car.

But yeah, broadly, car use is poor and I’m not honoring these theses correctly here.

Basic Banalities

Bureaucratic capitalism contains the palpable reality of alienation.

Is it by chance that a technological civilization has developed to such a point that social alienation has been revealed by its conflict with the last areas of natural resistance that technological power hadn’t managed (and for good reasons) to subjugate? Today the technocrats propose to put an end to primitive alienation: with a stirring humanitarianism they exhort us to perfect the technical means that “in themselves” would enable us to conquer death, suffering, discomfort and boredom.

What can be the future of totality in a fragmented society?

Summary: The vast majority of people have always devoted their energy to survival, thereby denying themselves a chance to live. The continue to do so today as a welfare state imposes the element of this survival in form form of technological conveniences (appliances, preserved food, prefabricated cities, Mozart for the masses.)

The organization controlling the material equipment of our everyday life is such that what in itself would enable to construct it so richly plunges us instead into a poverty of abundance, making alienation all the more intolerable as each convenience promises liberation and turns out to only be one more burden. We are condemned to slavery to the means of liberation.

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

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

Ideologies, Classes and the Domination of Nature

The appropriation of nature by man is precisely the venture we have embarked on.

The economic planning that reigns everywhere is insane, not so much because of its academic obsession with organizing the enrichment of the years to come as because of the rotten blood of the past that circulates through its veins and is endlessly pumped forth with each artificial pulsation of this “heart of a heartless world.”

Ideology, like penicillin, has become less effective as its use has become more widespread.

The victories of our day belong to star-specialists. Gagarin’s exploit shows that man can survive farther out in space, in increasingly unfavorable conditions. But just as is the case when the joint efforts of medicine and biochemistry enable a prolonged survival in time, this statistical extension of survival is in no way linked to a qualitative improvement of life. You can survive farther away and longer, but never live more.

The Avant-Garde of Presence

In spring 1962 the press began reporting on the “happenings” produced by the New York artistic avant-garde. The happening is a sort of spectacle pushed to the extreme state of dissolution, a dadaist-style improvisation of gestures performed by a gathering of people within a closed-off space. Drugs, alcohol and eroticism are often involved. The gestures of the “actors” compose a mélange of poetry, painting, dance and jazz. This form of social encounter can be considered as a limiting case of the old artistic spectacle, a hash produced by throwing together all the old artistic leftovers; and as a too aesthetically encumbered attempt to renovate the ordinary surprise party or the classic orgy. In its naive striving to “make something happen,” its absence of separate spectators and its desire to liven up the impoverished range of present human relations, the happening can even be considered as an attempt to construct a situation in isolation, on a foundation of poverty.

In contrast, the situation defined by the SI can be constructed only on a foundation of material and spiritual richness. This amounts to saying that the first ventures in constructing situations must be the work/play of the revolutionary avant-garde; people who are resigned in one or another respect to political passivity, to metaphysical despair, and even to being subjected to an artistic pure absence of creativity, are incapable of participating in them.

How are we going to bankrupt the dominant culture? In two ways— gradually at first, then suddenly.

All the King’s Men

The problem of language is at the heart of all struggles between the forces striving to abolish present alienation and those striving to maintain it; it is inseparable from the entire terrain of those struggles. We live within language as within polluted air. In spite of what humorists think, words do not play. Nor do they make love, as Breton thought, except in dreams. Words work—on behalf of the dominant organization of life. And yet they are not completely automatized; unfortunately for the theoreticians of information, words are not in themselves “informationist”; they embody forces that can upset the most careful cal- culations. Words coexist with power in a relationship analogous to that which proletarians (in the modern as well as the classic sense of the term) have with power. Employed almost constantly, exploited full time for every sense and nonsense that can be squeezed out of them, they still remain in some sense fundamentally strange and foreign.

Every revolution has been born in poetry, has first of all been made with the force of poetry… Poetry, whenever it appears, frightens them; they do their best to get rid of it by means of every kind of exorcism, from auto-da-fé to pure stylistic research. The moment of real poetry, which has “all the time in the world before it,” invariably wants to reorient the entire world and the entire future to its own ends.

Poetry is becoming more and more clearly the empty space, the antimatter, of consumer society, since it is not consumable.

Questions

The SI aims to represent the highest degree of international revolutionary consciousness. It is not a political movement. Situationist denotes an activity that aims at making situations, as opposed to passively recognizing them in academic or otherwise separate terms.

Is the SI an expression of nihilism? We can only build in the ruin of the spectacle. The supersession of nihilism is reached by way of the decomposition of the spectacle; which is precisely what the SI is working on.

Is SI utopian? Reality is superseding Utopia. We want to put the material equipment at the disposal of everyone’s creativity, as the masses themselves always strive to do in the moment of revolution.

Alienated work can only produce alienated leisure, for the idle (increasingly, in fact, merely semi-idle) elite as well as for the masses who are obtaining access to momentary leisure. No lead shielding can insulate either a fragment of time or the entire time of a fragment of society from the radioactivity diffused by alienated labor—if for no other reason than the fact that it is that labor which shapes the totality of products and of social life in its own image.

Captive Words - Preface to Dictionary

One such banality is the statement that language is not dialectical, thereby implying that all use of dialectics should be rejected. But in fact nothing is more clearly subject to dialectics than language, since it is a living reality. Thus, every critique of the old world has been made in the language of that world, yet directed against it and therefore automatically in a different language. Every revolutionary theory has had to invent its own terms, to destroy the dominant sense of other terms and establish new meanings in the “world of meanings” corresponding to the new embryonic reality needing to be liberated from the dominant trash heap.

Since any new interpretation is labeled misinterpretation by the authorities, the situationists are going to establish the legitimacy of misinterpretation and denounce the imposture of the interpretation given and authorized by power. Since the dictionary is the guardian of existing meaning, we propose to destroy it systematically. The replacement of the dictionary, that master reference of all inherited and tamed language, will find its adequate expression in the revolutionary infiltration of language, in that detournement extensively used by Marx, systematized by Lautréamont and now being put within everyone’s reach by the SI.

After Dada it has become impossible to believe that a word is forever bound to an idea: Dada realized all the possibilities of language and forever closed the door on art as a specialty. It definitively posed the problem of the realization of art. Surrealism was of value only insofar as it continued to pursue this exigence; in its literary productions it was reactionary.

“What’s the point of saving language,” Max Bense asks resignedly, “when there is no longer anything to say?”

The decline of radical thought considerably increases the power of words, the words of power. “Power creates nothing, it recuperates”

The Situationists and the New Forms of Action against Politics and Art

1. Experimentation in the detournement of romantic photo-comics as well as pornographic photos, and that we bluntly impose their real truth by restoring real dialogues by adding or altering speech bubbles. In the same spirit, it is also possible to detourn any advertising billboards—particularly those in subway corridors, which form remarkable sequences—by pasting over pre-prepared placards.
2. Promotion of guerilla tactics in the mass media: take over control stations, or jam via ham radio.
3. Situationist Comics - Comics are the only truly popular literature of our century. Cretins marked by years at school have not been able to resist writing dissertations on them; but they’ll get little pleasure out of reading ours.
4. Situationist Film - The cinema enables one to express anything, just like an article, a book, a leaflet or a poster. This is why we should henceforth require that each situationist be as capable of making a film as of writing an article

The Conquest of Space in the Time of Power

Science in the service of capital, the commodity and the spectacle is nothing other than capitalized knowledge, fetishism of idea and method, alienated image of human thought. Pseudogreatness of man, its passive knowledge of a mediocre reality is the magical justification of a race of slaves.

It has been a long time since the power of knowledge has been transformed into the knowledge of power. Contemporary science, experimental heir of the religion of the Middle Ages, fulfills the same functions in relation to class society: it compensates people’s daily stupidity with its eternal specialist intelligence. Science sings in numerals of the grandeur of the human race, but science is nothing other than the organized sum of man’s limitations and alienations.

Selected Opinions on the Situationists

• This young group sees only one way out of this impasse: to renounce painting as an individual art in order to use it within a new “situationist” framework. What a mon- strous word! Such manifestos are interesting as symptoms of inquietude and malaise. This particular one contains a few trivial truths, but its authors cling too closely to phenomena and slogans, with the result that essential truth escapes them.
• Their principal activity is an extreme mental derangement. … In the maximum possible number of languages the Situationist International sends letters from foreign countries filled with the most filthy expressions. In our opinion the Munich court gave them too much credit in condemning them to fines and imprisonment.
• As previously happened with surrealism, the internal development of the Situationist International shows that when the crisis of language and poetry is pushed beyond certain limits it ends up putting in question the very structure of society.
• A new student ideology is spreading across the world: a dehydrated version of the young Marx called “situationism.”