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Report on the
Construction of Situations
and on the
International Situationist Tendency’s
Conditions of Organization
and Action
(excerpts)
Revolution
and Counterrevolution in Modern Culture
The Role of Minority
Tendencies in the Ebbing Period
Platform for a Provisional Opposition
Toward a Situationist International
First of all, we think the world must be changed. We want the most liberating change of
the society and life in which we find ourselves confined. We know that such a change is
possible through appropriate actions.
Our specific concern is the use of certain means of action and the discovery of new
ones, means which are more easily recognizable in the domain of culture and customs, but
which must be applied in interrelation with all revolutionary changes.
A society’s “culture” both reflects and prefigures its possible ways of
organizing life. Our era is characterized by the lagging of revolutionary political action
behind the development of modern possibilities of production which call for a superior
organization of the world. [...]
One of the contradictions of the bourgeoisie in its period of decline is that while it
respects the abstract principle of intellectual and artistic creation, it resists actual
creations when they first appear, then eventually exploits them. This is
because it needs to maintain a certain degree of criticality and experimental research
among a minority, but must take care to channel this activity into narrowly
compartmentalized utilitarian disciplines and avert any holistic critique and
experimentation. In the domain of culture the bourgeoisie strives to divert the taste for
innovation, which is dangerous for it in our era, toward certain confused, degraded and
innocuous forms of novelty. Through the commercial mechanisms that control cultural
activity, avant-garde tendencies are cut off from the segments of society that could
support them, segments already limited because of the general social conditions. The
people within these tendencies who become well-known are generally accepted as exceptional
individuals, on the condition that they accept various renunciations: the essential point
is always the renunciation of a comprehensive contestation and the acceptance of
fragmentary work susceptible to diverse interpretations. This is what gives the very term
“avant-garde,” which in the final analysis is always defined and manipulated by
the bourgeoisie, a dubious and ridiculous aspect.
The very notion of a collective avant-garde, with the militant aspect it implies, is a
recent product of the historical conditions that are simultaneously giving rise to the
necessity for a coherent revolutionary program in culture and to the necessity to struggle
against the forces that impede the development of such a program. Such groups are led to
transpose into their sphere of activity certain organizational methods originally created
by revolutionary politics, and their action is henceforth inconceivable without some
connection with a political critique. In this regard there is a notable progression from
Futurism through Dadaism and Surrealism to the movements formed after 1945. At each of
these stages, however, one discovers the same desire for total change; and the same rapid
disintegration when the inability to change the real world profoundly enough leads to a
defensive withdrawal to the very doctrinal positions whose inadequacy had just been
revealed.
Futurism, whose influence spread from Italy in the period preceding World War I,
adopted an attitude of revolutionizing literature and the arts which introduced a great
number of formal innovations, but which was only based on an extremely simplistic
application of the notion of mechanical progress. 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.
Dadaism, initiated in Zurich and New York by refugees and deserters from World
War I, expressed the rejection 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 and
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. The dadaist spirit has nevertheless influenced all the
movements that have come after it; and any future constructive position must include a
dadaist-type negative aspect, 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.
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. Now, what is important in
an enterprise of this nature is not whether it is completely or relatively right, but
whether it succeeds in catalyzing for a certain time the desires of an era.
Surrealism’s period of progress, marked by the liquidation of idealism and a moment
of rallying to dialectical materialism, came to a halt soon after 1930, but its decay only
became evident after World War II. Surrealism had by then spread to numerous countries. It
had also initiated a discipline whose rigor must not be overestimated and which was often
tempered by commercial considerations, but which was nevertheless an effective means of
struggle against the confusionist mechanisms of the bourgeoisie.The surrealist program,
asserting the sovereignty of desire and surprise and proposing a new way of life, is much
richer in constructive possibilities than is generally realized. The limited scope of
surrealism was in large part due to the lack of material means for fulfilling its aims.
But the devolution of its original proponents into spiritualism, and above all the
mediocrity of its later members, obliges us to search for the failed development of
surrealist theory in the very origin of that theory.
The error that is at the root of surrealism is the idea of the infinite richness of the
unconscious imagination. The cause of surrealism’s ideological failure was its belief
that the unconscious was the finally discovered ultimate force of life; and the fact that
the surrealists revised the history of ideas in accordance with that simplistic
perspective and never went any further. We now know that the unconscious imagination is
poor, that automatic writing is monotonous, and that the whole ostentatious genre of
would-be “strange” and “shocking” surrealistic creations has ceased to
be very surprising. The formal fidelity to this style of imagination ultimately leads back
to the polar opposite of the modern conditions of imagination: back to traditional
occultism. The extent to which surrealism has remained dependent on its hypothesis
regarding the unconscious can be seen in the theoretical investigations attempted by the
second-generation surrealists: Calas and Mabille relate everything to the two successive
aspects of the surrealist practice of the unconscious — the former to psychoanalysis,
the latter to cosmic influences. The discovery of the role of the unconscious was indeed a
surprise and an innovation; but it was not a law of future surprises and innovations.
Freud had also ended up discovering this when he wrote, “Everything conscious wears
out. What is unconscious remains unaltered. But once it is set loose, does it not also
fall into ruin?”
Opposing an apparently irrational society in which the clash between reality and the
old but still vigorously proclaimed values was pushed to the point of absurdity,
surrealism made use of the irrational to destroy that society’s superficially logical
values. The very success of surrealism has a lot to do with the fact that the most modern
side of this society’s ideology has renounced a strict hierarchy of factitious values
and openly uses the irrational, including vestiges of surrealism. The bourgeoisie must
above all prevent a new beginning of revolutionary thought. It was aware of the danger of
surrealism. Now that it has been able to coopt it into ordinary aesthetic commerce, it
would like people to believe that surrealism was the most radical and disturbing movement
possible. It thus cultivates a sort of nostalgia for surrealism at the same time that it
discredits any new venture by automatically pigeonholing it as a rehash of surrealism, a
rerun of a defeat which according to it is definitive and can no longer be brought back
into question by anyone. Reacting against the alienation of Christian society has led some
people to admire the completely irrational alienation of primitive societies. But we need
to go forward, not backward. We need to make the world more rational — the
necessary first step in making it more exciting, fascinating and fulfilling. [...]
[...] Between 1930 and World War II surrealism continually declined as a revolutionary
force at the same time that its influence was being extended beyond its control. The
postwar period led to the rapid destruction of surrealism by the two factors that had
already blocked its development around 1930: the lack of possibilities for theoretical
renewal and the ebbing of revolution, developments which were reflected in the political
and cultural reaction in the workers movement. The latter factor is directly determinant,
for example, in the disappearance of the surrealist group of Rumania. On the other hand,
it is above all the first of these factors that condemned the Revolutionary Surrealism
movement in France and Belgium to a rapid collapse. Except in Belgium, where a fraction
issuing from surrealism has maintained a valid experimental position [the Lèvres Nues
group], all the surrealist tendencies scattered around the world have joined the camp of
mystical idealism.
Some of the Revolutionary Surrealists were among those who formed the
“Experimental Artists’ International” (1949-1951), which included
participants from Denmark, Belgium, Holland, and eventually also Germany, and which
published the journal Cobra (Copenhagen-Brussels-Amsterdam). The merit of these
groups was to have understood that such an organization is necessitated by the complexity
and extent of present-day problems. But their lack of ideological rigor, the limitation of
their pursuits to mainly plastic experimentation, and above all the absence of a
comprehensive theory of the conditions and perspectives of their experience led to their
breakup.
Lettrism, in France, had started off by totally opposing the entire known aesthetic
movement, whose continual decaying it correctly analyzed. Striving for the uninterrupted
creation of new forms in all domains, the Lettrist group carried on a salutary agitation
between 1946 and 1952. But the group generally took it for granted that aesthetic
disciplines should take a new departure within a general framework similar to the former
one, and this idealist error limited its productions to a few paltry experiments. In 1952
the Lettrist left wing organized itself into a “Lettrist International” and
expelled the backward fraction.(1) In the Lettrist
International the quest for new methods of intervention in everyday life was pursued
amidst sharp struggles among different tendencies.
In Italy — with the exception of the antifunctionalist experimental group that in
1955 formed the most solid section of the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus
— the efforts toward avant-garde formations have remained attached to the old
artistic perspectives and have not even succeeded in expressing themselves theoretically.
During the same period the most innocuous and massified aspects of Western culture have
been massively imitated all over the world, from the United States to Japan. (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.) As for the productions of peoples who are
still subject to cultural colonialism (often caused by political oppression), even though
they may be progressive in their own countries, they play a reactionary role in the
advanced cultural centers. Critics who have based their entire career on outdated systems
of creation pretend to discover engaging new developments in Greek films or Guatemalan
novels — an exoticism of the antiexotic, the revival of old forms long since
exploited and exhausted in other countries; an exoticism which does, however, serve the
primary purpose of exoticism: escape from the real conditions of life and creation.
In the workers states only the experimentation carried out by Brecht in Berlin, insofar
as it puts into question the classic spectacle notion, is close to the constructions that
matter for us today. Only Brecht has succeeded in resisting the stupidity of Socialist
Realism in power.
Now that Socialist Realism is falling apart, we can expect much from a revolutionary
confrontation of the intellectuals in the workers states with the real problems of modern
culture. If Zhdanovism has been the purest expression not only of the cultural
degeneration of the workers movement but also of the conservative cultural position in the
bourgeois world, those in the Eastern Bloc who are presently revolting against Zhdanovism
cannot do so — whatever their subjective intentions — merely in the name of a
greater creative freedom à la Cocteau, for example. A negation of Zhdanovism objectively
means the negation of the Zhdanovist negation of “liquidation.”(2)
The sole possible supersession of Zhdanovism will be the real exercise of freedom, which
is consciousness of present necessity.
Here, too, the recent years have at most been a period of confused resistance to the
confused reign of reactionary imbecility. There weren’t many of us really working
against it. But we shouldn’t linger over the tastes or trivial findings of this
period. The problems of cultural creation can be resolved only in relation with a new
advance of world revolution.
[...] The union of several experimental tendencies for a revolutionary front in
culture, begun at the congress held at Alba, Italy, at the end of 1956, presupposes that
we not neglect three important factors.
First of all, we must insist on a complete accord among the persons and groups that
participate in this united action; and this accord must not be facilitated by allowing
certain of its consequences to be dissimulated. Jokers or careerists who are stupid enough
to think they can advance their careers in this way must be rebuffed.
Next, we must recall that while any genuinely experimental attitude is usable, that
word has very often been misused in the attempt to justify artistic actions within an
already-existing structure. The only valid experimental proceeding is based on the
accurate critique of existing conditions and the deliberate supersession of them. It must
be understood once and for all that something that is only a personal expression within a
framework created by others cannot be termed a creation. Creation is not the arrangement
of objects and forms, it is the invention of new laws on such arrangement.
Finally, we have to eliminate the sectarianism among us that opposes unity of action
with possible allies for specific goals and prevents our infiltration of parallel
organizations.(3) From 1952 to 1955 the Lettrist
International, after some necessary purges, continually moved toward a sort of absolutist
rigor leading to an equally absolute isolation and ineffectuality, and ultimately to a
certain immobility, a degeneration of the spirit of critique and discovery. We must
definitively supersede this sectarian conduct in favor of real actions. This should be the
sole criterion on which we join with or separate from comrades. Naturally this does not
mean that we should renounce breaks, as everyone urges us to do. On the contrary, we think
that it is necessary to go still further in breaking with habits and persons.
We should collectively define our program and realize it in a disciplined manner, using
any means, even artistic ones.
Our central idea is the construction of situations, that is to say, the concrete
construction of momentary ambiances of life and their transformation into a superior
passional quality. We must develop a systematic intervention based on the complex factors
of two components in perpetual interaction: the material environment of life and the
comportments which it gives rise to and which radically transform it.
Our perspectives of action on the environment ultimately lead us to the notion of
unitary urbanism. Unitary urbanism is defined first of all as the use of all arts and
techniques as means contributing to the composition of a unified milieu. Such an
interrelated ensemble must be envisaged as incomparably more far-reaching than the old
domination of architecture over the traditional arts, or than the present sporadic
application to anarchic urbanism of specialized technology or of scientific investigations
such as ecology. Unitary urbanism must, for example, determine the acoustic environment as
well as the distribution of different varieties of food and drink. It must include both
the creation of new forms and the détournement of previous forms of architecture,
urbanism, poetry and cinema. Integral art, which has been talked about so much, can be
realized only at the level of urbanism. But it can no longer correspond to any of the
traditional aesthetic categories. In each of its experimental cities unitary urbanism will
act by way of a certain number of force fields, which we can temporarily designate by the
classic term “quarter.” Each quarter will tend toward a specific harmony
distinct from neighboring harmonies; or else will play on a maximum breaking up of
internal harmony.
Secondly, unitary urbanism is dynamic, in that it is directly related to styles of
behavior. The most elementary unit of unitary urbanism is not the house, but the
architectural complex, which combines all the factors conditioning an ambiance, or a
series of clashing ambiances, on the scale of the constructed situation. Spatial
development must take into account the emotional effects that the experimental city is
intended to produce. One of our comrades has advanced a theory of
“states-of-mind” quarters, according to which each quarter of a city would be
designed to provoke a specific basic sentiment to which people would knowingly expose
themselves. It seems that such a project draws appropriate conclusions from the current
tendency to depreciate randomly encountered primary sentiments, and that its realization
could contribute to accelerating that depreciation. The comrades who call for a new, free
architecture must understand that this new architecture will primarily be based not on
free, poetic lines and forms — in the sense that today’s “lyrical
abstract” painting uses those terms — but rather on the atmospheric effects of
rooms, hallways, streets — atmospheres linked to the gestures they contain.
Architecture must advance by taking emotionally moving situations, rather than emotionally
moving forms, as the material it works with. And the experiments conducted with this
material will lead to new, as yet unknown forms.
Psychogeographical research, “the study of the exact laws and specific effects of
geographical environments, whether consciously organized or not, on the emotions and
behavior of individuals,” thus takes on a double meaning: active observation of
present-day urban agglomerations and development of hypotheses on the structure of a
situationist city. The progress of psychogeography depends to a great extent on the
statistical extension of its methods of observation, but above all on experimentation by
means of concrete interventions in urbanism. Before this stage is attained we cannot be
certain of the objective truth of the initial psychogeographical findings. But even if
these findings should turn out to be false, they would still be false solutions to what is
nevertheless a real problem.
Our action on behavior, linked with other desirable aspects of a revolution in mores,
can be briefly defined as the invention of games of an essentially new type. The most
general goal must be to expand the nonmediocre part of life, to reduce the empty moments
of life as much as possible. One could thus speak of our enterprise as a project of
quantitatively increasing human life, an enterprise more serious than the biological
methods currently being investigated, and one that automatically implies a qualitative
increase whose developments are unpredictable. The situationist game is distinguished from
the classic notion of games by its radical negation of the element of competition and of
separation from everyday life. On the other hand, it is not distinct from a moral choice,
since it implies taking a stand in favor of what will bring about the future reign of
freedom and play.
This perspective is obviously linked to the continual and rapid increase of leisure
time resulting from the level of productive forces our era has attained. It is also linked
to the recognition of the fact that a battle of leisure is taking place before our eyes, a
battle whose importance in the class struggle has not been sufficiently analyzed. 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. By obtaining through collective pressure a slight rise in the price of its
labor above the minimum necessary for the production of that labor, the proletariat not
only extends its power of struggle, it also extends the terrain of the struggle. New forms
of this struggle then arise alongside directly economic and political conflicts. It can be
said that up till now revolutionary propaganda has been constantly overcome within these
new forms of struggle in all the countries where advanced industrial development has
introduced them. That the necessary changing of the infrastructure can be delayed by
errors and weaknesses at the level of superstructures has unfortunately been demonstrated
by several experiences of the twentieth century. It is necessary to throw new forces into
the battle of leisure. We will take our position there.
A rough experimentation toward a new mode of behavior has already been made with what
we have termed the dérive: the practice of a passional journey out of the
ordinary through a rapid changing of ambiances, as well as a means of study of
psychogeography and of situationist psychology. But 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.
Everything leads us to believe that the essential elements of our research lie in our
hypothesis of constructions of situations.
A person’s life 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 a perfect impression of sameness. As a result, the rare intensely
engaging situations found in life only serve to strictly confine and limit that life. We
must try to construct situations, that is to say, collective ambiances, ensembles of
impressions determining the quality of a moment. If we take the simple example of a
gathering of a group of individuals for a given time, it would be desirable, while taking
into account the knowledge and material means we have at our disposal, to study what
organization of the place, what selection of participants and what provocation of events
are suitable for producing the desired ambiance. The powers of a situation will certainly
expand considerably in both time and space with the realizations of unitary urbanism or
the education of a situationist generation.
The construction of situations begins beyond the ruins of the modern spectacle. It is
easy to see how much the very principle of the spectacle — nonintervention — is
linked to the alienation of the old world. Conversely, the most pertinent revolutionary
experiments in culture have sought to break the spectators’ psychological
identification with the hero so as to draw them into activity by provoking their
capacities to revolutionize their own lives. The situation is thus designed to be lived by
its constructors. The role played by a passive or merely bit-part playing
“public” must constantly diminish, while that played by those who cannot be
called actors, but rather, in a new sense of the term, “livers,” must steadily
increase.
We have to multiply poetic subjects and objects — which are now unfortunately so
rare that the slightest ones take on an exaggerated emotional importance — and we
have to organize games for these poetic subjects to play with these poetic objects. This
is our entire program, which is essentially transitory. Our situations will be ephemeral,
without a future. Passageways. Our only concern is real life; we care nothing about the
permanence of art or of anything else. Eternity is the grossest idea a person can conceive
of in connection with his acts. [...]
The situationist minority first emerged as a tendency in the Lettrist left wing, then
in the Lettrist International which it ended up controlling. The same objective movement
has led several recent avant-garde groups to similar conclusions. Together we must
eliminate all the relics of the recent past. We now believe that an accord for a united
action of the revolutionary avant-garde in culture must be carried out on the basis of
such a program. We have neither guaranteed recipes nor definitive results. We only propose
an experimental research to be collectively led in a few directions that we are presently
defining and toward others that have yet to be defined. The very difficulty of succeeding
in the first situationist projects is a proof of the newness of the domain we are
penetrating. Something that changes our way of seeing the streets is more important than
something that changes our way of seeing painting. Our working hypotheses will be
reexamined at each future upheaval, wherever it comes from. [...]
GUY DEBORD
June 1957
[TRANSLATOR’S NOTES]
1. The final break was provoked when the radical
tendency (including Debord and Wolman) disrupted a Charlie Chaplin press conference in
October 1952. The aesthete lettrists, including the founder of lettrism, Isidore Isou,
disavowed this action. The disrupters responded with an open letter: “We believe that
the most urgent expression of freedom is the destruction of idols, especially when those
idols present themselves in the name of freedom. The provocative tone of our leaflet was
an attack against a unanimous servile adoration. The disavowal by certain lettrists,
including Isou himself, only reveals the constantly reengendered communication gap between
extremists and ex-extremists. . . .”
2. In a previous passage omitted in this translation
Debord had quoted a speech of Andrei Zhdanov (head of culture under Stalin in the 1940s),
who had defended the USSR’s repression of avant-garde artists on the grounds that the
latter represented the “liquidation” of classical art.
3. The SI subsequently renounced any such
“infiltration” of other groups, considering that simultaneous membership in two
organizations tends to lead to manipulation.
This report was one of the preparatory texts for the July 1957 conference
at Cosio d’Arroscia, Italy, at which the Situationist International was founded.
Translated by Ken Knabb (slightly modified from the version in the Situationist
International Anthology).
No copyright.
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