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The Situationists and
the New Forms of Action
Against Politics and Art
Up to now our subversion has mainly drawn on the forms and genres inherited from past
revolutionary struggles, primarily those of the last hundred years. I propose that we
round out our agitational expression with methods that dispense with any reference to the
past. I don’t mean that we should abandon the forms within which we have waged battle
on the traditional terrain of the supersession of philosophy, the realization of art and
the abolition of politics; but that we should extend the work of the journal onto terrains
it does not yet reach.
Many proletarians are aware that they have no power over their lives; they know it, but
they don’t express it in the language of socialism and of previous revolutions.
Let us spit in passing on those students who have become militants in the tiny would-be
mass parties, who sometimes have the nerve to claim that the workers are incapable of
reading Internationale Situationniste, that its paper is too slick to be put in
their lunchbags and that its price doesn’t take into account their low standard of
living. The most consistent of these students accordingly distribute the mimeographed
image they have of the consciousness of a class in which they fervently seek stereotypical
Joe Worker recruits. They forget, among other things, that when workers read revolutionary
literature in the past they had to pay relatively more than for a theater ticket; and that
when they once again develop an interest in it they won’t hesitate to spend two or
three times what it costs for an issue of Planète. But what these detractors of
typography forget most of all is that the rare individuals who read their bulletins are
precisely those who already have the minimal background necessary to understand us right
away; and that their writings are completely unreadable for anyone else. Some of them,
ignoring the immense readership of bathroom graffiti (particularly in cafés), have
thought that by using a parody of gradeschool writing, printed on paper pasted on gutters
like notices of apartments for rent, they could make the form correspond to the content of
their slogans; and in this at least they have succeeded. All this serves to clarify what
must not be done.
What we have to do is link up the theoretical critique of modern society with the
critique of it in acts. By detourning the very propositions of the spectacle, we can
directly reveal the implications of present and future revolts.
I propose that we pursue:
1. Experimentation in the détournement of photo-romances and
“pornographic” photos, and that we bluntly impose their real truth by restoring
real dialogues [by adding or altering speech bubbles]. This operation will bring to the
surface the subversive bubbles that are spontaneously, but only fleetingly and
half-consciously, formed and then dissolved in the imaginations of those who look at these
photos. In the same spirit, it is also possible to detourn any advertising
billboards — particularly those in subway corridors, which form remarkable sequences
— by pasting pre-prepared placards onto them.
2. The promotion of guerrilla tactics in the mass media — an important
form of contestation, not only at the urban guerrilla stage, but even before it. The trail
was blazed by those Argentinians who took over the control station of an electronic
bulletin board and used it to transmit their own directives and slogans. It is still
possible to take advantage of the fact that radio and television stations are not yet
guarded by troops. On a more modest level, it is known that any amateur radio operator can
at little expense broadcast, or at least jam, on a local level; and that the small size of
the necessary equipment permits a great mobility, enabling one to slip away before
one’s position is trigonometrically located. A group of Communist Party dissidents in
Denmark had their own pirate radio station a few years ago. Counterfeit issues of one or
another periodical can add to the enemy’s confusion. This list of examples is vague
and limited for obvious reasons.
The illegality of such actions makes a sustained engagement on this terrain impossible
for any organization that has not chosen to go underground, because it would require the
formation within it of a specialized subgroup — a division of tasks which
cannot be effectual without compartmentalization and thus hierarchy, etc. Without, in a
word, finding oneself on the slippery path toward terrorism.(1)
We can more appropriately recall the notion of propaganda by deed, which is a very
different matter. Our ideas are in everybody’s mind, as is well known, and any group
without any relation to us, or even a few individuals coming together for a specific
purpose, can improvise and improve on tactics experimented with elsewhere by others. This
type of unconcerted action cannot be expected to bring about any decisive upheaval, but it
can usefully serve to accentuate the coming awakening of consciousness. In any case,
there’s no need to get hung up on the idea of illegality. Most actions in this domain
can be done without breaking any existing law. But the fear of such interventions will
make newspaper editors paranoid about their typesetters, radio managers paranoid about
their technicians, etc., at least until more specific repressive legislation has been
worked out and enacted.
3. The development of situationist comics. Comic strips are the only truly
popular literature of our century. Even 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. No doubt they’ll buy them just to burn them. In our task of
“making shame more shameful still,” it is easy to see how easy it would be, for
example, to transform “13 rue de l’Espoir [hope]” into “1
blvd. du Désespoir [despair]” merely by adding a few elements; or balloons can
simply be changed. In contrast to Pop Art, which breaks comics up into fragments, this
method aims at restoring to comics their content and importance.
4. The production of situationist films. The cinema, which is the newest and
undoubtedly most utilizable means of expression of our time, has stagnated for nearly
three quarters of a century. To sum it up, we can say that it indeed became the
“seventh art” so dear to film buffs, film clubs and PTAs. For our
purposes this age is over (Ince, Stroheim, the one and only L’Age d’or,
Citizen Kane and Mr. Arkadin, the lettrist films), even if there remain a
few traditional narrative masterpieces to be unearthed in the film archives or on the
shelves of foreign distributors. We should appropriate the first stammerings of this new
language — in particular its most consummate and modern examples, those which have
escaped artistic ideology even more than American “B” movies: newsreels,
previews and, above all, filmed ads.
Although filmed advertising has obviously been in the service of the commodity and the
spectacle, its extreme technical freedom has laid the foundations for what Eisenstein had
an inkling of when he talked of filming The Critique of Political Economy or The
German Ideology.
I am confident that I could film The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity
Economy in a way that would be immediately understandable to the proletarians of
Watts who are unaware of the concepts implied in that title. Such adaptations to new forms
will at the same time undoubtedly contribute to deepening and intensifying the
“written” expression of the same problems; which we could verify, for example,
by making a film called Incitement to Murder and Debauchery before drafting its
equivalent in the journal, Correctives to the Consciousness of a Class That Will Be
the Last. Among other possibilities, the cinema lends itself particularly well to
studying the present as a historical problem, to dismantling the processes of reification.
To be sure, historical reality can be apprehended, known and filmed only in the course of
a complicated process of mediations enabling consciousness to recognize one moment in
another, its goal and its action in destiny, its destiny in its goal and action, and its
own essence in this necessity. This mediation would be difficult if the empirical
existence of the facts themselves was not already a mediated existence, which only takes
on an appearance of immediateness because and to the extent that consciousness of the
mediation is lacking and that the facts have been uprooted from the network of their
determining circumstances, placed in an artificial isolation, and poorly strung together
again in the montage of classical cinema. It is precisely this mediation which has been
lacking, and inevitably so, in presituationist cinema, which has limited itself to
“objective” forms or re-presentation of politico-moral concepts, whenever it has
not been merely academic-type narrative with all its hypocrisies. If what I have just
written were filmed, it would become much less complicated — it’s all really
just banalities. But Godard, the most famous Swiss Maoist, will never be able to
understand them. He might well, as is his usual practice, coopt the above — lift a
word from it or an idea like that concerning filmed advertisements — but he will
never be capable of anything but brandishing little novelties picked up elsewhere: images
or star words of the era, which definitely have a resonance, but one he can’t grasp
(Bonnot, worker, Marx, made in USA, Pierrot le Fou, Debord, poetry, etc.). He really is a
child of Mao and Coca-Cola.
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 (cf. the “Anti-Public Relations Notice”
in Internationale Situationniste #8). Nothing is too beautiful for the blacks of
Watts.
RENÉ VIÉNET
1967
[TRANSLATOR’S FOOTNOTE]
1. “From the strategical perspective of social struggles it
must first of all be said that one should never play with terrorism. But even
serious terrorism has never in history had any desirable effect except in situations where
complete repression made impossible any other form of revolutionary activity and thereby
caused a significant portion of the population to side with the terrorists.” (Internationale
Situationniste #12, p. 98.)
Translated by Ken Knabb (slightly modified from the version in the Situationist
International Anthology).
No copyright.
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