The Blind Men and the Elephant
(Selected Opinions on the Situationists)
But even if this were not so, there would still be no reason to accept the tutelage of science, as is proposed, for example, by a self-styled “Situationist International,” which imagines it is making a new contribution when in fact it is merely creating ambiguity and confusion. But is it not in such troubled waters that one fishes for a situation?
—Benjamin Péret in Bief #1 (1958)
* * *
This young group sees only one way out of this impasse: to renounce painting as an individual art in order to wield it within a new “situationist” framework. What a grotesque term! Such manifestos are interesting as symptoms of restlessness and discontent. 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.
—Die Kultur (October 1960)
* * *
Their principal activity is an extreme mental derangement. . . . In the maximum 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.
—Vernissage #9-10 (May-June 1962)
* * *
The situationist critics who hope to seize all the means of communication without having created any at any level, and to replace its diverse creations and trivialities with their own enormous triviality — these cretins are excretions of the Hitlerist or Stalinist type, one of the manifestations of its present extreme impotence, of which the most well known examples are the Nazi gangs of America and England.
—Les Cahiers du Lettrisme #1 (December 1962)
* * *
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.
—La Tour de Feu #82 (June 1964)
* * *
The concerns of this movement, supported by M. Bernstein and G. Debord among others, are in some sense comparable, a hundred years later, to those of the Young Hegelians and especially to the Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts . . . . That is to say, they imagine that a revolution is possible and their program is aimed at making one.
—Arts (9 June 1965)
* * *
Behind the angry young men of Amsterdam we find a secret International. . . . The Provos provide the previously isolated theorists of the Situationist International with troops, “intelligent surrogates” capable of constituting the secular arm of an organization which itself prefers to remain more or less behind the scenes.
—Figaro Littéraire (4 August 1966)
* * *
These students have insulted their professors. They should be dealt with by psychiatrists. I don’t want to take any legal measures against them — they should be in a lunatic asylum. . . . As for their incitement to illegal acts, the Minister of the Interior is looking into that.
—Rector Bayen, Strasbourg University (November 1966)
* * *
Their doctrine, if such a term can be used in describing their delirious ravings, . . . is a sort of radical revolutionism with an underpinning of nihilism. . . . A monument of imbecilic fanaticism, written in a pretentious jargon, spiced with a barrage of gratuitous insults of both their professors and their fellow students. It constantly refers to a mysterious “Situationist International.”
—Le Nouvel Alsacien (25 November 1966)
* * *
This well-written text constitutes a systematic rejection of all forms of social and political organization in the West and the East, and of all the groups that are currently trying to change them.
—Le Monde (9 December 1966)
* * *
The accused have never denied the charge of misappropriating the funds of the Strasbourg Student Union. Indeed, they openly admit to having made the union pay some 5000 francs for the printing of 10,000 pamphlets, not to mention the cost of other literature inspired by the “Situationist International.” These publications express aims and ideas which, to put it mildly, have nothing to do with the purposes of a student union. One need only read what the accused have written for it to be obvious that these five students, scarcely more than adolescents, lacking any experience of real life, their minds confused by ill-digested philosophical, social, political and economic theories and bored by the drab monotony of their everyday life, have the pathetic arrogance to make sweeping denunciations of their fellow students, their professors, God, religion, the clergy, and the governments and political and social systems of the entire world. Rejecting all morality and legal restraint, these cynics do not shrink from to advocating theft, the destruction of scholarship, the abolition of work, total subversion, and a permanent worldwide proletarian revolution with “unrestrained pleasure” as its only goal.
—Judge Llabador, Strasbourg District Court (13 December 1966)
* * *
The verbal gesticulations of the situationists do not hit home. . . . It is, moreover, curious to see the bourgeois press, which refuses to print information from the revolutionary workers movement, rushing to report and popularize the gesticulations of these buffoons.
—Le Monde Libertaire (January 1967)
* * *
A new student ideology is spreading around the world: a dehydrated version of the young Marx called “situationism.”
—Daily Telegraph (22 April 1967)
* * *
Then appeared for the first time the disquieting figures of the “Situationist International.” How many are there? Where do they come from? No one knows.
—Le Républicain Lorrain (28 June 1967)
* * *
Situationism is, of course, no more the specter that haunts industrial society than was communism the specter that haunted Europe in 1848.
—Le Nouvel Observateur (3 January 1968)
* * *
It’s the tune that makes the song: more cynical in Vaneigem and more icy in Debord, the negative and provocative violence of their phraseology leaves nothing standing of what previous ages have produced except perhaps Sade, Lautréamont, and Dada. . . . A snarling, extravagant rhetoric that is always detached from the complexity of the facts upon which we reason not only makes the reading disagreeable but also staggers thought.
—Le Monde (14 February 1968)
* * *
M. Debord and M. Vaneigem have brought out their long-awaited major texts: the Capital and What Is To Be Done?, as it were, of the new movement. This comparison is not meant mockingly. . . . Under the dense Hegelian wrappings with which they muffle their pages several interesting ideas are lurking. M. Debord and M. Vaneigem are attempting, for the first time, a comprehensive critique of alienated society. . . . Their austere philosophy, now authoritatively set forth, may not be without influence on future Committees of 100, Declarations of the 121, and similar libertarian manifestations.
—Times Literary Supplement (21 March 1968)
* * *
These commando actions undertaken by a group of anarchists and “situationists,” with their slogan: “Never work!” . . . How has a handful of irresponsible elements been able to provoke such serious decisions, affecting 12,000 students in Letters and 4000 in Law?
—L’Humanité (29 March 1968)
* * *
Those who want to understand the ideas lying behind the student revolts in the Old World ought to pay serious attention not only to the writings of Adorno and of the three M’s — Marx, Mao and Marcuse — but above all to the literature of the Situationists. . . . Debord’s book . . . rejects the idea of proletarian revolution in the same way as it repudiates Socialist democracy, Russian or Chinese Communism, and traditional “incoherent anarchism.” . . . One has to destroy all authority, especially that of the state, to negate all moral restrictions, to expose fossilized knowledge and all “establishments,” to bring truth into the world of semblance, and to achieve what Debord calls “the fulfillment of democracy in self-control and action.” He fails to say how to achieve this program.
—New York Times (21 April 1968)
* * *
The situationists . . . are more anarchist than the anarchists, whom they find too bureaucratic.
—Carrefour (8 May 1968)
* * *
WARNING: Leaflets have been distributed in the Paris area calling for an insurrectionary general strike. It goes without saying that such appeals have not been issued by our democratic trade-union organizations. They are the work of provocateurs seeking to provide the government with a pretext for intervention. . . . The workers must be vigilant to defeat all such maneuvers.
—L’Humanité (paper of the French Communist Party) (20 May 1968)
* * *
. . . Daniel Cohn-Bendit, leader of the “enragés,” whom the leftist intellectuals have presented as being disciples of the American Marcuse, although anyone who reads the French books of the “situationist” writers Vaneigem and Debord can see where Dany and his friends actually got their inspiration.
—Le Canard Enchainé (22 May 1968)
* * *
Inside, in jampacked auditoriums, thousands applauded all-night debates that ranged over every conceivable topic, from the “anesthesia of affluence” to the elimination of “bourgeois spectacles” and how to share their “revolution” with the mass of French workers. . . . There were Maoists, Trotskyists, ordinary Communists, anarchists and “situationists” — a tag for those without preconceived ideologies who judge each situation as it arises.
—Time (24 May 1968)
* * *
This explosion was provoked by a few groups in revolt against modern society, against consumer society, against technological society, whether communist in the East or capitalist in the West — groups, moreover, which do not know what they would put in its place, but which delight in negation, destruction, violence, anarchy, brandishing the black flag.
—Charles de Gaulle, speech to the nation (7 June 1968)
* * *
The fact that the uprising took everyone by surprise, including the most sophisticated theoreticians in the Marxist, Situationist and anarchist movements, underscores the importance of the May-June events and raises the need to re-examine the sources of revolutionary unrest in modern society.
—Murray Bookchin, “The May-June Events in France” (July 1968)
* * *
Who is the authentic representative of the Left today: the Fourth International, the Situationist International or the Anarchist Federation? Leftism is everything that is new in Revolutionary history, and is forever being challenged by the old. . . . The Strasbourg pamphlet . . . acted as a kind of detonator. And although we in Nanterre did not accept the Strasbourg interpretation of the role of minority groups, i.e. university students, in the social revolution, we did all we could in helping to distribute the pamphlet.
—Daniel & Gabriel Cohn-Bendit,
Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative (1968)
* * *
The notion of “spectacle” (drama, happening, mask) is crucial to the theories of what is probably the furthest out of the radical factions. . . . In our consumer-technologies, life is merely a bad play. Like Osborne’s Entertainer, we strut about in a bankrupt sideshow playing parts we loathe to audiences whose values are meaningless or contemptible. Culture itself has become frippery and grease-paint. Our very revolutions are melodrama, performed under stale rules of make-believe; they alter nothing but the cast. . . . Compared to the Strasbourg absolutists, Monsieur Cohn-Bendit is a weather-beaten conservative.
—Sunday Times (21 July 1968)
* * *
. . . “situationists” (whose main contributions to the May Revolution were graffiti, joyful and nonsensical). . . . A group of “International Situationists” — a latterday incarnation of surrealism — seized the university loudspeaker system for a time and issued extravagant directives.
—Seale & McConville, Red Flag, Black Flag: French Revolution 1968 (1968)
* * *
It would be wrong to underestimate certain antecedents, in particular the November 1966 takeover of the Strasbourg Student Union. . . . The observer cannot help being struck by the rapidity with which the contagion spread throughout the university and among the nonstudent youth. It seems that the slogans propagated by a small minority of authentic revolutionaries struck some sort of indefinable chord in the soul of the new generation. . . . This fact must be stressed: we are witnessing the reappearance, just like fifty years ago, of groups of young people totally devoting themselves to the revolutionary cause; revolutionaries who know from experience how to await the favorable moments to trigger or aggravate disturbances of which they remain the masters, then go back underground and continue the work of undermining and of preparing other sporadic or prolonged upheavals, so as to slowly destabilize the social edifice.
—Guerres et Paix #4 (1968)
* * *
. . . the Situationist International, which has its base in Copenhagen and which is controlled by the security and espionage police of East Germany.
—Historama #206 (December 1968)
* * *
The situationists . . . make use of street theater and spontaneous spectacles to criticize society and denounce new forms of alienation. . . . Even though the small situationist group concentrated principally on the student situation and the commercialization of mass culture, the spring revolt was less a questioning of culture than a political criticism of society.
—Alain Touraine, The May Movement: Revolt and Reform (1968)
* * *
Their manifesto is the now famous book by Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle. In order to criticize the system radically, Debord, in an epigrammatic and Adorno-like style, constructs a concept of “spectacle” derived from Marx’s, and especially Lukács’s, conceptions of “commodity fetishism,” alienation and “reification.”
—L’Espresso (15 December 1968)
* * *
Their general headquarters is secret but I think it is somewhere in London. They are not students, but are what are known as situationists; they travel everywhere and exploit the discontent of students.
—News of the World (16 February 1969)
* * *
You know, I more or less agree with the situationists; they say that it’s all finally integrated; it gets integrated in spectacle, it’s all spectacle.
—Jean-Luc Godard, “Newsreel” interview (March 1969)
* * *
The occupation committee, which was re-elected every day, was not able to guarantee continuity, in addition to which situationist factions had gained a certain influence. On Thursday the 16th, the latter distributed a leaflet denouncing the “bureaucrats” who disagreed with their slogans and working methods. . . . The situationists set up a “council to maintain the occupations” which, in their inimitable Hegelianistic-Marxist terminology, expatiated on the same themes.
—Alain Schnapp & Pierre Vidal-Naquet, The French Student Uprising (1969)
* * *
We should add that Vaneigem’s very style is that of the slogans of May. He seems, moreover, to have been at the origin of many of the most successful and poetic phrases. . . . The author of The Revolution of Everyday Life gives us a key for understanding the role and place of the paranoiac mechanisms of our civilization.
—André Stéphane, L’Univers contestationnaire (1969)
* * *
Historically, few doctrines have attempted to follow the thread we have been pursuing. I know of only two: personalism and, in the contemporary scene, situationism. . . . Built on ideological premises utterly opposed to those of personalism (the latter is strongly influenced by Christianity, which situationists reject), the movement actually advances (despite its criticism) the tenets of surrealism, which were genuinely revolutionary at the start and closely resembled those of situationism. . . . Situationism should be credited for advocating individual decision-making and the exercise of imagination free of the irrationality we have discussed. The individual is committed to scrutinize his daily existence and to create a potential new one.
—Jacques Ellul, Autopsy of Revolution (1969)
* * *
An advertising specialist summed up the action of the graffiti writers with this formula: “They are fighting advertising on its own terrain with its own weapons.” . . . Those responsible are a small group of revolutionary students, half lettrist, half situationist.
—France-Soir (6 August 1969)
* * *
Too extreme for those of the Old Left intelligent enough to understand it and too incomprehensible for those of the New Left extreme enough to live it.
—Grove Press rationale for declining to publish Viénet’s book on May 1968 (1969)
* * *
It seems to me that the Situationist International’s influence has been considerably underestimated by commentators on the May events. (It should be said that, sparing nothing and nobody, the Situationists devote a good deal of their activity to virulent attacks on those who are closest to their own thinking, and have thus alienated a good many intellectuals who would otherwise be sympathetic to their views.) . . . Distortion, which was adopted and widely used first by the Situationists — especially, though not exclusively, in strip cartoons — consists in adding to a drawing, for example, certain words or phrases that distort the original meaning. . . . If the new meaning dominates or at least disturbs the meaning usually perceived by the reader of the original, the desired aim is achieved. It may involve a sudden awareness, an invitation to reflection, to doubt, or at least to participation in the game that will produce a certain detachment from the thing criticized. . . . This practicable and cheap technique of counter-manipulation is all the more effective in that it is placed in the context of an event, a production, etc., that already possess an audience.
—Alfred Willener, The Image-Action of Society (1970)
* * *
The Situationist pamphlet “Theses on the Commune” refers to the Commune as the greatest carnival of the nineteenth century, but to try to burn down the Louvre is merely symbolic. Revolutionary activity has to move beyond the symbolic into the phase of literalization of the stasis of “working” institutions in bourgeois society.
—David Cooper, The Death of the Family (1970)
* * *
Diderot wrote the preface to a Revolution and so the surrealists and the situationists have written the preface to a new Revolution. . . . Claims grew into contestation; the games and the playful demonstrations of the anarchist-situationist mini-group gave way to more serious activity.
—Posner (ed.), Reflections on the Revolution in France: 1968 (1970)
* * *
The way out is beginning to become clear: it’s there in the works of Wilhelm Reich and R.D. Laing, in the ideas in all of our heads in our maddest moments when we say to ourselves, “I can’t say that, they’ll think I’m nuttier than a fruit cake,” very clearly in the ideas of the Situationist International.
—Fusion (Spring 1970)
* * *
Although the language and tone of the essay are markedly similar to those of the Situationist manifesto, there are important differences between Bookchin and the Situationists. He explains these (in a personal letter to the editor) as follows: “The Situationists have retained very traditional notions about the workers’ movement, Pannekoek’s ‘council communism,’ almost Stalinist forms of internal organization (they are completely monolithic and authoritarian in their internal organization), and are surprisingly academic.”
—Lothstein (ed.), “All We Are Saying...” (1970)
* * *
In those mystical days of May . . . the poets of Paris were the International Situationists, who have attained a similar state of frenzied anti-doctrinal comic anarchism to the yippies, though suckled on Dada, not L.S.D.
—Richard Neville, Play Power (1970)
* * *
In the extreme case, the anarcho-situationist groups all but deny the persistence of traditionally recognized forms of oppression, and put forward a model of contemporary capitalism as dependent solely on psychological oppression, a strategy that sees class society defeated by the “return of the repressed,” and an organization and tactics confined to the symbolically terrorist actions of small groups.
—New Left Review #64 (November 1970)
* * *
We are here concerned with only two small groups who alone set the scene for the May events and provided the insurrection with a dialectical backbone. These few outlaws, the Enragés and the Situationists, universally despised by political organizations and student bodies, have their base on the surrealistic fringes of the Left Wing. From there they have nurtured one of the most advanced, coherent revolutionary theories (though often plagued by academic arrogance and “in” references), which provoked a near-liquidation of the State.
—Stansill & Mairowitz (ed.), BAMN (By Any Means Necessary) (1971)
* * *
When one reads or rereads the Internationale Situationniste issues it is quite striking to what degree and how often these fanatics have made judgments or put forward viewpoints that were later concretely verified.
—Le Nouvel Observateur (8 February 1971)
* * *
Internationale Situationniste 1958-69 . . . provides a fascinating record of this groupuscule which began in the French tradition of political-cultural sectarianism and ended by playing a prominent part first in the disturbances at Strasbourg University in 1966 and then in the more dramatic “events” of May 1968. Many of the slogans which achieved fame on the walls of Paris may be found here in some form, and the ideas which influenced the rebels so much were being worked out in these pages during the previous ten years. There is a certain irony in such a publication . . . here they are neatly packaged as a highly marketable commodity in a clearly spectacular way.
—Times Literary Supplement (19 February 1971)
* * *
The concept of the spectacle, which derives from the French Situationists . . . is a useful analytic device: it simplifies a world of phenomena that seem otherwise disparate. Surely the spectacle is conspicuous, once one learns to see it in its many dimensions.
—Todd Gitlin in Liberation (May 1971)
* * *
This revolt must be attributed to an awakening of awareness about the real nature of “consumer society” — an awakening (and its articulation) that has its source in the intellectual (and practical) activities of a small group of insolent but lucid insurgents: the Situationist International. By a paradox to which history holds the secret, the SI remained practically unknown in this country for over ten years, a phenomenon that verifies Hegel’s reflection: “Every important revolution that leaps into view must be preceded in the spirit of an era by a secret revolution that is not visible to everyone, least of all to contemporaries, a revolution that is as difficult to express in words as it is to comprehend.”
—Le Nouveau Planète #22 (May 1971)
* * *
The resolution unanimously passed by the Anarchist Congress calls for some explanation. The influence of the Situationist International, particularly negative on numerous Scandinavian, North American, and Japanese extra-parliamentary groups, has been active in France and Italy since 1967-68 with the aim of destroying the federated anarchist movement of these two countries — in the name of a theoretical discourse that the situationists generally submerge in a barrage of insolences and vague and tortuous phraseology.
—Communiqué of the Italian Anarchist Federation, Umanità Nuova (15 May 1971)
* * *
At the beginning of 1968 a critic discussing situationist theory mockingly characterized it as a “glimmer flickering vaguely from Copenhagen to New York.” Alas, that same year the glimmer became a conflagration that spread through all the citadels of the old world. . . . The situationists have uncovered the theory of the underground movement that torments the modern age. While the pseudoinheritors of Marxism forgot the role of the negative in a world swollen with positivity, and simultaneously relegated dialectics to the museum, the situationists announced the resurgence of that same negativity and discerned the reality of the same dialectics, whose language, the “insurrectional style” (Debord), they rediscovered.
—Les Temps Modernes #299-300 (June 1971)
* * *
It was not in America but among the Western European student movements that the recent renaissance of interest in Reich first began. In France, where he was practically unknown, his theories were initially rediscovered by the Situationists.
—Liberation (October 1971)
* * *
The Society of the Spectacle . . . has led the discussion among the entire ultraleft since its publication in 1967. This work, which predicted May 1968, is considered by many to be the Capital of the new generation.
—Le Nouvel Observateur (8 November 1971)
* * *
The situationists, although in many ways they are the heirs of surrealism, dadaism, and some millenarian trends, rejoin the modern currents in post-Marxism and even go further in their quasi-Marcusian analyses of alienation in capitalist-bureaucratic society, which is the purely political aspect of their ideas. . . . The enragés and the situationists had the chance to put their ideas into practice in the first Committee of Occupation of the Sorbonne (14-17 May 1968) which, under their influence, set up total direct democracy in the Sorbonne. . . . The members of the Situationist International go so far as to deny that they have any ideology at all since any ideology is alienating.
—Richard Gombin in Anarchism Today, ed. Apter & Joll (1971)
* * *
But the situationists never arrived at an adequate practice. Afraid to get their hands dirty in the confusion of radical activity (which they scorned as “militantism”) they confined their interventions to the theoretical level.
—Anarchy #7 (London, Winter 1972)
* * *
The Situationists . . . constantly talk of “workers” (sic) councils . . . while demanding the abolition of work! Unfortunately they seem to confuse attacks on the work ethic and on alienated labor, both of which are justified and necessary, with attacks on work itself.
—Workers’ Councils and the Economics of a Self-Managed
Society,
Solidarity (London, March 1972)
* * *
Miss Martin said the “situationists” were a political movement active in France in the 18th century, and that there had been “talk” on the campus of a revival under that name in Berkeley.
—San Francisco Examiner (18 May 1972)
* * *
Debord and Sanguinetti . . . quote extensively from the bourgeois press in order to demonstrate the “importance” of the S.I. . . . They impute a revolutionary consciousness to openly reformist movements; when they say that “youth, workers, homosexuals, women and children dare to want everything that had been forbidden them” (thesis No. 12) they fail to see how movements which only question isolated aspects of bourgeois society are easily recuperated. . . . A large part of “61 theses” is concerned with a critique of the pro-situs and there is little to dispute about it. . . . In going beyond the S.I. . . . we face the same difficulties it confronted. . . . We make no pretensions about ourselves.
—Point-Blank! #1 (October 1972)
* * *
The manifesto published by the Strasbourg students did little more than restate the troubling dilemmas already examined by the radical existentialists. Its content was not particularly original — except, perhaps, in its interpretation of the capitalist system as a vast, cretinizing spectacle. . . . When all was said and done, the “theory” of the situationists was rather uninspiring. . . . The situationists described their “situation” but presented no real, strategic perspective for its transformation. The task of forging concrete solutions was left to Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the principal ideologue of the May revolt.
—Richard Johnson, The French Communist Party Versus the Students (1972)
* * *
The S.I., although it presented the “most developed, most comprehensive, most modern” revolutionary theory yet to be found anywhere, is still not the end-all of revolutionary theory and practice. The sexual politics of the new women’s movement, coupled with the communal lifestyles and counter-institutions which have emerged, are among the American contributions which can aid in the development of a coherent post-Situationist critique of our conditions.
—New Morning (February 1973)
* * *
I could understand it, but it would be over the heads of our readers. Besides, why would they be interested in something that happened in France in 1968?
—Editor at Straight Arrow Books (April 1973)
* * *
Without some attempt at a coherent analysis of the general situation, why not accept, for example, the Situationists’ explanation of May 68: everyone was all of a sudden fed-up and discovered alienation and hit the streets?
—Internationalism Bulletin #1 (New York, Summer 1973)
* * *
The notion of recuperation, first introduced by the Situationists, refers to the manner in which the repressive system seeks to neutralize or contain the attacks launched against it by absorbing them into the “spectacle” or by projecting its own meanings and goals onto these oppositional activities.
—Bruce Brown, Marx, Freud and the Critique of Everyday Life (1973)
* * *
In the confusion and tumult of the May Revolt the slogans and shouts of the students were considered expressions of mass spontaneity and individual ingenuity. Only afterward was it evident that these slogans were fragments of a coherent and seductive ideology and had virtually all previously appeared in situationist tracts and publications. . . . Mainly through their agency there welled up in the May Revolt an immense force of protest against the modern world and all its works, blending passion, mystery, and the primeval.
—Bernard E. Brown, Protest in Paris: Anatomy of a Revolt (1974)
* * *
Bernard E. Brown . . . portrays (and unsympathetically so) the elements of the French intelligentsia who raised the banners of unreason, passion and primitivism. The anarchists and the “situationists” upon whom he concentrates most, represent in this interpretation a traditional force of romantic but destructive politics, determined to resist progress.
—New Republic (16 March 1974)
* * *
Other groups, like the Situationist International, are also important, though they lack an understanding of capital. . . . The communist revolution implies an action from the enterprise, to destroy it as such. The rebellions in the U.S. remained on the level of consumption and distribution. (This point was not fully understood in an interesting text by the Situationist International: The Rise and Fall of the Spectacular Commodity Economy.)
—Jean Barrot & François Martin,
Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Communist Movement (1974)
* * *
Pillaging and detourning in a lively and unconstrained manner a wealth of news clips, sequences filmed in the streets, ads with naked women, press photos, scenes from American westerns, second-rate war films, Soviet and Polish films, flashes from fashion ads, mixing in quotations from Clausewitz, Marx, Machiavelli, etc., interrupting the narrative to wickedly announce to the spectators that if the rhythm he has given the images continued it would become seductive, “but it won’t continue,” Debord develops the argument of his book without limiting himself to “illustrating” it. . . . If war, according to Clausewitz, is a continuation of politics by other means, the cinema, according to Debord, is a continuation of theory with other weapons. One must have seen the film two or three times to enumerate all the carefully calculated strokes of genius, the riches lavished with a subtle irony and the outbursts of a lyricism of rage that suddenly grips the heart. . . . Debord’s indignation (the word is too feeble) splashes out in superb images of contemporary subversion from the Asturias to Gdansk and Gdynia, from Poznan to Budapest, from police actions all over the world to May 68. It is no longer a matter of filming the world, the point is to change it. . . . Brecht dreamt all his life of adapting Capital to the stage. Guy Debord has found a producer crazy enough and wise enough to permit him to re-form his Society of the Spectacle on the screen. Don’t miss it.
—Le Nouvel Observateur (29 April 1974)
* * *
In his film The Society of the Spectacle, situationist Guy Debord has undertaken “a total critique of the existing world, that is, of all aspects of modern capitalism and its general system of illusions.” In bringing his book to the screen, the author has fulfilled his aim of creating a theoretical film. . . . Imagine a work of the same sort as Capital presented in the form of a western and you will get some idea of what Guy Debord’s film is like. The sequences of this theoretical western are accompanied by a narration read from the book. The film is a montage of fashion ads, news clips, quotations from Marx, Machiavelli, Tocqueville, Clausewitz, and fragments from diverse films that have marked the history of the cinema: Potemkin, Ten Days That Shook the World, New Babylon, We From Kronstadt, Shanghai Gesture, They Died With Their Boots On, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Rio Grande, Johnny Guitar, and Mr. Arkadin.
—Le Monde (9 May 1974)
* * *
The Makhnist Situationist International pig countergang created by the CIA from scratch in 1957 in France under the slogans “Kill the Vanguards!,” “Workers Councils Now!,” and “Create Situations!,” is the paradigm example of a CIA synthetic all-purpose formation. The loose and programless anarchist “left cover” countergang on the SI model is ideal for the CIA for the recruitment of new agents, the launching of psywar operations, the detonation of riots, syndicalist workers’ actions (e.g., LIP strike), student power revolts, etc., the continual generation of new countergang formations, and infiltration, penetration and dissolution of socialist and other workers’organizations. . . . During the 1968 French general strike the Situationists united with Daniel Cohn-Bendit and his anarchist thugs in preventing any potential vanguard from assuming leadership of the strike — thus guaranteeing its defeat. In the U.S. Goldner and his Situationist International offshoot group Contradiction have been assigned to play the same kind of role: namely to stop the Labor Committees from developing into a mass-based working-class party.
—New Solidarity (paper of the National Caucus of Labor
Committees)
(28 August and 6 September 1974)
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What was basically wrong with the S.I. was that it focused exclusively on an intellectual critique of society. There was no concern whatsoever with either the emotions or the body. . . . In the last analysis they made the same mistake as all left-wing intellectuals: they thought that everyone was plain thick. The poor workers don’t know what’s going on, they need someone to tell them. But people in the streets, in the offices and factories know damn well what’s going on, even if they can’t write essays about all its theoretical ramifications. The point is that they can’t do anything about it. . . . Ultimately the problem is an emotional, not an intellectual one.
—Christopher Gray, Leaving the Twentieth Century (1974)
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The revolutionary hopes of the 1960s, which culminated in 1968, are now blocked or abandoned. One day they will break out again, transformed, and be lived again with a different result. . . . When that happens, the Situationist programme (or anti-programme) will probably be recognized as one of the most lucid and pure political formulations of that earlier, historic decade, reflecting, in an extreme way, its desperate force and its privileged weakness. What then was its privileged weakness? . . . They ignored the everyday fact of tragedy, both on a world and personal scale. They refused to face the need to find meaning in tragedy.
—John Berger in New Society (6 March 1975)
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Apart from a lot of the dialectical jargon, which is just rubbish, there is much that is a bad case of “excuse me but didn’t Hegel say that?” The grandeur of the rhetoric shows up the bathos of the suggested “practice” (e.g. creating situations, whatever that may mean), while the “revolutionary project” itself seems to lack any clear goals.
—Time Out (4 April 1975)
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Coming from the decomposition of “left” lettristes and cultural dilettantes of the 50s, the Situationists simply carried to their logical conclusions the bourgeois “critiques” of capitalism contained in Dadaism and Surrealism. Parrotting what Socialisme ou Barbarie had taught them about economics, about the “workers councils” and “generalized self-management,” the Situationists became the most coherent expression of petty bourgeois radicalism in the whole modernist carnival which accompanied May ’68. . . . But the proletariat did not begin a communist revolution in Paris ’68. The Situationists and other modernists did not fail to notice this omission and from then on the viciousness of their anti-working class outbursts knew no limits. . . . In The Decline and the Fall of the “Spectacular” Commodity-Economy (1965) the Situationists had already begun to talk about “the integration of the classical proletariat” to the “society of the spectacle.”
—World Revolution #3 (April 1975)
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But of course, it should have been obvious from the start that the Situationists do not have the slightest genuine concern with freedom. Their mask is far too transparent to conceal that familiar, vicious and authoritarian face beneath, the same old desire to dominate, rule and coerce other people. . . . It is indeed fortunate for the human race, however, that there now exist truly radical individualist and libertarian movements which are actually dedicated to leading it out of the Twentieth Century — into the Twenty First, into a new world of greater freedom and prosperity and not, as would the Situationists, back into the Dark Ages of slavery and poverty.
—Chris R. Tame, The Politics of Whim (Radical Libertarian Alliance, 1975)
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Situationism seems to have “caught on” in the U.S.A., particularly in California, that playground of the ideologies. . . . The American situationists seem to be repeating the pattern of mutual exclusion and criticism as occurred in Europe, and to be employing a fairly impenetrable Hegelian vocabulary. . . . Debord and Vaneigem are worth reading for their critique of modern consumer-culture (if you can arrange a few weeks free of work and booze).
—Freedom (10 May 1975)
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Their strategy of interrupting the routines of daily life with guerrilla theatre in order to “create situations” was traceable to Lefebvre, although they asserted that he also took much from them. . . . The Situationists created a mini-May in 1966, disrupting the university and publishing a very popular pamphlet, De La Misère en milieu étudiant, which was an application of the theory of the Arguments group to student life.
—Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France (1975)
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What is hidden behind the Censor case, where will the Censor scandal lead? First let us explain: Censor is the author of a book entitled True Report on the Last Chance To Save Capitalism in Italy, circulated in a limited edition in August among the men of power, then in October among the literati. At the time, everyone wondered who Censor was. Everyone assumed he had to be himself a man of power: Merzagora, Carli, Mattioli. The things he knew were too important and too precise. He had to be one of those three men. Instead, here is the surprise: a few days ago the real author revealed himself. He is not a man of power, but a little-known young man in his twenties by the name of Gianfranco Sanguinetti. “The first duty of the press today is to undermine all the bases of the constituted political order,” wrote Marx in 1849. Sanguinetti-Censor has set out to accomplish precisely this task with his book. He is not modest, but on the whole he has done so effectively. . . . Anyone who is familiar with the situationists knows that the immediate objectives of their philosophy are provocations and scandals carried out with coolness and precision. With his Censor coup, Sanguinetti has simply given a crowning manifestation of the situationist technique of scandal.
—L’Europeo (6 February 1976)
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Situationalism: Species of Marxist cultural and political criticism propounded by L’Internationale Situationaliste, a tiny group of intellectual terrorists formed from the fusion of the Romanian surrealist Isidore Isou’s Mouvement Lettriste with other nihilist and anti-cultural avant-gardists in 1957. Influenced by the Trotskyist surrealists Breton and Péret, as well as Lefebvre, de Sade, Lautréamont and Lewis Carroll. Specialists in staccato, sarcastic and heavily Hegelian denunciations of the Spectacle, art, advertising and consumption. . . . In its simplified form became a rationale for “action” and the propaganda of the deed during the decline of the student Left. Its executive has had British members, including the Scots novelist and junkie Alex Trocchi, but they have usually been swiftly expelled.
—David Widgery, The Left in Britain: 1956-68 (1976)
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Jorn’s role in the Situationist movement (as in COBRA) was that of a catalyst and team leader. Guy Debord on his own lacked the personal warmth and persuasiveness to draw people of different nationalities and talents into an active working partnership. As a prototype Marxist intellectual Debord needed an ally who could patch up the petty egoisms and squabbles of the members. Their quarrels came into the open the moment Jorn’s leadership was withdrawn in 1961. . . . Finally, 1966-8 saw the vindication of Debord’s policy, sustained against every kind of opposition, of adhering rigidly to the uncompromising pursuit of a singleminded plan. When the time came — in Strasbourg in November 1966 and in Paris in May 1968 — Debord was ready, with his two or three remaining supporters, to take over the revolutionary role for which he had been preparing during the last ten years. Incredible as it may seem, the active ideologists (“enragés” and Situationists) behind the revolutionary events in Strasbourg, Nanterre and Paris, numbered only about ten persons.
—Guy Atkins, Asger Jorn, the Crucial Years: 1954-1964 (1977)
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Paris 1968 was rich in nameless wildness. . . . It was marred by a small group of embittered scene-creamers, who called themselves the Situationists, and who tried in typically French fashion to intellectualize the whole mood out of existence, and with their very name tried to colonize it. Failed activists and mini-Mansonettes who boasted that all their books and pamphlets (Leaving the 20th Century, The Veritable Split in the Fourth International, etc.) had been produced from the proceeds of a bank robbery when even the most lavish of them could have been produced for the price of a few tins of cat-food from Safeways (one tiny exception being “Ten Days that Shook the University” by Omar Khayati). . . . Their heroes are a legion of mad bombers: Ravachol, Valerie Solanas, Nechayev, the IRA, et al.
—Heathcote Williams in International Times (Autumn 1977)
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Ducasse in one sense leads to the Orwell of Politics and the English Language and beyond, to Vaneigem and the Situationists who by shrewd use of collage and juxtaposition exposed both the poverty and richness of slogans, and the thinly veiled hypocrisy of a society which by not respecting words abuses people, and by insulting the intelligence creates a state of political cretinisation in which the various forms of authoritarian control may dominate.
—Alexis Lykiard, Introduction to his translation of Ducasse’s Poésies (1978)
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Guy Debord rejects praise as well as blame. . . . Far from currying favor with his contemporaries, Debord denounces their compromises and resignations with the ferocity of a grand inquisitor. . . . The seduction of this author stems precisely from the rigor of his critique and the mastery of the form he gives to it. The publication of his Oeuvres cinématographiques complètes, and particularly of the text of his latest film, In girum imus nocte, confirms his position in the line of French writers — Pascal, Bossuet, Chamfort — who combine elegance, passion and firmness. . . . We are going to die one day, soon. Let us therefore not be unworthy of our pride and our ambitions. This, I believe, is Guy Debord’s message.
—Le Monde (20 January 1979)
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In exploiting the hysteria of the record companies and the public over the Pistols, McLaren was drawing upon an avant garde movement too playful and fluid to be doctrinal. This was the Situationist International, or Situationism. . . . So, although professing the obligatory sympathy with the proletariat, the Situationists rejoiced, like students at a rag day, in scandal and shock tactics. . . . In this evaluation one may see the models for the subsequent behavior of Malcolm McLaren and the Pistols. . . . McLaren and Jamie Reid took Situationism to Glitterbest with more success. “It’s wonderful to use it in rock n’ roll,” McLaren said.
—Melody Maker (June 1979)
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Meanwhile, the notion of the spectacle elaborated by the S.I. 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. . . . Its contradiction, and, ultimately, its theoretical and practical dead-end, is to have made a study of the profound through and by means of the superficial appearance. The S.I. had no analysis of CAPITAL: it understood it, but through its effects. . . . The S.I. saw the revolution as a calling into question more of the relations of distribution (cf. the Watts riot) than of the relations of production. It was acquainted with the commodity but not with surplus value.
—Jean Barrot, “Critique of the Situationist International” in Red-Eye #1 (Fall 1979)
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Situationism is a product of the student rebellion, a glorification of the spontaneous happenings which it is felt will spring out of the favoured role of the student within society. It picks up phrases, here from Marxism and there from anarchism. It has an affinity with Blanquism and, when it does, often parades as Maoism or a revised form of Marxism-Leninism — to the indignation of orthodox Maoists or other Marxist-Leninists. But the situationists were virtually non-existent between situations, and unlikely ever to get around to doing anything so positive as attacking a Cabinet Minister.
—Stuart Christie, The Christie File (1980)
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Shot in March 1978, this situationist maceration [In girum imus nocte] is now finally presented to the vulgum pecus of the Latin Quarter, Montparnasse and the Olympic. . . . In 1973 Guy Debord presented his first film, The Society of the Spectacle, adapted from his book of the same name. Its moral: smash everything, hock the cinema, we have to live today. A détournement of the spectacle and thus of the cinema, a return to the essential, to immediate life. In girum: . . . a pavane for a disappointed love of the cinema, often irritating because of his self-satisfied indulging of his dear little ego. Strictly for in-group devotees.
—Le Monde (11 May 1981)
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In girum imus nocte was completed in March 1978. . . . It was subjected to a complete blackout for the next three years. . . . Debord begins by attacking the spectators, the audience. The first image of the film is a photo of a “present-day film audience staring fixedly ahead,” so that “the spectators see nothing but a mirror image of themselves on the screen.” . . . But in his film Debord does not talk only about the cinema public. He talks about himself. . . . The same people who go into ecstasies over the self-portraits of famous painters, the memoirs of someone or other, or even Bakunin’s Confession are suddenly outraged at having Debord “inflict his ego” on them. . . . Yet Debord recounts his life and loves quite simply. . . . And who better than he can render homage to his friends of long ago such as Ivan Chtcheglov . . . or expose the devastation that has since hit Paris? . . . But enough of all these scattered quotations from the text of the film. If you can’t catch the pirate showing of it tonight on Channel 68, go see it at the cinema.
—Libération (3 June 1981)
I originally issued “The Blind Men and the Elephant” as a huge poster in 1975, and I later included the above augmented selection as an appendix in the original edition of the Situationist International Anthology (1981). I haven’t bothered to update it since that time, but I have continued to include this same 1981 version in all the subsequent editions of the Anthology. Over the decades the quantity of reactions has continually increased, but the main types of misunderstandings and falsifications remain much the same. In addition to the nearly one hundred books about the SI or Debord and the thousands of printed articles and reviews, Google currently shows more than seven million online results for “situationist” and over five million for “Guy Debord.” Most of the later reactions are as laughably clueless as the earlier ones. In certain regards, however, the general level of comprehension has improved (particularly among those engaged in radical practices) because the society’s increasingly evident spectacularization has made some of the situationists’ insights more clear and undeniable.
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