The nostalgia I feel thinking about
Situationism from the perspective of this twenty-first century is unfortunately
a function of how these United States and France and much of the world has
backslid since the movement’s glory days in 1968. In America we have just eluded a fascist
takeover by an utterly self-interested would-be tyrant. In the sixties we told each other that Republicans
were passé,
that big business had learned how to work in concert with government, making the
principal danger corporate liberalism.
Many spoke of ‘the post-industrial society,” and believed (as I do yet)
that technology has produced a state of affairs in which all reasonable needs
could be satisfied with very little work.
Much of the motive of the New Left was not material want as it had been
when “Solidarity Forever” described labor as “outcast and starving,” The Port Huron Statement founding SDS said
American youth were “bred in at least modest comfort” and “housed now in
universities,” but nonetheless felt alienated.
Yet at the same time Utopia seemed possible. We little imagined that over fifty years
later the ugly specters of overt racism, Nazism, unashamed sexism, and
predatory capitalism would re-emerge as strong as ever and that the old working-class
anxieties could once more be directed against scapegoats instead of bosses.
History has kept grinding on at the usual
inexorable pace, but at a moment when all dreams were allowed, many, and among
them the Situationists, imagined a modern Abbey of Thélème with its single
rule: “Do as thou wouldst.” The role of Situationists
who in the uprisings of May of 1968, in particular their influence in the Atelier
Populaire, which produced hundreds of posters and leaflets and gave
Situationism very likely the greatest visibility of any artistic movement in
social upheaval since the origin of capitalism.
Situationism was always a minute coterie,
a splinter of a splinter. The group was
sparked by the encounter between avant-garde artistic formations and left-wing
politics. [1] In spite of the writers’
intentions, tendentiously radical literature has had negligible discernable
influence on social change [2], yet the Dadaists and Surrealists, for example,
felt a warmth (not always returned) toward revolutionary socialism. In 1946 a Romanian émigré, Isidore Isou, made
his place in the Modernist lineage clear when, in Lettrisme’s first public
manifestation, he disrupted a performance of Tristan Tzara’s La Fuit,
shouting "Dada is dead! Lettrism has taken its place!" Guy Debord, the central figure of
Situationism, joined in 1951, espousing a more radical Marxist position.
Through street art the Lettrists spread
slogans such as “Never work!” Debord led
demonstrators who in October 1952 interrupted Charlie Chaplin’s press conference
for his new film Limelight, and published a leaflet defending their
action “Finis les pieds plats” (“No More Flat Feet!”) [3], causing a
break with Isou. In 1957 Debord and
others announced the Situationist International.
A few years later the “Situationist
Manifesto” appeared [4] noting “the irresistible development of technology and
the dissatisfaction of its possible uses in our senseless social life. “a lack
of satisfaction in our senseless social lives” and calling for a “new human
force,” totally rejecting “alienation and oppression” in “the current multiform
crisis.” The Situationist alternative is
“a society which authentically ‘reorganizes production on the basis of the free
and equal association of the producers’" in which everyone would be freed
from work, assuring the “complete liberty to the individual.” The guarantee of the liberty of each and of
all is in the value of the game, of life freely constructed. The exercise of
this ludic recreation is the framework of the only guaranteed equality with
non-exploitation of man by man. The liberation of the game, its creative
autonomy, supersedes the ancient division between imposed work and passive
leisure.” “Everyone will become an
artist.”
This utopian economic perspective is the true heart of Situationism, the
intoxicating lure of total freedom, yet it manifests symbolically, its own art
challenging the rituals of late capitalism, “the miserable pseudo-games of
non-participation” and proposing “a better game, which more exactly is provoked
by the human presence.”
What such a liberating art would look like
is not clear. From Lettrisme the
Situationists inherited a fondness for the abstract, but the left-wing elements
of the formation staged a celebrated event when, on Easter Sunday of 1950,
during a televised High Mass in Notre Dame Michel Mourre mounted the pulpit in
Dominican robes and preached a sermon maintaining that God was dead and that
the church was a “running sore on the decomposed body of the West.” [7] Debord made several films with differing
content. His first film Hurlements en
faveur de Sade (Howls for Sade) (1952) includes no images
whatsoever. His second Sur le passage
de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps (On the
Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time) (1959)
juxtaposes images of Debord and his associates with scenes from mass culture.
Much of Situationist statements focus on
social relations more than aesthetics, insisting that pre-revolutionary art
must be subversive to be genuine. Whereas
the ruling class seeks to pacify the masses with “spectacle,” which signifies
an altogether passive experience which displaces the individuals’ real lived
experience. Though posters and graffiti
were surely their most influential media, the specific techniques most
identified with Situationism are détournement (diversion) and
dérive
(drift).
Détournement seeks to expose
and overturn the ruling class’s mind control through, "turning expressions
of the capitalist system against itself."
Though the device is an old one – the I. W. W. parodies of revival songs
is just one example – the most familiar example associated with Situationism is
the use of hyper-conventional images from old advertisements and comic strip
panels, often from romance titles, with new text. [6] One might view Abbie Hoffman as a master of
the improvisatory détournement, applaud Jacques Servin
and Igor Vamos (the Yes Men), and ask whether Sacha Baron Cohen is the form’s genius
or its commodifier.
Debord defined the dérive
as the art of wandering through urban space. “In a dérive one or more persons
during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure
activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let
themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they
find there.” [8] The dérive
was an effort to experience one’s environment freshly without the blinders
imposed by capitalist culture.
The Situationist International was always
very small, and their concepts would linger in obscure footnotes were it not
for the energetic French movement of workers as well as intellectuals in 1968,
during which what had been an obscure clique became widely influential. Debord was perhaps exaggerating, but he had
reason to boast that “the disorder that overtook the world in 1968 had its
source at a few café tables, where, in 1952, a handful of somewhat strayed
young people calling themselves the Letterist International used to drink too
much and plan systematic rambles they called dérives.” [9]
In 1966 the Strasbourg chapter of the French student union, the U. N. E.
F., published a manifesto explicitly employing Situationist analysis “On the
Poverty of Student Life: considered in its economic, political, psychological,
sexual, and particularly intellectual aspects, and a modest proposal for its
remedy.” In politics, the students
condemned the “licensed and impotent” left; in art they declared “art is dead, but the student is
necrophiliac.” They point toward the possibility of
liberation. “The only poetry . . . is
the creativity released in the making of history, the free invention of each
moment and each event: Lautréamont's poésie faite par tous -- the
beginning of the revolutionary celebration. For proletarian revolt is a
festival or it is nothing; in revolution the road of excess leads once and for
all to the palace of wisdom. A palace which knows only one rationality: the
game. The rules are simple: to live instead of devising a lingering death, and
to indulge untrammelled desire.”
Similar ideas swept through French
campuses and in the spring of 1968 Situationists dominated the Occupation
Committee of the Sorbonne and went on to establish The Council for the
Maintenance of the Occupations (CMDO) which sought to bring workers into the
movement for total liberation. This
group lasted only a very short time. In
1972, reduced to two members, the Situationiste International dissolved
itself. [10]
The “Situationist Manifesto” sounds
something like a Bodhisattva when it says, “We await the turning point which is
the inevitable liquidation of the world of privation, in all its forms. Such
are our goals, and these will be the future goals of humanity." The Situationists remind us that artists can
influence history and that no demand is excessive. Ask for everything. We deserve it.
1. 1. Even the exceptions tend to be not apolitical or
centrist, but rather, like Pound, Marinetti, and Céline, to adopt extreme fascist
views.
2. Reformist writing has sometimes attracted
considerable readership. The best
American example is Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
3. The leaflet called for “the destruction of
idols” and accused Chaplin’s admirers of “a unanimous, servile enthusiasm"
while calling the actor himself an "emotional blackmailer, master-singer
of misfortune.”
4.
In Internationale Situationniste #4 (June
1960). The French text is available at https://www.ubu.com/media/text/si/Internationale_situationniste_4.pdf
and the English translation I have used by Fabian Thompsett at https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/manifesto.html.
5.
See Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle
(1967).
6.
Now that one commonly sees such “turned” images
in merchandise like tee shirts and coffee cups, one must ponder whether critics
such as Naomi Klein and Slavoj Žižek may be correct in arguing that such play with
images might reinforce rather than reveal oppression. It is doubtless significant that the comic
panels of Roy Lichtenstein never alter the original text as the Situationists
did.
7.
Mourre, who had, when younger, been a Dominican,
in this way recalled the intrusions of the young Blanquistes who interrupted
mass in Notre Dame March 22, 1892, shouting “Long live the Republic! Long live the Commune! Down with the Church,” as well as when on
November 17, 1918, Oberdada Johannes Baader declared that “Christ is a sausage”
from the pulpit of the Berlin Cathedral.
The tradition continues with the
performance by Pussy Riot inside Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior on
February 21, 2012.
8.
Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive,” 1958. Despite the language of “psychogeography,”
the procedure sounds rather similar to the recreational strolls people have
taken for many years after using
cannabis.
9.
Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord.
10.
The work of Situationist artists did not
end. In 1975 Gianfranco Sanguinetti working
with Debord published a pamphlet titled Rapporto veridico sulle ultime
opportunità di salvare il capitalismo in Italia (The Real Report on the
Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy) [57].
Claiming to be written by a major capitalist, the pamphlet made
outlandish and satirical claims, such as that the ruling class was in fact
responsible for ultra-left violence as part of a strategy to prevent
communism. The text was taken to be
genuine, and, when the deception was revealed, Sanguinetti was obliged to flee Italy.
Situationist
and situationist-influenced slogans of Paris in May of 1968
The collection below is available at http://www.bopsecrets.org/CF/graffiti.htm.
These graffiti are drawn primarily from Julien Besançon’s Les
murs ont la parole (Tchou, 1968), Walter Lewino’s L’imagination au
pouvoir (Losfeld, 1968), Marc Rohan’s Paris ’68 (Impact, 1968), René
Viénet’s Enragés et situationnistes dans le mouvement des occupations
(Gallimard, 1968), Maurice Brinton’s Paris: May 1968 (Solidarity, 1968),
and Gérard Lambert’s Mai 1968: brûlante nostalgie (Pied de nez, 1988).
This translation
by Ken Knabb is from the Situationist International Anthology (Revised
and Expanded Edition, 2006). No copyright.
B U R E A U O F
P U B L I C S E C R E T S
MAY 1968 GRAFFITI
In the decor of the spectacle, the
eye meets only things and their prices.
Commute, work, commute, sleep . .
.
Meanwhile everyone wants to breathe
and nobody can and many say, “We will breathe later.”
And most of them don’t die because
they are already dead.
Boredom is counterrevolutionary.
We don’t want a world where the
guarantee of not dying of starvation brings the risk of
dying of boredom.
We want to live.
Don’t beg for the right to live —
take it.
In a society that has abolished
every kind of adventure the only adventure that remains is
to abolish the society.
The liberation of humanity is all
or nothing.
Those who make revolutions half
way only dig their own graves.
No replastering, the structure is
rotten.
Masochism today takes the form of
reformism.
Reform my ass.
The revolution is incredible
because it’s really happening.
I came, I saw, I was won over.
Run, comrade, the old world is
behind you!
Quick!
If we only have enough time . . .
In any case, no regrets!
Already ten days of happiness.
At every moment something is
happening.
Live in the moment.
Comrades, if everyone did like us
. . .
We will ask nothing. We will
demand nothing. We will take, occupy.
Down with the state.
When the National Assembly becomes
a bourgeois theater, all the bourgeois theaters should
be turned into national assemblies. [Written above the entrance of the
occupied Odéon Theater]
Referendum: whether we vote yes or
no, it turns us into suckers.
It’s painful to submit to our
bosses; it’s even more stupid to choose them.
Let’s not change bosses, let’s
change life.
Don’t liberate me — I’ll take care
of that.
I’m not a servant of the people
(much less of their self-appointed leaders). Let the people serve themselves.
Abolish class society.
Nature created neither servants
nor masters. I want neither to rule nor to be ruled.
We will have good masters as soon
as everyone is their own.
“In revolution there are two types
of people: those who make it and those who
profit from it.” (Napoleon)
Warning: ambitious careerists may
now be disguised as “progressives.”
Don’t be taken in by the politicos
and their filthy demagogy. We must rely on ourselves.
Socialism without freedom is a
barracks.
All power corrupts. Absolute power
corrupts absolutely.
We want structures that serve
people, not people serving structures.
The revolution doesn’t belong to
the committees, it’s yours.
Politics is in the streets.
Barricades close the streets but
open the way.
Our hope can come only from the
hopeless.
A proletarian is someone who has
no power over his life and knows it.
Never work.
People who work get bored when
they don’t work. People who don’t work never get
bored.
Workers of all countries, enjoy!
Since 1936 I have fought for wage
increases. My father before me fought for
wage increases. Now I have a TV, a fridge, a
Volkswagen. Yet my whole life has been a drag. Don’t negotiate with the bosses.
Abolish them.
The boss needs you, you don’t need
the boss.
By stopping our machines together
we will demonstrate their weakness.
Occupy the factories.
Power to the workers councils. (an enragé)
Power to the enragés councils. (a worker)
Worker: You may be only 25 years
old, but your union dates from the last century.
Labor unions are whorehouses.
Comrades, let’s lynch Séguy! [Georges Séguy: head bureaucrat of
the Communist Party-dominated labor union]
Please leave the Communist Party
as clean on leaving it as you would like to find it on entering.
Stalinists, your children are with
us!
Man is neither Rousseau’s noble
savage nor the Church’s or La Rochefoucauld’s depraved sinner. He is violent when oppressed, gentle
when free.
Conflict is the origin of
everything.
(Heraclitus)
If we have to resort to force,
don’t sit on the fence.
Be cruel.
Humanity won’t be happy till the
last capitalist is hung with the guts of the last
bureaucrat.
When the last sociologist has been
hung with the guts of the last bureaucrat, will we still
have “problems”?
The passion of destruction is a
creative joy. (Bakunin)
A single nonrevolutionary weekend
is infinitely more bloody than a month of total revolution.
The tears of philistines are the
nectar of the gods.
This concerns everyone.
We are all German Jews.
We refuse to be highrised,
diplomaed, licensed, inventoried, registered, indoctrinated, suburbanized, sermonized, beaten,
telemanipulated, gassed, booked.
We are all “undesirables.”
We must remain “unadapted.”
The forest precedes man, the
desert follows him.
Under the paving stones, the
beach.
Concrete breeds apathy.
Coming soon to this location:
charming ruins.
Beautiful, maybe not, but O how charming:
life versus survival.
“My aim is to agitate and disturb
people. I’m not selling bread, I’m selling yeast.” (Unamuno)
Conservatism is a synonym for
rottenness and ugliness.
You are hollow.
You will end up dying of comfort.
Hide yourself, object!
No to coat-and-tie revolution.
A revolution that requires us to
sacrifice ourselves for it is Papa’s revolution.
Revolution ceases to be the moment
it calls for self-sacrifice.
The prospect of finding pleasure
tomorrow will never compensate for today’s boredom.
When people notice they are bored,
they stop being bored.
Happiness is a new idea.
Live without dead time.
Those who talk about revolution
and class struggle without referring
to everyday reality have a corpse
in their mouth.
Culture is an inversion of life.
Poetry is in the streets.
The most beautiful sculpture is a
paving stone thrown at a cop’s head.
Art is dead, don’t consume its
corpse.
Art is dead, let’s liberate our
everyday life.
Art is dead, Godard can’t change
that.
Godard: the supreme Swiss Maoist
jerk.
Permanent cultural vibration.
We want a wild and ephemeral
music. We propose a fundamental
regeneration: concert strikes, sound gatherings with collective
investigation. Abolish copyrights: sound
structures belong to everyone.
Anarchy is me.
Revolution, I love you.
Down with the abstract, long live
the ephemeral. (Marxist-Pessimist Youth)
Don’t consume Marx, live him.
I’m a Groucho Marxist.
I take my desires for reality
because I believe in the reality of my desires.
Desiring reality is great!
Realizing your desires is even better!
Practice wishful thinking.
I declare a permanent state of
happiness.
Be realistic, demand the
impossible.
Power to the imagination.
Those who lack imagination cannot
imagine what is lacking.
Imagination is not a gift, it must
be conquered.
(Breton)
Action must not be a reaction, but
a creation.
Action enables us to overcome
divisions and find solutions.
Exaggeration is the beginning of
invention.
The enemy of movement is
skepticism. Everything that has been realized comes from dynamism, which comes
from spontaneity.
Here, we spontane.
“You must bear a chaos inside you
to give birth to a dancing star.” (Nietzsche)
Chance must be systematically
explored.
Alcohol kills. Take LSD.
Unbutton your mind as often as
your fly.
“Every view of things that is not
strange is false.” (Valéry)
Life is elsewhere.
Forget everything you’ve been
taught. Start by dreaming.
Form dream committees.
Revolution is the active passage
from dream to reality.
Dare! This word contains all the
politics of the present moment. (Saint-Just)
Arise, ye wretched of the
university.
Students are jerks.
The student’s susceptibility to
recruitment as a militant for any cause is a sufficient
demonstration of his real impotence. (enragé women)
Professors, you make us grow old.
Terminate the university.
Rape your Alma Mater.
What if we burned the Sorbonne?
Professors, you are as senile as
your culture, your modernism is nothing but the modernization
of the police.
We refuse the role assigned to us:
we will not be trained as police dogs.
We don’t want to be the watchdogs
or servants of capitalism.
Exams = servility, social
promotion, hierarchical society.
When examined, answer with
questions.
Insolence is the new revolutionary
weapon.
Every teacher is taught, everyone
taught teaches.
The Old Mole of history seems to
be splendidly undermining the Sorbonne. (telegram from Marx, 13 May 1968)
Thought that stagnates rots.
To call in question the society
you “live” in, you must first be capable of calling yourself in
question.
Take revolution seriously, but
don’t take yourself seriously.
The walls have ears. Your ears
have walls.
Making revolution also means
breaking our internal chains.
A cop sleeps inside each one of
us. We must kill him.
Drive the cop out of your head.
Religion is the ultimate con.
Neither God nor master.
If God existed it would be
necessary to abolish him.
Can you believe that some people
are still Christians?
Down with the toad of Nazareth.
How can you think freely in the
shadow of a chapel?
We want a place to piss, not a
place to pray.
I suspect God of being a leftist
intellectual.
The bourgeoisie has no other
pleasure than to degrade all pleasures.
Going through the motions kills
the emotions.
Struggle against the emotional
fixations that paralyze our potentials. (Committee of Women on the Path of
Liberation)
Constraints imposed on pleasure
incite the pleasure of living without constraints.
The more I make love, the more I
want to make revolution. The more I make revolution, the
more I want to make love.
SEX: It’s okay, says Mao, as long
as you don’t do it too often.
Comrades, 5 hours of sleep a day
is indispensable: we need you for the revolution.
Embrace your love without dropping
your guard.
I love you!!! Oh, say it with
paving stones!!!
I’m coming in the paving stones.
Total orgasm.
Comrades, people are making love
in the Poli Sci classrooms, not only in the fields.
Revolutionary women are more
beautiful.
Gilda, I love you! Down with work!
The young make love, the old make
obscene gestures.
Make love, not war.
Whoever speaks of love destroys
love.
Down with consumer society.
The more you consume, the less you
live.
Commodities are the opium of the
people.
Burn commodities.
You can’t buy happiness. Steal it.
See Nanterre and live. Die in
Naples with Club Med.
Are you a consumer or a
participant?
To be free in 1968 means to participate.
I participate.
You participate.
He participates.
We participate.
They profit.
The golden age was the age when
gold didn’t reign.
“The cause of all wars, riots and
injustices is the existence of property.” (St. Augustine)
Happiness is hanging your
landlord.
Millionaires of the world unite.
The wind is turning.
The economy is wounded — I hope it
dies!
How sad to love money.
You too can steal.
“Amnesty: An act in which the
rulers pardon the injustices they have committed.” (Ambrose Bierce)
[The definition in Bierce’s The
Devil’s Dictionary is actually: “Amnesty: The state’s magnanimity to those offenders
whom it would be too expensive to punish.”]
Abolish alienation.
Obedience begins with
consciousness; consciousness begins with
disobedience.
First, disobey; then write on the
walls.
(Law of 10 May 1968)
I don’t like to write on walls.
Write everywhere.
Before writing, learn to think.
I don’t know how to write but I
would like to say beautiful things and I don’t know how.
I don’t have time to write!!!
I have something to say but I
don’t know what.
Freedom is the right to silence.
Long live communication, down with
telecommunication.
You, my comrade, you whom I was
unaware of amid the tumult, you who are throttled, afraid,
suffocated — come, talk to us.
Talk to your neighbors.
Yell.
Create.
Look in front of you!!!
Help with cleanup, there are no
maids here.
Revolution is an INITIATIVE.
Speechmaking is
counterrevolutionary.
Comrades, stop applauding, the
spectacle is everywhere.
Don’t get caught up in the
spectacle of opposition. Oppose the spectacle.
Down with spectacle-commodity
society.
Down with journalists and those
who cater to them.
Only the truth is revolutionary.
No forbidding allowed.
Freedom is the crime that contains
all crimes. It is our ultimate weapon.
The freedom of others extends mine
infinitely.
No freedom for the enemies of
freedom.
Free our comrades.
Open the gates of the asylums,
prisons and other faculties.
Open the windows of your heart.
To hell with boundaries.
You can no longer sleep quietly
once you’ve suddenly opened your eyes.
The future will only contain what
we put into it now.
