fig. 1. Excerpt from ‘L’Étage suivant’ from Internationale Situationnisteno. 7, p. 47.
THE NEXT STAGE
Attila Kotányi
What is the most revolutionary element to make its appearance in the SI? The most revolutionary: that is, the most in touch with the future. And what aspect contains the most critical point? To respond to this question, I shall analyse the SI’s program as if I were speaking to a philosopher. What an absurd and audacious undertaking! I see the innovative element in the fact that we have begun to better understand the peculiarity of our “existence in the world”[« existence dans le monde »],and so we better understand the nature of our program: the consequences of the incompatibility of our program, insofar as it is expressed, with the available means of expression and reception.
What in the SI’s original program is most unsettling, that keeps the most people awake at night? Responding to this question in philosophical terms is clearly absurd. Still, as present-day philosophy situates itself entirely within the theme of the “abandonment of philosophy” (cf. the Hamburg Theses[1]), this gives us the opportunity to cause a surprise—and surprise is recognised by all information theorists as the condition for the transmission of a “quantity of information”.
From the start, the situationist project was a revolutionary program. It was practical, quasi-political, objective, in favour of transforming the world, and linked to real present-day transformations—albeit reified, generalised, and inter-bureaucratic. On the other hand, this program was intersubjective, nourished by desire, by what is radically anti-alienating in everyone’s lives—a drink mixed from thirst itself.[2] From the start, we were conscious that the artist, sociologist, and the order-giving manager [du manager dirigeant], comprised a troika paid to make people believe that desires can be cannibalized, or that the energies of these desires can be converted into “needs without ever having been desires”.[3] We were equally conscious that a unique historical opportunity allowed the order-givers [dirigeants] to expropriate for their own ends, “the ensemble of means through which a society thinks of itself and shows itself to itself”.[4] The underestimation of this power—nourished by the most diverse sources, and in part by the ignorance diffused by these very channels of “news” and spectacles—multiplied the effectiveness of the order-givers. In short: power [le pouvoir] comes to have a direct grip upon the system by which individuals communicate with themselves and with others (and yet except for power, the responsibility of everyone in this system is recognized by everyone).
These elements existed in the SI from the start. Their classic content corresponded with Marx’s classic criteria for revolutionary theory: don’t leave the exploitation of the subjective side to the idealists.[5]
We are now involved in a supersession of this classic stage. It has become clear that other movements—surrealism, Marxism, existentialism, etc.—dropped the chestnut when it got too hot (though they cannot forget Hegelian philosophy, even if they have forgotten that at its origin its dialectic was the dialectic of the subjective and the objective). As I have said, I see this supersession in the fact that we have begun to better understand the peculiarity of our “existence in the world”, and consequently the incompatibility of our program, insofar as it is expressed, with the available means of expression. And I would add that this is not just a question of “our program”. Everyone automatically participates, for or against, in the situationist program—in this “infinitely complicated conflict between alienation and the struggle against alienation” (Lefebvre).[6]
From the start of the discussions about the implications of the situationist program, we have posed demands in accordance with this program, and we have proposed constructions. At the same time, we have recognized the ‘chimerical,’ ‘utopian’ character of some of these images and the ‘Manichean’ character of some of these demands.[7] Examples are easy enough to find in our published texts. Despite this, the approach to this problem remained haphazard [accidentelle], as we insisted on the legitimacy of the momentary utopia, on the revolutionary value of such demands, on the necessity of material means, and, on the contrary, the necessity to “think our ideas rigorously enough in common” at this primitive stage (Internationale Situationniste no. 2).[8]
I believe that these remarks, though presented awkwardly, are profoundly correct.[9] Yet it is here that I already see an advance in relation to the first programmatic stage, and the possibility of a great future evolution.
Translated by Anthony Hayes. First published, January 2024. My long promised translation of Attila Kotányi’s ‘L’Étage suivant’ from Internationale Situationniste no. 7. Apologies for taking so long–life, as they say, intervened. Having completed ‘Du rôle de l’I.S.’ (The role of the SI) some time ago, all I have left to do is ‘Communication prioritaire’ (Priority Communication). Not too long now...
[4] Ibid, part I, § 1. Note that the term ‘dirigeant’ and ‘exécutant’ (sometimes translated as ‘order-giver’ and ‘order-taker’) was proposed by Cornelius Castoriadis and the Socialisme ou Barbarie group to describe the transformation of the class relation between bourgeois and proletarian in ‘modern’, post-Second World War capitalist societies.
[5] Perhaps a reference to the first of Karl Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach: ‘The chief defect of all previous materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that things [Gegenstand], reality, sensuousness are conceived only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was set forth abstractly by idealism—which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such.’
[6] Henri Lefebvre, La somme et le reste, 4e édition, Paris: Anthropos, 2009 [1959]. p. 267 (Part III, Chapter IV, ‘Sur le mode d’existence philosophique’). A longer citation ending in the quote used by Kotányi was noted by Guy Debord: ‘A satisfying mode of expression should spontaneously deliver [livrer spontanément] the uncertainty of lived experience [vécu] and the certainty of reality (thus of the possible, of the future, of “destiny”), with which it is woven [qui s’y trame]. Thus, it is founded neither on the freedom of the actor nor the determinism of character or “individuality”, but in the varying degrees of freedom and willpower [volonté], in the failures of freedom and willpower, and in the becoming that disappoints and carry’s freedom and willpower along in the infinitely complicated conflict between alienation and the struggle against alienation…’ (ellipsis in the original). Cf. Guy Debord, La librairie de Guy Debord: Marx Hegel, éditions L’échappée, 2021, p. 175.
[7] One wonders if Raoul Vaneigem’s use of ‘Manicheanism’ to describe aspects of the burgeoning commodity-spectacle in the second part of his Basic Banalities (cf. § 29, in particular), owes a debt to Kotányi. In Raoul Vaneigem: Self-Portraits and Caricatures of the Situationist International, Vaneigem has some interesting things to say about Kotányi’s relationship with mysticism and religious thought—a relationship that ultimately lead to his expulsion from the SI in late 1963. Nonetheless, Vaneigem seemed deeply affected by his relationship with Kotányi, including discussions of the role of myth in the ancient and modern worlds. One, perhaps, sees this influence in the first part of Vaneigem’s Basic Banalities.
[8] The reference is to the article ‘Le tournant obscur’ [The dark turning point], Internationale Situationniste no. 2, December 1958, pp. 10-11: ‘Even if our ideas have a vague and utopian side, this is due less to the impossibility, at this primitive stage, of verifying the initial part of our hypotheses in practice, than from our incapacity to think them rigorously enough in common.’ Note that Kotányi inserts ‘nos idées’ [‘our ideas’] into his quote from IS no. 2, presumably for clarity’s sake.
[9] It is unclear what is being referred to here. Kotányi was a non-native speaker of French, having fled Hungary for Belgium after the defeat of the 1956 revolution. His situationist comrade Raoul Vaneigem has more recently remarked on his command of French as ‘approximate as it was peremptory’. Nonetheless, Vaneigem continued approvingly, ‘his approximations […] gave birth to a poetry that gave weight to his remarks’ (cf. Raoul Vaneigem: Self-Portraits and Caricatures of the Situationist International, translated by Not Bored). It is possible, however, that Kotányi is referring to his own misgivings regarding his article. A letter from Guy Debord to Vaneigem from February 1962 sheds some light on the matter: ‘Re-reading his article for IS no. 7 [i.e., “The Next Stage”], Attila found it strongly Kotányian in tone. Which is accurate. But as a result, he no longer wants to publish it without a long explanatory extension. Given that we know that he provided some Kotányian pages with a delay of a little over six months, we absolutely lack now the elements needed to calculate the age of the captain [l’age du capitaine, a French expression for an insoluble problem], and the time of production of an article which would be non Kotányian in style.’ Cf. Guy Debord. ‘Lettre à Raoul Vaneigem, 15 février, 1962.’ In Correspondance volume II septembre 1960 – décembre 1964, edited by Patrick Mosconi, Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2001, p. 128.
fig. 1. A translation and facsimile of the original pages 14 & 15 of Internationale Situationniste no. 7, April 1962. Click on the image to access hi-res version.
Since last year, I have fallen away from the task of being a good little pro-situ. My planned follow ups to the new translations from Internationale Situationniste no. 7 did not appear. Instead, they moulded on my hard drive, prey to the gnawing of electronic mice.
Over the next week or so I will put up my translations of Situationist Attila Kotányi’s ‘L’étage suivant’ and the Situationist group’s ‘Communication prioritaire’. Regarding the authorship of the latter ‘Note éditoriale’, the editorial board for issue no. 7 was Kotányi, Uwe Lausen, Guy Debord, and Raoul Vaneigem.
My potlach to you for my blessed and cursed idleness over the last year is the following. I offer a complete translation of pages 14 and 15 of issue 7 of Internationale Situationniste–click on the image above. One of my favourite spreads of all time. What a double. First of all, it’s the Vendome Column, before and after, so, to speak. But the picture on the left, is it taken before the one on the right? Or is it, rather taken after?
In 1871 the Communards of Paris blew up the original. The picture on the right was taken soon after the event of the blowing up. Yet the column was rebuilt under the orders of those that organised the murder of the communards
So, is the picture of the column on the left, from before the blowing up or the after of the rebuild? The difficulty answering this is, for me, crucial for understanding what the Situationists are up to in this double spread.
The ambiguity of the relationship between the two pictures is surely a moment of the Situationists attempting to express the strangeness and estrangement of the modern spectacle. Is the picture on the left a picture of the rebuild, a photo of the simulation of the original? Or is it, rather, a picture from before 1871, a photo of the “original”?
fig. 2. Page 14. Click on the image.
Under the photographic representation of the complete Vendome Column on the left replete with statue of Napoleon I on top, lies a quote from Kommunist, the official theoretical and political organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The subject of the sentence is obviously Stalin, unnamed and spoken of in the circumlocutionary fashion of the Soviet Union in 1962. A further relationship is implicitly posed by the Situationists, much in the circumlocutory style of contemporary Stalinists (not) speaking about Stalin. The latter is a later day development of Napoleon, the little man at the head of the revolutionary bourgeois state forms a template of sorts for the jokers that came after him. Napoleon III. Mussolini. Stalin. Hitler. Not so much inverting Marx’s dictum that farce follows tragedy as Hegel purportedly said; rather, the farcical nature of the bourgeois dictator has merely grown more awful and bloody. Here, the tragedy is the transformation of the revolutionary impulse into autophagous destruction of the proletariat by the erstwhile leadership of the self-same proletariat. Channelling Hegel, the Situationists put it thus (on page 14): “the crushing of the classical workers movement […] whose power was reversed and turned into the police state by a ruse of history”.[1]
The Situationists appear to be drawing a relationship between the Vendome Column as so much advertising and propaganda for Napoleon’s dictatorship, and a modern photographic representation of the Vendome column as an exercise in simulation, a photo of the post 1871 rebuild, and so a peculiarly appropriate example of spectacle more and less modern. Stalin is simply the latest model in a series of progressively worse iterations of bourgeois dictator.
To this day the simulation of the original Vendome stands as mockery of the Communards, the effacement of the memory of their wonderful detonation. Perhaps it is fitting, thus, that this awful triumphalism is today little more than the window dressing of dumb statuary for Paris of the open-air museum and touristic spectacle. An image of the city’s dynamic history frozen and packaged and flogged off at bargain-based prices. Ah, Paris.
fig. 3. Page 15. Click on the image.
Nonetheless, there is another Paris, and another world glimpsed by, among others, the Communards of 1871. The text under the photo of the blown-up Vendome Column is a classic of détournement. The author of the original is attempting to communicate the unfortunate nature of the union losing control of the rank and file, inadvertently singing a hymn to the wildcat given the context: the picture of the Vendome Column in pieces, blown up by the Communards of 1871. Turning the world upside down. Just as one inverts the explicit meaning of the quote from Le Monde in order to détourn the unconscious kernel within.
Note the text in the bottom left corner. It is part of a paragraph from the article in which these images and accompanying titles appeared. ‘Les mauvais jours finiront’. ‘The bad days will end’. Long available in the clear translation, it constitutes one of the central texts of the Situationist International’s break with its first period of 1957-61. In the fragment at the bottom of page 14 the SI is thinking chiefly of Socialisme ou Barbarie in the role of one of the “rebel minorities” that helped to “preserve” the “much-maligned tradition” of revolutionary communist activity.
I’ve bored you enough with my ruminations. Have some of your own instead while consuming this offering to the great god of the Situationist fetish.
Footnote
[1]Internationale Situationniste no. 7 (Avril 1962), p. 14. Ken Knabb put it thus: “the crushing of the classical workers movement […] whose force the ruse of history transformed into state police” (The Bad Days Will End).
fig. 1. A reproduction of the photomontage by Ernest Eugène Appert that the situationists used in their published version of ‘Du rôle de l’I.S.’ (‘On the role of the SI’). For more details of this image, see here.
Translator’s afterword to ‘On the role of the SI’
A translation of ‘On the role of the SI’ is available here.
If there is an article in which the Hamburg Theses of 1961 appear clearest, the conclusions of the Theses hidden in plain sight while their explicit presence is left as a brief citation to an exceedingly hard to find original, then it is ‘On the role of the SI’ (‘Du rôle de l’I.S.’) in Internationale Situationniste no. 7 (hereafter IS 7). Published in April 1962, the issue marked a significant turn in the group’s fortune. Over the previous three months the group around principally Debord, Vaneigem, and Kotányi, had expelled almost the entirety of the Spur group from the Situationist International (SI), soon followed by the split of almost the entire Scandinavian section of the SI and Jacqueline de Jong in Holland. However, the seventh issue was not simply marked with the expulsions and splits, even if they loomed large over the issue. As the first issue of a purged and purified group, it also signalled the victory of the ‘authors’ of the Hamburg Theses, and their conception of the SI as a general avant-garde—to use Debord’s 1963 term.[1]
My new translation of ‘Du rôle de l’I.S.’ (‘On the role of the SI’) is the first in English that is accompanied by the original illustrations in their proper location vis-à-vis the text. Rather than being inserted randomly and out of order, as done by the article’s first translator, I’ve returned the illustrations to their original location as I believe that they are a component of, and a graphic extension of the arguments that immediately precede and follow their appearance in the text.
The first image of a sectional elevation of an average family sized home nuclear shelter follows immediately upon the charge that capitalism has only realised ‘the inverted utopia of repression: it has all the powers, and nobody wants it’.[2] For the SI, the grim fact of a profitable market in shelter’s that purported to protect their owners from nuclear Armageddon summed up the irrationality of the commodity spectacle of the early 1960s. As they mordantly noted, elsewhere in IS 7,
If this system were to go to the point of bluntly proclaiming that it imposes such an empty and hopeless existence that the best solution for everyone would be to go hang themselves, it would still succeed in managing a healthy and profitable business by producing standardized ropes.[3]
The second image, taken from a photomontage representing the execution of Generals Jacques Leon Clément-Thomas and Claude Lecomte by revolutionary Parisian National Guardsmen on the first day of the Paris Commune, 18 March 1871, follows immediately upon this militant situationist declaration: ‘it is necessary to either accept or reject us as a whole. We will not be broken down into details’.[4]
The picture of the execution plays the role of projection into the imagined future; it is a détournement not mere decoration. It speaks to the challenge the SI throw down to a milieu they partly inhabit, that of leftist intellectuals breaking with Stalinism and Marxist orthodoxy in France circa the 1950s and after. On the basis of this détournement they present a vision of this future: the surprise of their academic contemporaries in coming days when another revolutionary proletariat will rise and ‘architects [will be] hunted down and hung in the streets of Sarcelles’.[5]
Perhaps the use of the image is also a sly dig at Ernest Eugène Appert, the pro-Versaillais, anti-communard photographer who produced the photomontage in question. No doubt Appert broke down the event into details by way of his photographic reconstruction aimed at garnering support for the counter-revolutionaries bent on the destruction of the Paris Commune.
Of the two articles that explicitly mention the Hamburg Theses in IS 7, ‘On the role of the SI’ speaks most substantially upon them:
The interpretation that we defend in culture can be regarded as a mere hypothesis, which we expect to be effectively verified and surpassed very quickly. In any case it possesses the essential characteristics of a rigorous scientific verification in the sense that it explains and orders a number of phenomena which are, for some, incoherent and inexplicable (and which are sometimes even hidden by other forces); and that it enables the possibility of foreseeing events that are ultimately controllable. Not for an instant are we abusing the so-called objectivity of any researcher, either in culture or what are conventionally known as the human sciences. On the contrary, the rule there is to hide both the problems and the answers. The SI will disclose the hidden, and itself as a possibility ‘hidden’ by its enemies. Highlighting the contradictions that others have chosen to forget, we will succeed by transforming ourselves into the practical force foreseen in the Hamburg Theses created by Debord, Kotányi, Trocchi and Vaneigem (summer 1961).[6]
The ‘hypothesis’ the SI defend in this article is summarised in their justly infamous claim: ‘Situationist theory is in people like fish are in water’.[7] If there is a single theme in ‘On the role of the SI’ it is this phrase, pointedly directed at undermining the exceptionalism of the SI. Here, the situationists wager that the specificity of the situationist critique is one manifestation—albeit a coherent and self-consciously revolutionary manifestation—of forms of contestation that are re-emerging amidst the appearance of the post-Second World War triumph of state capitalism East and West. Indeed, the situationists further wagered that this is necessarily the result of the intensive and extensive development of the global commodity-spectacle.
The idea that alienation—in Marx’s sense of the term—was more of a problem in the early 1960s was certainly not shared evenly among much of the leftist intelligentsia in France (or elsewhere for that matter). This was the time in which structuralists came to argue that Marx’s early conception of alienation was a dread Hegelian residue that Marx had apparently given up on circa 1845. Indeed, even in those cases in which Marx’s early conception of alienation was taken up—by Eric Fromm and Herbert Marcuse for example—it was often used to illustrate the utter triumph of capital against the possibility of a revolutionary proletarian subject dis-alienating society. Nonetheless, there were exceptions: Henri Lefebvre and Lucien Goldmann, to name only two of the more influential champions of Marx’s conception of alienation encountered by the situationists.
The SI had early on rejected the idea that the burgeoning markets in culture and consumer durables aimed at a working-class audience signalled the end of material impoverishment and so too of proletarian alienation in the face of capitalist wealth. Rather, they proposed that such developments only signified the triumph of the ‘bourgeois conception of happiness’.[8] Thus, it would be a mistake to see in the SI’s dismissal and contempt for their academic contemporaries simply a de rigeur combativeness and sectarianism. No doubt there is this as well; but more pointedly, the SI rejected what they saw as the collapse of so-called revolutionary thought in the face of the transformations that capitalism underwent between 1945 and 1960.
Per the paragraph cited above, the SI proposed to disclose the truth of contemporary alienation ‘hidden’ amidst the burgeoning commodity wealth of Western societies, just as they would likewise disclose the SI ‘itself as a possibility “hidden” by its enemies’.[9] There is no question, to my thinking, that the ‘hidden’ here is also code for the deliberately hidden Hamburg Theses—theses, moreover, that constitute a moment of the SI as the hidden ‘possibility’ of revolutionary contestation. To the ‘negative pole of alienation’ that constitutes the commodity-spectacle, the SI proposed themselves as ‘the positive pole’ by which they will map the potentialities of ‘human geography’ buried in the ‘untapped layers’ of capitalist alienation.[10] In this sense, dis-alienation was immanent to alienation, the latter a negative image of the potential for modifying and shaping human powers beyond their alienated and alienating reification as capital and wage labour.
However, the idea that the SI was ‘itself […] a possibility “hidden” by its enemies’ was also directed against many of their contemporaries, particularly those published in the leftist journal Arguments (1956-62). For some time prior to 1962, the SI had remarked on a ‘silence’ that had come to be informally imposed vis-à-vis mention of the situationists within the pages of Arguments. In part this was due to the hostility the SI had directed at the group, which had resulted in a situationist initiated boycott upon Arguments from 1 January 1961.[11] However, more striking by far according to the SI was the unavowed influence the latter’s ideas exerted upon some of the writers in Arguments, albeit stripped of the SI’s revolutionary intransigence and, in particular, their increasingly explicit desire to re-establish a revolutionary movement. That is, the SI hidden as the inconvenient source of some of these writer’s ideas. This would reach a paroxysm of sorts in the following months with no less than two articles appearing in Arguments, both of which explicitly used situationist ideas in detail without any acknowledgment of their source or direction—one written by André Frankin an ex-situationist, and the other by their sometime comrade Henri Lefebvre.[12] Indeed, this ‘silence’ that the SI believed was maintained against them by leftist academics more generally in France, would be transformed in the wake of May 1968 into a rush to capitalise upon the newfound infamy of the group—and in some cases by the self-same gatekeepers of the previous silence.[13]
In 1962, the idea that proletarian revolution was off the agenda in the so-called advanced capitalist world was widespread. Such a perspective had already been argued out within the SI, most notably by Constant between 1958 and 1960, and then again by some of the German ‘Spur’ section of the group in 1960 and 1961. With the expulsions of 1962 this perspective was decisively defeated within the SI. Outside of the group, it gained its most forceful elaboration from an explicitly revolutionary direction that shared some of the SI’s concerns regarding alienation in Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964). Nonetheless, a mere four years later, this vision of a quiescent and fully integrated working class was decisively shattered amidst the movements of May 1968 in France and the Hot Autumn in Italy in 1969 and 1970. Clearer than most of their erstwhile revolutionary contemporaries, the SI not so much prophesised this as they participated in calling these movements into being—harbingers and organisers of the ‘detonation’ they worked toward.[14]
By the end of the 1960s such sweeping, all-encompassing radicalism beloved of the situationists would be common coin across the growing revolutionary left. By the early 1970s, theorists like Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, all of whom were remarkably quiet before 1968 concerning such matters as they impatiently flipped through the pages of Internationale Situationniste, now offered their own versions of revolutionary intransigence. Briefly infused with a Zarathustra like courage, they were in truth more like the Owls of Minerva spoken of by Hegel (who they detested), than they were like their much-desired anti-master, Nietzsche. Debord, the Marxian-Hegelian, having published The Society of the Spectacle in 1967, attempted to wield theory in the moment of May 1968, while Lyotard and company bided their time and research grants to finally hold forth on what 1968 was, too late to matter. Indeed, their masterworks appeared well into the dusk of the movement emanating from 1968 (Anti-Oedipus in 1972; The Mirror of Production in 1973; Libidinal Economy in 1974). Surely it is one of the perversities of history that Lyotard et al, and not Debord, are more often considered exemplars of what is known in France as ‘68 thought’ (pensée 68).
Yet it is here, early in the 1960s in the pages of Internationale Situationniste, and in ‘On the role of the SI’ as much as its elusive template, the Hamburg Theses, that we begin to see the true becoming of the revolutionary thought of May 1968.
[11] Internationale Situationniste, ‘Renseignements situationniste [5]’, Internationale Situationniste, no. 5 (Décembre 1960), pp. 12-13.
[12] See, André Frankin, ‘Le parti, le quotidien’, Arguments, no. 25-26 (1er et 2e trimestres 1962); Henri Lefebvre, ‘La signification de la Commune’, Arguments, no. 27-28 (3e et 4e trimestres 1962). Lefebvre’s article resulted in a definitive break between him and the SI. For the SI’s version, see, ‘Into the Dustbin of History!’ (partially translated here), and for Lefebvre’s version see, Kristin’s Ross 1983 interview with Lefebvre.
[13] I realise that there is still much to be explained about the situationist claim of the ‘silence’ around them. I will hopefully return to this question at a later date.
On the role of the SI (from Internationale Situationniste no. 7, April 1962)
We are totally popular. We only consider problems that are already latent in the population. Situationist theory is in people like fish are in water. To those who believe that the SI is building a speculative fortress, we maintain, to the contrary, that we are going to dissolve ourselves into the populace that lives our project in every moment (living it, of course, primarily in the mode of emptiness and repression).
Those who cannot understand this must recommence their study of our programme. The journal Internationale Situationniste, in which can be found published a provisional report of a supersession, is such that having read the latest issue one finds that it is necessary to start again at the beginning.
Specialists may flatter themselves with the illusion that they grasp certain areas of knowledge and practice. But there is no specialist who escapes our omniscient critique.[1] We acknowledge that we still lack resources, but our lack of means is primarily our lack of information (both our lack of access to essential documents that exist, as well as the absence of documents on the most important issues we can indicate). But we must not forget that the technocratic scum also lacks information. Even where they have the most extensive information that accords with their own standards, they only have ten percent of what they would need to refute us. In any case, such an eventuality is purely a stylistic provision, because the ruling bureaucracy, by its very nature, does not delve far into quantitative information (it ignores how workers work, and how people really live). Thus, it cannot hope to catch up to the qualitative. On the contrary, we only lack the quantitative. And we will have that in the future since we have the qualitative—which from now on acts to multiply exponentially the quantity of information that we have. We can also use this model to understand the past. Even without access to much of the erudition of historians, we strive to reevaluate and deepen our understanding of certain historical periods.
The bare facts—known by all the specialist thinkers—repudiate the current organization of reality (for instance: the decor of Sarcelles[2] as much as the lifestyle of Tony Armstrong-Jones[3]), insofar as the facts themselves fashion an instant and relentless critique. For too long these hired specialists have congratulated themselves that only they represent these facts, even though the whole of reality in fact presents them. How they tremble! The good times are over. We will cut them up, along with all the hierarchies that shelter them.[4]
We can import contestation into every discipline. We will not let any specialist remain master of a single field. We are ready to temporarily use these forms which we can reckon with and assess. We can do this because we know the margin of error, itself calculable, which is necessarily a part of such calculations. We will then reduce any error introduced by categories we know are false. Each time it will be easy for us to choose the terrain of combat. If we must have a theoretical ‘model’, considering that ‘models’ are the converging points of today’s technocratic thinking (whether of total competition or total planning), our ‘model’ is that of total communication.[5] We are not speaking of utopia. Of course, we acknowledge that such a hypothesis is never exactly realized in reality—no more than any other. In any case we have an additional advantage, whose definitive expression is the theory of potlatch.[6] ‘Utopia’ is no longer possible because all the conditions for its realization are already present. These conditions have been diverted [détourne] to serve the maintenance of the current order,[7] whose absurdity is so terrifying that—no matter the cost—a utopia was first realized without anyone daring to theorize it, even after the fact. It is the inverted utopia of repression: it has all the powers, and nobody wants it.
fig. 1. Translator’s note: Sectional elevation of a home nuclear shelter.
The study we are conducting of the ‘positive pole of alienation’ will be as exacting as that of its negative pole. As a result of our diagnosis of the poverty of wealth, we can map this world by way of the extreme wealth of this poverty. In fact, these maps that speak a new topography will be the first realization of ‘human geography’.[8] Upon them, our surveys of the untapped layers of proletarian consciousness will replace the oil deposits.
Under these conditions, the general tone of our relations with an impotent intellectual generation can be easily understood. We will make no concessions. Obviously, from among the mass who spontaneously think like us, we must exclude all those intellectuals (which is to say, all those people who lease contemporary thought), who, in quasi-unanimity, are so self-satisfied with their own thoughts about thinkers. Yet they continue to discuss the general impotence of thinking, though recognizing themselves as thinkers, and thus, impotent (see the editorial clowns of Arguments no. 20, devoted specifically to intellectuals[9]).
We have been clear from the beginning of our collective action. But now, our game has become so important that we no longer talk to ill qualified people [des interlocuteurs sans titre]. Our partisans are everywhere. And we have no intention of deceiving them. We come bearing a sword.
As for those capable of entering into dialogue with us [des interlocuteurs valables], they should know that such a relationship cannot be innocuous.[10] Though we find ourselves at a turning point, and know full well the extent of our mistakes, we can still force any potential ally into an overarching choice: it is necessary to either accept or reject us as a whole. We will not be broken down into details.[11]
fig. 2. Translator’s note: Detail of a photomontage by Ernest Eugène Appert of the execution of Generals Jacques Leon Clément-Thomas and Claude Lecomte by revolutionary Parisian National Guardsman on the first day of the Paris Commune, 1871.
There is nothing surprising in stating these truths. Rather, what is surprising is that all the opinion-poll specialists ignore, in so many ways, how very close this righteous, rising anger is. One day they will be surprised to see the architects hunted down and strung up in the streets of Sarcelles.
The defect of other groups—those who have more or less seen the necessity of the coming transformations [mutation]—is their positivity. Whether they are trying to be an artistic avant-garde or a new political formation, they all believe they must save something from the old praxis—and so, they lose themselves.[12]
Those who too quickly want to constitute a political positivity, depend entirely upon the old politics. In the same way that so many people have pressed the situationists to constitute a positive art.[13] Our strength is in having never done such a thing. Our dominant position in modern culture has never been more clearly shown than in the decision taken at the Göteborg Conference to classify, from now on, all artistic productionby members of the SI as anti-situationist in the current context—in the sense that they simultaneously contribute to the latter’s destruction and preservation.[14]
The interpretation that we defend in culture can be regarded as a mere hypothesis, which we expect to be effectively verified and surpassed very quickly.[15] In any case it possesses the essential characteristics of a rigorous scientific verification in the sense that it explains and orders a number of phenomena which are, for some, incoherent and inexplicable (and which are sometimes even hidden by other forces); and that it enables the possibility of foreseeing events that are ultimately controllable. Not for an instant are we abusing the so-called objectivity of any researcher, either in culture or what are conventionally known as the human sciences. On the contrary, the rule there is to hide both the problems and the answers. The SI will disclose the hidden, and itself as a possibility ‘hidden’ by its enemies.[16] Highlighting the contradictions that others have chosen to forget, we will succeed by transforming ourselves into the practical force foreseen in the Hamburg Theses created by Debord, Kotányi, Trocchi and Vaneigem (summer 1961).[17]
As freedom is not easy to imagine in the existing oppression, the irreducible project of the SI is total freedom concretized in acts and in the imaginary. This is how we will win, by identifying ourselves with the most profound desire that exists in everyone, and by giving this desire total license. The ‘motivational researchers’ of modern advertising find in the subconscious of people only the desire for objects, whereas we find the desire to break all the shackles of life. We are the representatives of this key insight of the vast majority. Our first principles are not up for discussion.
‘Du rôle de l’I.S.’ (‘On the role of the SI’) translated by Anthony Hayes, 2022. It was originally published in Internationale Situationniste no. 7, April 1962 (pp. 17-20). The illustrations reproduced above are scans taken from the facsimile edition of the entire run of the Internationale Situationniste journal (Éditions Champ Libre, 1975). Unlike a previous translation, these pictures have been returned to their proper place in the text (as can be ascertained here).
Note that this latest translation, though a complete draft, is liable to updates and corrections.
[1] When the SI themselves quoted this passage in their circular against Henri Lefebvre, ‘Into the Dustbin of History!’ (February 1963), they left out the term ‘omniscient’.
[2] The situationists are referring to the low-income housing developments that were built in the 1950s and 60s in Sarcelles, in the north of Paris. They considered such developments emblematic of the oppressive urbanism of spectacular capitalism. See, ‘Critique of Urbanism’, Internationale Situationniste no. 6 (August 1961).
[3] Antony Armstrong-Jones (1930-2017) was a well-known English photographer and husband of Princess Margaret in the 1960s.
[4] At this point in the SI’s trajectory, the archetypes of intellectual ‘specialists’, particularly of the intellectual left, were those writers and thinkers grouped around and published in the journal Arguments. See footnote 9.
[5] The situationist suggestion of the critical use of a ‘theoretical “model” […] of total communication’, is strikingly similar to Henri Lefebvre’s suggestion that one can propose a ‘model of communication’ while avoiding the ‘fetishization’ of models seen in the work of contemporaneous structuralists. See, Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Volume II: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, trans. John Moore, London: Verso, [1961] 2002, pp. 177-79 (chapter 2.9).
[6] ‘Potlatch’, as used by the situationists and earlier, the Letterist International, referred to the exchange of gifts, and was conceived of as a superior social relation to that of capitalist exchange relations of money and commodities. The word is taken from indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of Canada and the US and was most likely derived by the letterists and situationists from Marcel Mauss’ The Gift (Essai sur le don, 1925).
[7] Note that the SI here speak of a type of counter-détournement, i.e., something akin to what they also elsewhere refer to as ‘recuperation’.
[8] In part, such a ‘human geography’ had been one of the chief axes along which the Letterist International and later the SI, had been moving since the 1950s. See, for example, Guy Debord, ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’ (1955).
[9] The editors of Arguments no. 20 were Kostas Axelos, Jean Duvignaud, and Edgar Morin. Both Morin and Duvignaud contributed articles to this issue.
[10] These remarks on who can and cannot enter into relations with the SI would later be expressed more clearly in the lead article of IS no. 9 (August 1964), ‘Now, the SI’: ‘To approach us one should therefore not already be compromised, and should be aware that even if we may be momentarily mistaken on many minor points, we will never admit having been mistaken in our negative judgment of persons. Our qualitative criteria are much too certain for us to debate them. There is no point in approaching us if one is not theoretically and practically in agreement with our condemnations of contemporary persons or currents’—and, etcetera. See, also, footnote 11.
[11] Debord further expounded upon this paragraph in a letter to Serge Bricianer: ‘[W]e are partisans, at all levels, of the free discussion of ideas. And we are resolved to take part in such whenever possible—that is to say, precisely whenever it is not a question of mingling with enemies of the free discussion of ideas, or of freedom in the most general sense. Of course, it is a question of being lucid in the application of this definition, and we would be great victims of ideology if we thought that the left-wing intelligentsia in France, where it holds part of the cultural means, is really favorable to this freedom today. The sentence you quote about “accept[ing] us as a whole” is explicitly addressed to these people, or rather to those among them “capable of entering into dialogue with us”. This whole column–on page 19 [of IS no. 7, i.e., of the article ‘On the Role of the SI’]–concerns, in very clear terms, “an impotent intellectual generation” which monopolizes the spectacular role of progressive thought. | “Accept[ing] us as a whole” means that we refuse (that we will try to prevent) the recognition of some of us, or certain aspects (talents) of such as us, or certain diluted part of our program. Indeed, the SI is first and foremost comparable–sociologically, if I may say–to a group of artists more than to a political organization. Our critique of culture is made from the cultural terrain (where we have our sole economic base). This leads to contradictions and specific risks: the chief risk is seeing a continuation of modern art preached among us, while at the same time as discussion on our common theses is stifled. We have already noted this tendency a lot. Such that we had to respond several times, and indeed, with an obvious brutality (which does not mean that the C[entral] C[ouncil] [of the SI] is really a lasting “management”). There can be no doubt that a political party, having a certain number of rank-and-file militants and an authoritarian centralism, is already entirely engaged in the bureaucratic way, and recomposes in-itself the old society even if its program is ultra-revolutionary. We are on completely different ground, but not sure, however, of arriving at an adequate form of organization.’ See, Guy Debord, ‘Lettre à Serge Bricianer, 27 avril 1962,’ in Correspondance volume II septembre 1960 – décembre 1964, ed. Patrick Mosconi, Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2001. Note that Bricianer was a member of Informations et correspondances ouvrières (ICO, English: Workers’ News and Letters), a council communist group that had emerged out of a split in Socialisme ou Barbarie in 1958.
[12] Of the ‘other groups’ the situationists refer to here, the chief representatives of the ‘old praxis’ they refer to are, respectively, on the political side the Socialise ou Barbarie group, and on the artistic side the ‘Nashists’ and other ex-situationists who constituted a ‘Second Situationist International’ in the wake of their expulsion and resignations from the SI.
[13] See footnote 12 & 14. The political and artistic ‘positivity’ refers here to the old political and artistic practices that the SI are rejecting, whether the hierarchical militancy of Socialisme ou Barbarie, or the ongoing continuation of modern art of the ‘Nashists’ et al. Also see, Guy Debord, The Situationists and the New Forms of Action in Politics and Art (1963).
[14] See, ‘The Fifth SI Conference in Göteborg’ (IS no. 7). Having declared artistic production ‘anti-situationist’, some may find it puzzling that such production is then described as ‘contribut[ing] simultaneously to the […] destruction and preservation’ of modern culture. So, if it is destructive of this ‘current context’—albeit liable to preserve it in a recuperative fashion—why is it ‘anti-situationist’? Reflecting upon this exceedingly concise and somewhat opaque statement helps us, in part, resolve the confusion of those commentators who read the declaration of art being ‘anti-situationist’ as an injunction against the production of art (Wark, Home, et al). Such an injunction was always imaginary, particularly when one considers (i) the inability or even desire of the SI to enforce such an injunction, and (ii) the ongoing artistic production of situationists. What the SI were striving to achieve here—and the paradoxical position of avant-garde art as simultaneously destroying and preserving the culture it desires to overcome—was draw attention to the inadequacy of a purely artistic opposition to art. No doubt the demand to supersede the position of art in society lay at the heart of the entirety of avant-garde practice in the first half of the 20th century. And yet this demand exceeded the means of artists to achieve such a supersession, insofar as the artistic realisations of such a demand remain caught in the very field which they purported and desired to go beyond. Debord, thus, was fully aware that his filmic criticism of the society of the spectacle themselves did not get beyond this paradoxical existence of avant-garde art, insofar as they were objects that contributed to the spectacle of culture even if their content was unquestionably critical. In a phrase, they were anti-situationist, if, by ‘situationist’, we mean to describe the possibility of the ephemeral construction and consumption of life against capital’s reified and spectacular domination of the present. Consider Debord’s comments in The Society of the Spectacle: ‘Art in its period of dissolution—as the movement of negation pursuing the supersession [dépassement] of art within a historical society where history is not yet [directly] lived—is at once an art of change and the purest expression of the impossibility of change. The more grandiose its demands, the more its true realisation is beyond it. This art is necessarily avant-garde, and [at the same time] it is not. Its avant-garde is its own disappearance’ (thesis 190).
[15] Consider that the ‘constructed situation’ was presented as a ‘hypothesis’ by Debord in the founding document of the group. See, Report on the Construction of Situations (1957).
[17] See, Debord, The Hamburg Theses of September 1961 (1989). Note that the composition of the Hamburg Theses, given as the first few days of September in Debord’s 1989 note, corresponds with the more vague ‘Summer’ used here, as September contains the official end of summer in the Northern Hemisphere: 21 September, the eve of the Autumnal Equinox.
If an eye for an eye is the motto of revenge, it can also be bad advice. On 29 April 2022, a white nationalist attacked Asger Jorn’s 1959 painting The Disquieting Duck (shown above in Jorn’s form). Jorn’s ‘modification’ (also ‘disfiguration’) was on display at the Museum Jorn in Denmark. Lex talionis: just as Jorn ‘disfigured’ a pre-existing nineteenth century style idyll, so too Jorn suffers disfiguration.
An obvious interpretation is that a Danish painting is reclaimed by a Danish nationalist for his own cause—he affixed his own likeness and signed his name in permanent marker. In the rush to exploit an increasingly excluded populace and the last remnants of a near exhausted natural world, capitalists, their managers and fascist proxies advise us to ramp up the competition for goods on an ethnic and national level.
Jorn thought very differently. He believed competition should be playful. As a member of the Situationist International (1957-1972), Jorn emphasised creativity in a non-exploitative cosmic journey (see tapestry below). The idea is familiar from anti-militarism. The demand that borders should not be defended is by nature transnational, so as to not leave anyone vulnerable to invasion. A demand that has been raised by rebellious soldiers as much as those that oppose war from the outset. So ended the First World War in 1918—a direct result of the refusal of both German sailors and soldiers, and their Russian counterparts, to go on amidst their revolution against war and capitalism. Indeed, this refusal was also widely present on the so-called victorious side, among which soldiers and workers had engaged in strikes and mass mutiny. Beyond an end to hostilities, we glimpse a new world.
Thus, to defend Jorn’s modification/disfiguration as a ‘national treasure’, as has Jacob Thage, the museum director where the painting hangs, is not only inadequate, it plays directly into the nationalist rhetoric of its attackers (a second fascist filmed the attack, both being part of current far right organising).
The Disquieting Duck is not simply a thing to be passively contemplated or revered as a transcendent value—a practice and value moreover, that were roundly rejected by Jorn throughout his life. In keeping with his explicit revolutionary outlook, The Disquieting Duck presents us with a profound and striking intuition, namely that we can reclaim from idylls and elsewhere a common raw creativity.
The modification of a bucolic canvas by Jorn is particularly piquant given that if we succeed in overthrowing capitalism, we will need to creatively repair the damage already done. Indeed, the formal slab of paint over the “realist” idyll is also the content of the painting. One can intuit the relationship between this form and content and extend that to questions of the modification and repair of present social-historical “idylls”, whether capitalist hellscapes or imaginary, eutopian impulses in the present—i.e., the desire for something other and better.
On the other hand, the fascist closely grasped and used Jorn’s technique of modification to delete a true idea of a common creativity and replace it with a false one of national creativity. In a word, Jorn was recuperated. By disfiguring The Disquieting Duck, these fascists want revenge on Jorn’s way of thinking. For the rest of us, it’s just more bad advice. Jorn’s cosmic journey is aborted, leaving behind a sordid and empty claim of ownership, along with a snide dismissal of what is possible beyond an obsessive and acquisitive hatred. Nothing to see here folks: the arts have already become focussed on different identities asserting themselves. Here as elsewhere this involves a claim to having been silenced—even if in the case of the white nationalists such a claim is just another falsehood.
As we have discovered to our cost, nation states and market competition requires pollution, global warming, and zoonotic viruses. These are not so-called “freak” side effects, nor simply the outcomes of “immoral” business people nor “evil” states. For instance, the unleashed viruses are the direct result of the exploitation of the biodiverse biomes that previously contained them. Such exploitation is necessary under capitalism. Necessary because, if one group of capitalists backed by a nation state does not exploit in this, and the other ecologically destructive ways mentioned, they will be rapidly out-competed by others that do.
Today, the consequences are even more dire. Potential world and nuclear war is added to the climate catastrophe as the competing blocs of global capital are insatiably driven to catch a lead on each other. Whether under the flags of liberalism, fascism or state-socialism, all of these market capitalists seek to undermine solidarity and the social conditions of life. If we don’t act soon to defeat their increasingly warlike machinations, that nightmare of the Twentieth Century that we dreamed was over will finally be realised: universal destruction. This ain’t rock and roll, this is genocide.
Instead of disfiguring Jorn, we must reconfigure him. The only realistic way to confront the immense problems ahead is interlinked groups formed to favour the creative imagination as liberated from market strictures; groups that are embarking on the long voyage to a world beyond capitalism. These groups will also have to stand up to fascists—become antifa—to show the fash the true meaning of an eye for an eye.
Gerald Keaney Anthony Hayes May, 2022
fig. 2. Photo reproduction of Asger Jorn’s 1959-1960 collaboration with Pierre Wemaëre, Le Long Voyage, a tapestry more than fourteen meters long and twenty-four meters high. Travelling between continents or galaxies, or in the labyrinths of everyday life, in his n-dimensional continuum, Jorn looks like a Science Fiction painter. But contrary to the general spirit of this genre, creatures are well met. Inheritor of revolutionary universalism, Jorn proclaims: “Monsters of all planets, unite!” Anyone who disfigures Jorn’s work on the basis of misplaced personal and anecdotal prejudice is wrong.fig. 3. Photo reproduction of an oil painting sketch, Le Long Voyage, by Jorn and Wemaëre, 1959.
The Hamburg Theses of September 1961 (Note to serve in the history of the Situationist International)[1]
The ‘Hamburg Theses’ [‘Thèses de Hambourg’] surely constitute the most mysterious of all the documents that emerged from the SI; among which many have been widely reproduced, while others have been distributed discretely.
The ‘Hamburg Theses’ were mentioned several times in situationist publications, but a single citation was never given. For example, in Internationale Situationniste no. 7, pages 20, 31 and 47;[2] more indirectly in IS no. 9, page 3 (in the title of the editorial, ‘Now, the SI’ [‘Maintenant, l’I.S.’][3]; and also, in the still unpublished contributions of Attila Kotányi and Michèle Bernstein to the debate concerning A. Kotanyi’s programmatic propositions in 1963. The ‘Theses’ are mentioned without commentary in the ‘table of works cited’ (page 99) of Raspaud and Voyer’s L’Internationale situationniste (protagonistes, chronologie, bibliographie).[4]
In fact, the ‘Theses’ were conclusions, voluntarily kept secret, of a theoretical and strategic discussion that concerned the entirety of the conduct of the SI. The discussion took place in a series of randomly chosen bars in Hamburg over two or three days at the beginning of September 1961, between G. Debord, A. Kotányi and R. Vaneigem, who were then returning from the SI’s 5th Conference, which took place in Göteborg from the 28th to the 30th of August.[5] Alexander Trocchi, who was not present in Hamburg, would subsequently contribute to the ‘Theses.’ Deliberately, with the intention of leaving no trace that could be observed or analysed from outside the SI, nothing concerning this discussion and what it had concluded was ever written down. It was then agreed that the simplest summary of its rich and complex conclusions could be expressed in a single phrase: ‘Now, the SI must realise philosophy’ [‘L’I.S. doit, maintenant, réaliser la philosophie’].[6] Even this phrase was not written down. Thus, the conclusions were so well hidden that they have remained secret up until the present.
The ‘Hamburg Theses’ have had a considerable importance, in at least two respects. First, because they mark the most important choice made in the history of the SI. But also, as an experimental practice. From this latter point of view, the ‘Theses’ were a striking innovation in the succession of artistic avant-gardes, who hitherto had all given the impression of being eager to explain themselves.
The summarised conclusions evoked a celebrated formula of Marx from 1844 (in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel Philosophy of Right[7]). It meant that we should henceforth no longer attribute the least importance to any of the ideas [conceptions] of the revolutionary groups that still survived as heirs of the old social emancipation movement destroyed in the first half of our century; and therefore, that it would be better to count on the SI alone to relaunch a time of contestation as soon as possible, by way of revitalising all the basic starting points [bases de départ] that were established in the 1840s.[8] Once established this position did not imply the coming rupture with the artistic ‘right’ of the SI (who feebly desired only to repeat or continue modern art), but rendered it extremely probable. We can thus recognise that the ‘Hamburg Theses’ marked the end of the first period of the SI—that is research into a truly new artistic terrain (1957-61)—as well as fixing the departure point for the operation that led to the movement of May 1968, and what followed.
On the other hand, considering only the experimental originality (that is to say the absence of any written ‘Theses’) the subsequent socio-historical application of this formal innovation is equally remarkable—of course only after it had been subjected to a complete reversal. In fact, little more than twenty years later you could see that the process had encountered an unusual success in the highest bodies of many States. We now know that truly vital conclusions—[whose authors are] loath to inscribe them on computer networks, tape recordings or telex, and even wary of typewriters and photocopiers—often having been drafted in the form of handwritten notes are simply learned by heart. The draft is immediately destroyed.[9]
This note was written specifically for the Thomas Y. Levin,[10] who so tirelessly raced around the world to find traces of the effaced art of the Situationist International, as well as its various other historic infamies.
Translated by Anthony Hayes, 2022. This translation is a revision of one I made and published in 2017—see, Hayes, How The Situationist International Became What It Was, Appendix One. Note that this latest translation, though a complete draft, is liable to updates and corrections.
TRANSLATOR’S FOOTNOTES
[1] Two slightly different versions of Debord’s 1989 note exist. The first, published in 1997, excised the name of the original addressee, Thomas Y. Levin, from the text of the note. The second, published in 2008, reinstated the full text of the note as it was originally conceived: as a letter addressed to Thomas Y. Levin in November 1989. See, respectively, Guy Debord, ‘Les thèses de Hambourg en septembre 1961 (Note pour servir à l’histoire de l’Internationale Situationniste) [1989],’ in Internationale situationniste : Édition augmentée, Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1997; Guy Debord, ‘Lettre à Thomas Levin, Novembre 1989—Les thèses de Hambourg en septembre 1961 (Note pour servir à l’histoire de l’Internationale Situationniste),’ in Correspondance, volume 7, janvier 1988 – novembre 1994, ed. Patrick Mosconi, Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2008. Except where indicated in the footnotes, this translation follows the text of the 1997 Fayard edition.
[4] Jean-Jacques Raspaud and Jean-Pierre Voyer, L’internationale situationniste : chronologie, bibliographie, protagonistes (avec un index des noms insultés), Paris: Éditions Champ libre, 1972.
[5] Of the three pages Debord mentions, one will find a clear mention of the ‘Hamburg Theses’ only on two of them: pages 20 and 47. The citation on page 31 is far more allusive, speaking of the unnamed Theses as, in effect and appropriately, an urban drift (dérive) that gave rise to the Hamburg Theses in the immediate wake of the SI’s 5th Conference: ‘After the closing of the final session, the Conference ended in a much more constructive celebration, for which, unfortunately, there is no record [procès-verbal]. This celebration wound down into a drift [dérive] departing across the Sound, continuing on to the port of Frederikshavn—and for others extending on to Hamburg.’ Internationale Situationniste, ‘La Cinquième Conférence de l’I.S. à Göteborg,’ Internationale Situationniste, no. 7 (Avril 1962), p. 31.
[6] Debord noted above, that the title of the article, ‘Now, the SI’ [‘Maintenant, l’I.S.’] in IS no. 8 was ‘indirectly’ inspired by the Hamburg Theses. I take it that he means their ‘summarised conclusion’, namely: ‘L’I.S. doit, maintenant, réaliser la philosophie’. I’ve translated this as ‘Now, the SI must realise philosophy’, which draws out the connection explicitly between the summarised conclusion of the Hamburg Theses and the title of the article in IS no. 9. However, the summarised conclusions could also be literally translated as ‘The SI must, now, realise philosophy’, which perhaps gives a better indication of the ‘indirect’ influence.
[7] Debord is referring here to what is known in English, for example, as ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction’ (Marx Engels Collected Works) and ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction’ (Penguin Marx Library). This work was published in Marx’s lifetime, in the only issue of the journal Deutsch-Französische Jahrbüch in February 1844. It is the source of the famous chiasmus that the situationists would make so much of: the realization and abolition of philosophy. In English these Introductions contrast with another, earlier text that remained unpublished in Marx’s lifetime. Indeed, Marx had written the Introduction for a planned re-write of the earlier text for publication. This latter text has since been published, and translated, as ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’ (Marx Engels Collected Works) and ‘Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State’ (Penguin Marx Library). In French, this earlier, previously unpublished text is known in the edition used by Debord as ‘Critique de la philosophie de l’Etat de Hegel’, contrasting with the one published in Deutsch-Französische Jahrbüch: in French, ‘Contribution à la critique de la philosophie de l’Etat de Hegel’.
[8] The second clause of the forgoing sentence has caused me some pain over the years. Both extant English translations—by Reuben Keehan (n.d.) and Not Bored! (2008)—have rendered it the reverse of what I believe it to be. This was pointed out to me by Tom Bunyard, author of Debord, Time and Spectacle (2018), who had himself had it pointed out to him by another—both of whom I appreciate for bringing it to my attention. Unfortunately, this notice did not arrive soon enough to prevent me from naively relying solely upon these earlier translations in a brief article on the Hamburg Thesis, ‘Three Situationists walk into a bar’ (2015). Not only has this helped to shown me the worth of carefully checking one’s claims, but it has also proven perhaps more useful in gaining some humility regarding my own hasty judgements and barbs occasionally throw at other scholars and travellers who, like me, find themselves in a dark forest where the right way is lost.
[9] For more on the Hamburg Theses, see, Anthony Hayes, ‘How the Situationist International became what it was’ (Australian National University, 2017), chapter one, passim.
[10] Levin’s name is excised from the 1997 publication of the note. See footnote [1], above.
[11] In the 2008 publication of the full letter to Thomas Y. Levin, it is noted that ‘The signature is followed by the Chinese seal of Guy Debord’. See, Debord, ‘Lettre à Thomas Levin, Novembre 1989—Les thèses de Hambourg en septembre 1961 (Note pour servir à l’histoire de l’Internationale Situationniste).’
[You can read my translation of Debord’s The Hamburg Theses of September 1961here]
Once more on the Hamburg Theses
The plans announced in my last post with an eye to the 60th anniversary of the first publication of Internationale Situationniste no. 7 have been held up a little. Most obviously and unfortunately by the fact that I contracted covid shortly after posting. More pertinently by what I would call a certain lack I identified in the project of publishing new translations of articles from Internationale Situationniste no. 7 (hereafter IS no. 7).
For instance, I was struck by the spectral presence of what is arguably the pivotal situationist ‘document’, one whose shadow is cast over the entirety of IS no. 7: namely, the mysterious Hamburg Theses.
Published in April 1962, IS no. 7 marked the definitive turn of the SI toward the task that would take it up to May 1968: the relaunch of a revolutionary movement. However, whereas the seventh issue cements this turn, the turn itself had been underway for a good two years. In part, this can be seen in the arguments that raged over the significance of art that reached a peak at the 5th Conference of the group in August 1961. In part, it emerged from Debord’s participation in the Socialisme ou Barbarie group over 1960 and 1961. The Hamburg Theses of September 1961 were a response to both aspects of the SI’s evolution.
In two of the three documents that I have translated from IS no. 7, ‘Du rôle de l’I.S.’ (The Role of the SI), and Attila Kotányi’s ‘L’Étage suivant’ (The Next Stage), the Hamburg Theses are explicitly cited, even though no clear details of their content are revealed. As was discovered by Thomas Y. Levin in 1989, the Hamburg Theses never existed as a finished document. To the end of better contextualising these documents, I’ve decided to post a new translation of Debord’s 1989 note on the Hamburg Theses.[1]
In early September 1961, as the story goes, Guy Debord, Attila Kotányi and Raoul Vaneigem were on their return from the recently concluded 5th Conference of the Situationist International (SI). Having embarked, at the conferences end, on a drunken drift (dérive) across the Kattgatt sea from Göteborg to Frederikshavn, the three situationists, in the wake of the acrimonious discussions over what exactly constituted ‘anti-situationist’ activity (and why artistic activity under current circumstances constituted a subsection thereof), wended their way to Hamburg.[2] There, ‘in a series of randomly chosen bars in Hamburg over two or three days at the beginning of September 1961,’ Debord, Kotányi and Vaneigem composed the aptly named Hamburg Theses.[3]
The chief argumentative thrust of the Theses would find its way into other works by the situationists. Debord, in his 1989 note, handily summarised the non-existent ‘document’:
[T]he ‘Theses’ were conclusions, voluntarily kept secret, of a theoretical and strategic discussion that concerned the entirety of the conduct of the SI. […]
Deliberately, with the intention of leaving no trace that could be observed or analysed from outside the SI, nothing concerning this discussion and what it had concluded was ever written down. It was then agreed that the simplest summary of its rich and complex conclusions could be expressed in a single phrase: ‘Now, the SI must realise philosophy’. Even this phrase was not written down. Thus, the conclusions were so well hidden that they have remained secret up until the present. […]
The summarised conclusions evoked a celebrated formula of Marx from 1844 (in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel Philosophy of Right). It meant that we should henceforth no longer attribute the least importance to any of the ideas of the revolutionary groups that still survived as heirs of the old social emancipation movement destroyed in the first half of our century; and therefore, that it would be better to count on the SI alone to relaunch a time of contestation as soon as possible, by way of revitalising all the basic starting points that were established in the 1840s. Once established this position did not imply the coming rupture with the artistic ‘right’ of the SI (who feebly desired only to repeat or continue modern art) but rendered it extremely probable. We can thus recognise that the ‘Hamburg Theses’ marked the end of the first period of the SI—that is research into a truly new artistic terrain (1957-61)—as well as fixing the departure point for the operation that led to the movement of May 1968, and what followed.[4]
Two things need to be said in clarification of the foregoing.
First, the two extant English translations of Debord’s note on the Hamburg Theses contain mistranslations of a crucial phrase rendered in the last paragraph, above. In these earlier translations, ‘qu’il ne faudrait donc plus compter que sur la seule I.S.’, became, ‘that it was therefore no longer necessary to count on the SI alone’ (Reuben Keehan), and, ‘that it would no longer be necessary to count on the SI alone’ (Not Bored!). As I noted in my last post, Keehan and Not Bored’s translation have the unfortunate result of inverting the meaning of the phrase in question—arguably the pivotal phrase concerning the import of the Hamburg Theses for the future of the SI.
This mistake alone justifies a new English translation. Nonetheless, I feel that the confusion of these earlier translators was understandable. The phrase in question is a particularly convoluted one in the French.
Nonetheless, the meaning of this phrase in relation to the entire sentence of which it is a part—its internal coherence if you will—should give one pause. For instance, the idea that one would no longer count on the SI alone (as Keehan and Not Bored rendered the phrase in question) does not clearly follow from the preceding clause to which it is the conclusion, i.e., ‘that we should henceforth no longer attribute the least importance to any of the ideas of the revolutionary groups that still survived as heirs of the old social emancipation movement’. Perhaps these translators believed that Debord was talking here of the revolutionary movement they proposed to relaunch as opposed to the relaunching itself? Certainly, the SI never suggested that they alone would constitute such a revolutionary movement. However, Debord was not claiming here that the SI would alone constitute such a movement. Rather, he was arguing that given the way that the artistic and political contemporaries of the situationists remained beholden to forms of artistic and political spectacle that were recuperated and ‘destroyed in the first half of our century’, these contemporaries were more likely not to be involved in the relaunch of such a movement. Thus, it would be better to count on the SI alone.
Further, in the seventh issue of Internationale Situationniste, the situationists made the case for actual existence of the forces which would make up such a revolutionary movement—passively, in terms of the sheer weight of the increasing proletarianization of the world, and actively in so far as elements of this proletariat were being driven to revolt, albeit sometimes in less than ‘orthodox’ fashion. Thus, the SI put much store in what was then, in the early 1960s, signs of a burgeoning youth rebellion across the advanced industrial world, as well as the increase in ‘wildcat’ strikes already extensively commented upon by comrades in the Socialisme ou Barbarie group.[5]. The question then, from the situationist’s perspective, was one of ‘organis[ing] a coherent encounter between the elements of critique and negation (whether as acts or as ideas) that are now scattered around the world’.[6] However, such an organisation was, perforce, distinctly opposed to the various authoritarian and hierarchical conceptions of a political or artistic avant-garde beloved of much of the contemporaneous far-left, whether Marxist or anarchist. Underlining this anti-hierarchical sense, the situationists would later say of their role, ‘[w]e will only organize the detonation: the free explosion must escape us and any other control forever’.[7]
fig. 2. Detail of a map of Hamburg.
Secondly, critics have—perhaps justly—been confused when Debord in his 1989 note initially speaks of the Hamburg Thesis as being ‘the most mysterious of all the documents that emerged from the SI’ (my emphasis), only to later clarify that ‘nothing concerning this discussion and what it had concluded was ever written down’.[8] Debord speaks of the Hamburg Theses as a ‘document’ in an ironic fashion, in order to underline not only its non-existence in written form, but more pointedly to draw attention to this non-existence as its most singular and enduring quality.
In the same note, Debord wrote that the Hamburg Theses ‘were a striking innovation in the succession of artistic avant-gardes, who hitherto had all given the impression of being eager to explain themselves’.[9] The question, however, was never one of refusing ‘to explain themselves’, as the ongoing publication of Internationale Situationniste testifies.[10] Debord would explain the avant-garde nature of the Theses by underlining the positive nature of the destructive truth of the Hamburg Theses in a letter to Vaneigem:
we agreed not to write the Hamburg Theses, thereby all the better to impose in the future their central significance to our project. Thus, the enemy will not be able to feign approval of them without great difficulty.[11].
Here, the Theses are spoken of as a trap to the unwary. There is no question that their conclusions became a part of the explicit weaponry of the SI, and yet it was forever put out of reach, an authority impossible to appeal to just as the SI worked hard to disabuse those who, perhaps inevitably, had begun to treat them as authorities. As the group would later write, in an article moreover that took its title from the Hamburg Theses:
It is quite natural that our enemies succeed in partially using us. We are neither going to leave the present field of culture to them nor mix with them. The armchair advisors who want to admire and understand us from a respectful distance readily recommend to us the purity of the first attitude while they themselves adopt the second one. We reject this suspect formalism: like the proletariat, we cannot claim to be unexploitable under the present conditions; the best we can do is to strive to make any such exploitation entail the greatest possible risk for the exploiters.[12]
By refusing to publish a document called the Hamburg Theses, and so being less that ‘eager to explain themselves,’ Debord, Vaneigem and Kotányi were gesturing at what was coming to be a central aspect of the situationist project as they understood it.[13] In IS no. 7, in the wake of the Hamburg Theses, they wagered that, ‘situationist theory is in people like fish are in water’.[14] This sentence has proved puzzling for many readers, some of whom have read it ungenerously as yet more evidence of the SI’s megalomania. However, by 1961 the situationists around Debord, Vaneigem and Kotányi were beginning to conceive of the particularities of their project as a moment of a more general revolutionary contestation dispersed in time and space. Which is to say, as a moment of the forces of refusal and rebellion that were real products of the spread and development of capitalist alienation.
Contrary to Lenin and Trotsky, for example, and for that matter a fair amount of anarchist theory too, the SI did not see themselves as bringing a theory of revolution to the working classes. Rather, like Marx they held to the idea that such a theory and practice itself emerged from the experience of the alienated and conflictual nature of proletarian life. The young Marx had argued, in words echoed and approvingly used by the SI, that ‘[t]heory can be realised in a people only insofar as it is the realisation of the needs of that people’; thus, ‘[i]t is not enough for thought to strive for realisation, reality must itself strive towards thought’.[15] At best, the SI saw itself as a particularly coherent moment of the struggle for theory from below whose practical truth they found posed not only in their own faltering experiments in unitary urbanism and the constructed situation, but even more so in the wildcat strikes of workers as much as the then flourishing counter cultures of alienated working-class youth.
In opposition to many of their leftist and intellectual contemporaries, the situationists did not see that alienation was being ameliorated or revealed as an idealist delusion, but rather that it was ramified and multiplied with the intensification and extension of capitalist production and consumption across the globe. The question, then, was not one of educating the proletariat in the guise of the eternal sacrifice of the intellectual leader, but rather participating in the clarification and cohering of a fractured and dispersed contestation that was already underway.
And so, the peculiar and not so peculiar situationist sense of the ‘avant-garde’. In artistic, political and military terms, ‘avant-garde’ had come to designate those ‘in advance’ of the main body. In the Leninist and Stalinist vernaculars, it indicated the necessary gap between the merely social democratic consciousness of the worker and the avant-garde consciousness of the revolutionary who would lead the worker to the promised land. For the situationists, the notion of avant-garde, to the extent that it had come to merely justify an unchallenged hierarchy amenable to a capitalist division of labour, had ceased to be of any use. As Debord would put it some years later in The Society of the Spectacle,
Proletarian revolution depends entirely on the condition that, for the first time, theory as understanding of human practice be recognized and lived by the masses. It requires that workers become dialecticians and put their thought into practice.[16]
Which is not to say that the SI rejected its avant-garde role, but rather that it rejected the then dominant conceptions of what constituted a political or artistic avant-garde. Against both, Debord would pose that, ‘now, the first realisation of an avant-garde is the avant-garde itself’.[17] To have itself as its ‘realisation’, instead of the fetish of the art-object or theoretical manifesto, was simply to emphasis the true, ultimate object of the avant-garde. For the SI this was precisely the communist society it saw as the necessary condition for the realisation of the project first outlined in the hypothesis of the constructed situation back in 1957. The question, then, was one of realising the project of communism (or at least the situationist conception of such) and so abolishing the need for such an avant-garde like the SI—an abolition, moreover, that would be embodied in the realisation of a mass revolutionary movement. As they phrased it in IS no. 8, the situationist avant-garde would be ‘a party that supersedes itself, a party whose victory is at the same time its own disappearance’.[18]
The resonance with Marx’s notion of the realisation and abolition of philosophy is palpable—as Debord noted in his 1989 note on the Theses. Marx’s early conception of the intersection of a radical philosophical project and a proletariat struggling to overcome their respective alienations and separations amidst the commercial wastelands of a fledgling industrial capitalism would become a central point of refence for the situationists. Indeed, Debord considered that in Marx’s notion of the congruence of the self-abolition of philosophy and the proletariat could be found a process akin to the various artistic avant-gardes of the 19th and 20th centuries—all of whom appeared to move inexorably toward the progressive destruction of traditional aesthetic and artistic truth. It is here, in the artistic lineage of the SI that one can, perhaps, find the formal antecedents of the Hamburg Theses—the ‘height of avant-gardism’ as Debord called them.
Much as the Comte de Lautréamont and Stéphane Mallarmé had announced and celebrated the shipwreck of language and poetry in LesChants de Maldoror and Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, as Kazimir Malevich had paused on the representational abyss of the destruction of the art-object in his painting White on White, and as André Breton caught sight of the marvellous amidst the drab of everyday art and alienation, so too Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem, Attila Kotányi and Alexander Trocchi pushed on to the limits of expression given the prison house of the commodity and its various alienations. To manifest the anti-manifesto, and to leave nothing to posterity but the fading and fallible memory of the passage of a few persons through a rather brief unity of time.
As a young Letterist, Debord had set his sights on destroying the cinema, making a film in which the Letterist effacement of the cinematic image was taken to its extreme. In his film, Hurlements en faveur de Sade(1952), all the images were eliminated to leave a blank screen during its projection, variously white or black depending on the dialogue that was left to occasionally mark the film’s 80-minute run. A few years later, reacting against the nihilist tendencies of his Letterist and International Letterist days, Debord argued that the coming Situationist international must constitute ‘one step back’ from such an ‘external opposition’ to art.[19] The point, for Debord, was never one of re-entering the artistic domain under the banner of the SI but rather investigating the possible uses to which artistic practices could be deployed in developing the situationist hypothesis of the constructed situation. Having increasingly encountered the limits of such experimental use between 1957 and 1961, Debord and his circle forced the issue, breaking the SI away from the artistic morass it had fallen into in order to better chart the new waters of an avant-garde practice at once political and artistic—as much as it proposed, simultaneously, to supersede both. However, this was not a return to the heady days of Letterist nihilism. And the Hamburg Theses is perhaps the most singular proof of this. When Debord spoke of it as ‘the most mysterious, and also the most formally experimental [text] in the history of the SI’,[20] his reference was no longer the impasse of formal destruction that he had faced in his film, Hurlements en faveur de Sade. Rather, the Hamburg Theses, even as it embodied the destruction of form, posed the positivity at the heart of the situationist project: namely, that most pressing question of how best to bring about a social order conducive to the free play and construction of situations as outlined at the founding of the SI.
[1] Two slightly different versions of Debord’s 1989 note exist. The first, published in 1997, excised the name of the original addressee, Thomas Y. Levin, from the text of the note. The second, published in 2008, reinstated the full text of the note as it was originally conceived: as a letter addressed to Thomas Y. Levin in November 1989. See, respectively, Guy Debord, ‘Les thèses de Hambourg en septembre 1961 (Note pour servir à l’histoire de l’Internationale Situationniste) [1989],’ in Internationale situationniste : Édition augmentée, Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1997; Guy Debord, ‘Lettre à Thomas Levin, Novembre 1989—Les thèses de Hambourg en septembre 1961 (Note pour servir à l’histoire de l’Internationale Situationniste),’ in Correspondance, volume 7, janvier 1988 – novembre 1994, ed. Patrick Mosconi, Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2008.
[2] Internationale Situationniste, ‘La Cinquième Conférence de l’I.S. à Göteborg,’ Internationale Situationniste, no. 7 (Avril 1962).
[3] Debord, ‘Les thèses de Hambourg en septembre 1961 (Note pour servir à l’histoire de l’Internationale Situationniste) [1989].’
[4] This is an excerpt from my new translation of Debord’s 1989 note/letter on the Hamburg Theses. For details of the original French version, see footnote 1, above.
[5] See, respectively, ‘Unconditional Defence’ and ‘Instructions for an Insurrection’, both from IS no. 6 (August 1961). For more on the brief relationship between the SI and Socialisme ou Barbarie, see Anthony Hayes, ‘The Situationist International and the Rediscovery of the Revolutionary Workers’ Movement,’ in The Situationist International: A Critical Handbook, ed. Alastair Hemmens and Gabriel Zacarias, London: Pluto Press, 2020.
[6] Situationist International, ‘Now, the SI’, IS no. 9, August 1964.
[10] As Debord noted in a letter to his old Letterist comrade, Ivan Chtcheglov, even though publishing the journal could be ‘tiresome’ and prone to ‘inevitable defects’, it remained ‘one of our only weapons’, ‘a living voice […] to envision supersessions more precisely’. Guy Debord, ‘Lettre à Ivan Chtcheglov, 30 avril 1963,’ in Correspondance volume II septembre 1960 – décembre 1964, ed. Patrick Mosconi, Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2001.
[11] Guy Debord, ‘Lettre à Raoul Vaneigem, 15 février, 1962,’ in Correspondance volume II septembre 1960 – décembre 1964, ed. Patrick Mosconi, Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2001, p. 127. Italics in the original.
[12] Situationist International, ‘Now, the SI’, IS no. 9 (August 1964).
[13] Debord, ‘Les thèses de Hambourg en septembre 1961 (Note pour servir à l’histoire de l’Internationale Situationniste) [1989].’
[14] Internationale Situationniste, ‘Du rôle de l’I.S.,’ Internationale Situationniste no. 7 (Avril 1962).
[15] Karl Marx, ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction [1844],’ in Karl Marx & Frederich Engels Collected Works Vol. 3, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975, p. 183.
[16] Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, chapter 4, thesis 123.
[17] G.-E. Debord, ‘L’avant-garde en 1963 et après,’ in Guy Debord Œuvres, Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2006.
[19] Guy Debord, ‘One Step Back [1957],’ in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2004.
[20] Debord, ‘Lettre à Thomas Levin, 1 septembre 1989.’
fig. 1. Advances in alienation. The first color photograph of the whole Earth (western Hemisphere), shot from the ATS-3 satellite on 10 November 1967.
It is sixty years sinceInternationale Situationniste number 7 was published, dated April 1962. Partly in commemoration I plan on posting new translations of several articles from the seventh issue over the next month.
Our world is arguably less distant from the situationists, sixty years past, then theirs was from 1902. Certainly not in terms of clock time, but rather in lived time. No equal of the revolutionary insurgency and capitalist disasters of 1914 to 1945 have marked the decades since 1962. But more pointedly, the fitfully globalising capitalism of 1962 has come to fruition in the sixty years since. The commodity-spectacle has not only triumphed across the planet—remarkably expressed in the first colour photograph of the world-globe from space, taken the same year Debord published The Society of the Spectacle—it has ramified down the years, taken on new, more intensively reified forms as it has extended its reach throughout the social-natural metabolism.
The absence of revolutionary contestation in the 60 years since 1962, at a level equal to that of Russia in 1917, Germany in 1918-19, China in 1926 and Spain in 1936-37, can be attributed solely to the success of the global commodity-spectacle. The unification of the capitalist world over the past six decades has been singularly aimed at preventing a repeat of the revolutionary insurrections capitalism faced between 1914 and 1945. A more thoroughly integrated, quiescent proletariat has been perhaps the single greatest project of capital—a project, moreover, that has been achieved without the dangers of the old social-democratic politics that offered a working-class community of sorts in which the dream of a post-capitalist world was kept alive, albeit in a largely religious, and so ineffectual form. The contemporary spectacle, in which the communal moment of the old social-democratic politics has been thoroughly replaced by the fractured and atomizing pseudo-communities of mass consumer culture, is by far more successful at integrating and undermining any pesky proletarian aspirations for a world beyond capitalism. Alongside the full spectrum dominance of commodified dreams, whether of the cinematic, televisual, or computerised variety, even so-called radical theory and politics is churned out to the hum of machines and mass produced profit. Unsurprisingly much of it reiterates the impossibility of a revolutionary project.
The situationist project, 1957-1972, was an attempt to make sense of the legacy of the first half of the twentieth century, in both artistic and political terms, to the end of the immediate revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. On the basis of a thoroughgoing critique of the nostalgia that dominated the far-left and artistic avant-gardes of the 1950s and 60s, the situationists outlined a revolutionary project that targeted the weakness of not only their artistic and political contemporaries, but more pointedly the nature of the vast commodity-spectacle that had come into being in the wake of the Second World War. Unlike many of their erstwhile disciples and followers today, the situationists did not simply propose a theory of the present; even more they argued that the desire for a different future was already present amidst the misery of capitalist alienation, albeit in an often disguised, marginalised or unconscious fashion. Thus, their belief in no compromise with the forces of spectacular integration. One can only throw off the domination of the past if one’s eyes remain firmly fixed upon the future, and so necessarily against all the alienations of the present.
fig. 2. Illustration from Internationale Situationniste no. 7. The image is taken from a contemporary US ad for family-sized nuclear shelters. It is a deeply ideological rendering of a mid-20th century US family. No doubt if such a campaign was launched today, canny capitalists would be more attuned to using a “diverse” array of models to flog their grim wares.The aim would nonetheless remain the same. As the situationists mordantly noted at the time, “If this system were to go to the point of bluntly proclaiming that it imposes such an empty and hopeless existence that the best solution for everyone would be to go hang themselves, it would still succeed in managing a healthy and profitable business by producing standardized ropes”.
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The seventh issue of International Situationniste was a pivotal one in the life of the situationist group. It was the first issue to be published after the so-called ‘break with the artists’ in the first quarter of 1962, and the first issue to take up the project outlined by Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem, Attila Kotányi, and Alexander Trocchi in the enigmatic Hamburg Theses of September 1961.
In the articles of Internationale Situationniste no. 7 (hereafter IS no. 7), the group was chiefly concerned with outlining a distinctly situationist revolutionary project. Following on from their turn to critically appropriating the council communist perspective Debord found amongst comrades in the Socialisme ou Barbarie group, and announced in IS no. 6 (August 1961), issue seven finds the group more forcefully transforming itself from a group on the margins of artistic experimentation to one in which a ‘new type’ of revolutionary practice is being proposed. For instance, here we find not only the concept of ‘survival’ through which the SI would criticise the cult of work that then dominated what passed for a revolutionary left, but also the distinctly situationist notion that revolutionaries have more to learn from the glorious failures of the past, like the Paris Commune of 1871 and the German Revolution of 1918-19, than erstwhile “successes” like the so-called ‘really existing socialism’ of the then contemporaneous Soviet Union.
Today, IS no. 7 is perhaps best remembered for four articles: the first part of Raoul Vaneigem’s ‘Banalités de base’ (Basic Banalities, part 1), the lead articles, ‘Géopolitique de l’hibernation’ (Geopolitics of Hibernation), and ‘Les mauvais jours finiront’ (The Bad Days Will End), as well as ‘La cinquième conférence de l’I.S. à Göteborg’ (The Fifth SI Conference in Göteborg [excerpts]) in which details of the arguments that laid the groundwork for 1962 split were finally revealed. As linked, all of these articles exist in good English translations made by Ken Knabb. However, this selection, arguably the most important of the articles in IS no. 7, constitutes only about half of the written content of the number.
Nonetheless, the other articles from IS no. 7 exist in English translation, available here (The Role of the SI, Priority Communication, Situationist News, and the complete The Fifth SI Conference in Göteborg) and here (Sunset Boulevard). Links to all of the available translations of IS no. 7 are usefully available in one place, here. Unfortunately, these other translations, made by Reuben Keehan and Not Bored, are not always of the same high quality as Knabb’s. Indeed, many are desperately in need of an overhaul. At best, Keehan and Not Bored have made available many situationist articles that had previously only been available in the original French. At worst, they are traps to the unwary reader who either cannot or will not compare them to the original French.[1]
However, I cannot spare myself from all the critical barbs I’ve aimed at others. Over the last decade I have published the occasional translation of situationist and para-situationist texts on this blog, and elsewhere. Whereas I stand by my more recent efforts—for instance, my translations of Guy Debord’s Surrealism (2021) and Mustapha Khayati’s Marxisms (2016)—I cannot recommend the more distant ones—for instance, from my very first published translation of a situationist text, On the Exclusion of Attila Kotányi (2012), up to and including the equally awkward and flawed Socialism or Planète (2013). As such I feel that I bear some responsibility for any confusion or misinterpretation that has flowed from my less than adequate translations. To that end, and in the hope that I can continue to aid in the communication of situationist ideas, I offer more recent efforts in an attempt at exculpation. Indeed, one may say, like Hegel and Marx, that error is the surest road to the truth. Accordingly, none of my translations should be considered done with or finished, but rather works in progress—as, indeed, are all things, including the original situationist texts.
Over the coming weeks I will offer my translations of the following articles from IS no.7: ‘Du rôle de l’I.S.’ (The role of the SI), ‘Communication prioritaire’ (Priority Communication) and Attila Kotanyi’s ‘L’Étage suivant’ (The Next Stage). Though perhaps not as important as some of the other articles in the issue, all three of these are important for understanding the turn carried out by the Situationist International over 1961 and 1962, and further, shed light upon the influence that the mysterious Hamburg Theses exerted on the group. To that end I will also offer up my translation of Guy Debord’s 1989 text on the latter, ‘Les theses de Hambourg en septembre 1961’ (The Hamburg Theses of September 1961). Indeed, the two extent translations of this text of Debord’s (available here and here) both share an identical flaw—a mistranslation of a central phrase that inverts the phrase’s meaning. That these continue to be the only widely available translations of this important text is testament to the perilous state of much of what passes for scholarship, exegesis, and translation of the works of the Situationist International.
What we really need is not only well-made translations of all the article in IS no. 7, but also of the entire run of the Internationale Situationniste journal. Considering that Knabb’s large selection, collected in his Situationist International Anthology, is now more than 40 years old (originally published 1981, and substantially revised 2006), it is way past time that a complete collection was published in English.
If anyone reading this is interested in such a project do not hesitate to contact me: antyphayes [at] gmail [dot] com
fig. 3. The metallicized cover of Internationale Situationniste no. 7
Anthony Hayes April, 2022
FOOTNOTES
[1] An example of the latter can be found in James Trier’s recent book, Guy Debord, the Situationist International, and the Revolutionary Spirit (2019). However, Trier’s errors cannot be solely put down to the inadequate translations that he relied upon. To present just one example: on the third page of the introductory chapter he attributes an article by Guy Debord, All the King’s Men (title originally in English), to Michèle Bernstein—a mistake that he compounds by continuing to refer to her as the author throughout his book. Perhaps being distracted by Humpty Dumpty’s great fall, Trier has confused, or inadvertently associated Debord’s article with Bernstein’s similarly titled novel, Tous les chevaux du roi (All the King’s Horses). But such a mistake does not bode well for an author who claims to offer new information on the situationist group. At best, Trier’s work is a relatively straightforward and unimaginative description of the works of the situationists. However, the author’s efforts are hamstrung by his inability to engage with their works in the original French, and so judge the worth or usefulness of the extant translations.
A PDF of this document can be found here. Note that there are some differences between the version presented below and pdf (most notably, the complete bibliography is only available in the pdf version).
In September 1968 a brochure entitled Le Surrealisme: une revolution irrationnel (Surrealism: An irrational revolution) was published under the Encyclopédie du monde actuel (EMDA) imprint—one of its monthly Cahiers de l’encyclopédie du monde actuel (Notebooks from the Encyclopedia of the Contemporary World). The author of this booklet was Guy Debord, despite no author being attributed on the brochure.
Considering the distinctly non-situationist nature of its publication (more on this below) Debord’s essay on surrealism is, perhaps, not one of his major works, despite being his longest published piece upon the subject. Nonetheless, it demonstrates two things very clearly: first, his familiarity with the surrealists; and secondly, the importance of the surrealist project, as it was originally conceived, for the situationists. And, despite the situationists never been named throughout the essay, Debord cunningly inserts them implicitly into the last line when he quotes André Breton as seer: “It will fall to the innocence and to the anger of some future men to extract from Surrealism what cannot fail to be still alive, and to restore, at the cost of a beautiful ransacking, Surrealism to its proper goal.”[1] By Debord’s reckoning the situationists simply were those other horrible workers Rimbaud had foretold.[2]
Particularly striking, in the introductory section of the essay, is Debord’s synthetic account of the “self-annihilation”, “dissolution” and “destruction” that appeared in poetry and painting in the century before the surrealists. Debord had been refining his critique of what he also called the “decomposition of culture” since the 1950s. Scattered over various, mostly brief articles, one can find the elaboration of the situationist critique of “decomposition”, as well as elements of an historical account of its development across the arts, culminating in the “active decomposition” of Dada and Surrealism.[3] Certainly, a more theoretically nuanced elaboration of the self-abolition of culture and the decomposition of modern art can be found in chapter 8 of The Society of the Spectacle. But it is only here, in Debord’s essay on surrealism, that one can find in such succinct detail an account of the “self-annihilation” that appeared in the poetry and painting of the European avant-gardes. Debord’s essay is thus both accomplice and extension of his more explicitly situationist writing on the question.
Debord situates the Surrealists at the confluence of the revolutions of the early twentieth century. Not only the growing self-consciousness of the dissolution and destructive elements of Modern Art, but also in the phantastic eruption of psychoanalysis and, most importantly of all, “the last great offensive of the revolutionary proletarian movement” between 1917 and 1937.[4] There is no doubt that the fortunes of Surrealism and Dada are bound up with the insurrections and social dislocations of their time, a fact that the Surrealists became fitfully aware of and anxiously engaged with almost from the moment they marked out their anti-empire of dreams. Debord, though, is clear: the fortunes of revolutionary Surrealism faded with the defeat of the proletarian revolutionary movement. Which is not to say that he agreed with Surrealism’s chief failing in the face of the French Communist Party’s attempts to make them submit to their diktat (or better, disappear). As Debord wrote, regarding the pivotal importance of the poetic in the situationist conception of revolution,
[t]he point is not to put poetry at the service of revolution, but to put revolution at the service of poetry. We do not intend to repeat the mistake of the surrealists, who put themselves at the service of the revolution right when it had ceased to exist.[5]
Organised Surrealism eventually overcame its dalliance with and subjection to Stalinism, and this is to its credit. However, it was arguably too late to matter. Despite their efforts to constitute a revolutionary pole outside and against the French Communist Party—for instance in the anti-fascist Appel à la lutte, and the short lived Contre Attaque group—the results were ambiguous to say the least. After the Second World War, notwithstanding the ongoing activity of organised Surrealism and the obvious influence it exerted upon the post-war avant-gardes, the height of Surrealism’s revolutionary moment lay firmly in the past.
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The imprint under which Debord’s essay appeared, Encyclopédie du monde actuel (EMDA), was a commercial project and resembles, in its aims, the various collectible encyclopedias I recall occasionally buying from newsagents in my youth and adolescence in Australia in the late 1970s and 80s. See here for a detailed account, in French, of EDMA and its various offshoots.[6]
The ex-Situationist, Donald Nicholson-Smith, has said,
The participation of the “situationist group” in […] [EDMA] wasn’t official. There were a few small-paying jobs to which some members of the SI devoted themselves. The work consisted in drafting “EDMA cards” and, eventually, monthly booklets. (Each perforated card included a 500- word-long text; each booklet contained around 30 illustrated pages.)[7]
Debord’s booklet on Surrealism was one of many monthly booklets published under EDMA between November 1965 and November 1975. For instance, Mustapha Khayati wrote booklets on Marxism (translated and available here) and the Persian Gulf, and Raoul Vaneigem wrote a booklet on post-Second World War French poetry. Another booklet on Modern Painting, though written by a situationist, remains unattributed.[8]
Nicholson-Smith has recounted how he and his wife, Cathy Pozzo di Borgo, led their comrades into this publishing project, though he notes that it was hardly treated seriously by them, either as work or as an expression of situationist activity:
These editorial activities certainly couldn’t be described as “situationist.” Nevertheless, specific points of view are sometimes discernible in them. […] We were grosso modo [roughly] compensated per piece and individually by Editions Rencontre. This activity was, for all of us, as tedious as it was pleasant. Each person tried, in a general manner, to bypass or slyly parody the official constraints of “objectivity.”[9]
In the example of essay on Surrealism, the gist of Debord’s irony is surely contained in the subtitle.
*
All footnotes are mine. I have attempted to find, where available, English translations of all the works Debord cites in his article on Surrealism. In those cases in which I have been unable to find an extent translation, I have left the cited title in the original French. Further, in order to not overburden the translation with more footnotes than I have already provided, I have only footnoted references to works in those cases where Debord has quoted from them. Otherwise, information on available translations of other titles cited by Debord can be found in the Bibliography at the end.
Thanks to Peter Dunn and Alastair Hemmens for comments and help with the translation. Needless to say, all errors of meaning and style are attributable solely to me.
Anthony Hayes Canberra, June 2021
Surrealism: an irrational revolution
by Guy Debord
First published in Notebooks from the Encyclopedia of the Contemporary World (Cahiers de l’encyclopédie du monde actuel), Number 35, September 1968
There is hardly an aspect of modern life that is not more or less profoundly marked by surrealism—whether the arts, literature, advertising, or even politics. The modes of thought and creation elaborated by André Breton and his disciples have exploded everywhere—even still, when its subversive intent disappeared. Where did surrealism come from? Who were its adepts? And how has it evolved?
I. Origins
The crisis of poetry
1. Passionately partisan toward all the irrational aspects of human existence, the Surrealist movement is nonetheless the product of rationally understood historical conditions. It can seem that all modern culture was kept waiting over the last century for this ultimate moment. Such a process was first recorded in the history of French poetry. For instance, the founders of surrealism in Paris in 1924, all originally poets, acted on the basis of this primal experience.
2. Heralded by long-neglected tendencies in Romanticism—e.g., the extremist “Bouzingos”,[10] and the dream-work of Gérard de Nerval—the current which asserted itself around Charles Baudelaire in 1860 can be defined as that of the autonomy of poetic language. Henceforth, poetry—which is to say the people who wanted a poetic use of language—rejected all reasoning beyond itself and gave itself the goal of contemplating its own power. While undertaking the demolition of all conventional forms of expression, this poetry simultaneously set itself against the society whose values it denied and proclaimed itself in revolt against “bourgeois” order. Such poetry rejected everything in the world that was not poetry, while progressing toward its self-annihilation as poetry.[11]
3. This dissolution—manifest in the Symbolist era to the highest degree by Mallarmé, whose work was a progression to silence (“Verse has been tampered with”[12])—had arrived with the irruption of Rimbaud, with its new free language and surprisingly dense imagery. The Surrealists are the descendants of Rimbaud. Having wanted “the systematic derangement of all the senses,”[13] Rimbaud was finished with poetry by the age of 20, signifying the insufficiency of writing by fleeing to the antipodes after 1873.
4. More than in Rimbaud, the Surrealist subversion of language found its consummate model in the writings of the “Comte de Lautréamont”, aka Isidore Ducasse: Maldoror and the Preface to a then unknown work entitled Poésies. Lautréamont introduced into poetry a principle of destruction that did not come into more general use until later, and which was more radical than the Rimbaldian shock that dominated the years immediately after Lautréamont’s death at twenty-four in 1870. Unnoticed at the time, and still barely registered by the Symbolist critique twenty years later, Lautréamont’s œuvre would be rediscovered and promoted by the Surrealists. Lautréamont combined to an extreme a mastery of the powers of language and their self-critical negation. He reversed all the givens of culture and bequeathed to surrealism its definition of beauty: “beautiful […] as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing machine and an umbrella”.[14]
5. Before 1914 the consummation of the process of the internal destruction of the old poetic forms was pursued by: Alfred Jarry (principally in the theatrical “Ubu” cycle); in some aspects of the work of Apollinaire—“Oh mouths men are looking for a new language”[15]—the theoretician of The New Spirit in art and poetry (e.g., the suppression of punctuation in his collection Alcools and his later “conversation poems” [16]); the Futurist poetry initiated by the Italian Marinetti, which had Russian partisans—notably the young Mayakovski; and the pre-Dadaism of the poet-boxer Arthur Cravan, who become in the Great War “a deserter from seventeen countries”.[17] In Zurich in 1916 the Dada Movement was founded, in which the poem was reduced to the juxtaposition of independent words by Tristan Tzara (“thought is made in the mouth”[18]); and ultimately to onomatopoeia by Raoul Hausmann and Kurt Schwitters.
Destruction in Modern Art
1. In the other principal field of what would become the artistic expression of surrealism—painting—an analogous movement of liberation and negation was produced in parallel with that determining the stages of innovation in modern poetry. Impressionism, inaugurated in the works of Edouard Manet and Claude Monet, broke with academic representation and submission to the anecdotal subject from around 1860. The autonomous assertion of painting was founded on colour and moved toward an always more radical challenge to the accepted norms of figuration.[19]
2. Toward the end of the century, Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin pursued this research. Of these painters, Gauguin formulated the best program by writing that he “wanted to establish the right to dare everything”.[20] The Fauvism of their successors would, in turn, be surpassed around 1907 by the Cubism of Braque and Picasso. In the Cubist painting the represented object itself was disintegrated, beyond the perspective constructed amidst the Italian Renaissance.
3. Around 1910, an extreme tendency in Expressionism—a current principally from Germany and Northern Europe, whose content was explicitly linked to a social critique—constituted the “The Blue Rider” [Der Blaue Reiter] group in Munich, whose experiments in pure form led to abstraction: Paul Klee remaining on the frontier with Kandinsky the first to fully establish himself there. A little bit later Malevich’s “suprematism” consciously attained the supreme stage of the destruction of painting. Having exhibited a simple black square painted on a white background in 1915, Malevich painted a white square on a white background in 1918 during the Russian Revolution.
4. The anti-painting of the Dadaist movement more immediately determined the Surrealist explosion: collage, mixing image and writing, the correction of famous paintings (the Mona Lisa adorned with a moustache), and directly provocative objects like the mirror in which art lovers see only their own faces exhibited under the title of Portrait of an Imbecile (Portrait d’un Imbécile). Above all this absolute extremism was embodied in the work of Francis Picabia. Additionally, Giorgio de Chirico’s anxious portrayal of constructed landscapes in his “metaphysical phase” (before 1917) constituted one of the sources of Surrealist sensibility in painting and elsewhere.
5. Another decisive experiment for Surrealist painting was conducted by Marcel Duchamp. From 1912 he restricted himself to signing “readymade” objects, while composing a painting on glass which he left unfinished after many years of work: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even(La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même). Echoing the disdainful refusal which Rimbaud was the model for, Duchamp abandoned art from around the First World War, and for the last fifty years has been principally interested in the game of chess. His prestige has always been great among the Surrealists, none of whom have pushed contempt for artistic activity as far as he.
Freud and the exploration of the unconscious
1. The thought and affectivity that would define the Surrealist movement was influenced by the many challenges that exploded amidst the different disciplines of knowledge at the turn of the century. All these disputes converged on the refusal of Cartesian rationalism, which had reigned universally for a time in the history of European society. The old image of the world was shattered by anthropological ethnology, the appreciation of non-European and primitive art, Einstein’s theories of space-time relativity, and Planck’s discoveries of the structure of matter. Meanwhile, society itself was being called into question in certain respects through the dialectical thought originating with Hegel. However, at surrealism’s birth nothing produced an impact as decisive as that of the Freud’s psychoanalysis.
2. Freud’s discoveries of the role of the unconscious, repression, the interpretation of dreams, “Freudian slips”, and the aetiology and repression of neuroses, appeared in the last years of the 19th century. By 1910, Freudianism had become an international movement developing a theory and therapeutic. But in France, as in countries more generally submitted to the influence of Catholicism, psychoanalytical thought remained almost unknown and derided—even after the First World War. Psychoanalysis would find itself received in the poetic avant-garde in advance of its appearance in the medical milieu.
3. André Breton, who studied medicine, was one of the first defenders of Freud in France. Breton would derive a new form of poetry—automatic writing—from the Freudian technique of spontaneous association, and unveil it in his 1921 book, The Magnetic Fields, written in collaboration with Phillipe Soupault.[21] For surrealism, automatism—by which the creativity of the unconscious is recorded—represented the same method, now rationally understood, that accounted for the poetic language of Lautréamont and Rimbaud, and even the entire share of actual poetic creation evident in the bulk of poetry from previous times.
4. Surrealism considered that the possible uses for Freud’s discoveries went far beyond the foundation of a new poetry. They were also a perfect weapon for the liberation of human desire. Although such an interpretation did justice to the more revolutionary side of Freud’s work, it could not fail to oppose the conformist tendencies that remained in his social thought. The Surrealist position was comparable rather to Wilhelm Reich’s or the interpretations that have been presented in the wake of Herbert Marcuse’s. But a more fundamental misunderstanding arose from the unilateral Surrealist choice in favour of irrationalism, taken so far as a belief in occultism. Freud, on the contrary, always scientifically pursued an enlargement of the rational.
The malaise in civilisation
1. In the Surrealist revolt, what unified both the refusal of the old poetic conditions and the refusal of all moral and social values, was the experience of the First World War—into which the future Surrealists had for the most part been thrown. From the brutality of the conflict and the absurdity of the social order which imperturbably reconstituted itself upon its ruins, Dada drew its absolute and collective violence—which, in the troubled Germany of 1919, mingled with the attempted worker revolution of the Spartakists.[22] Surrealism did not retreat from the perspective inherited from Dada. In a social milieu less extensive but longer lived, it would incarnate a total critique of dominant values.
2. The Surrealist movement declared itself the radical enemy of religion, nationalism, the family and morality. It took up, with a vigour accentuated by the surprising forms of its language, all the positions of extremist anarchism (adding to it both a negation of science and common sense). It saluted in the work of the Marquis de Sade an exemplary manifestation of revolutionary thought.
3. Dostoyevsky stated that “without God […] everything is permitted”.[23] The Surrealists came to think this exactly—that everything is possible—and this euphoric confidence strongly coloured the first years of the movement. To their social critique (the first issue of the journal The Surrealist Revolution announced, “it is necessary to formulate a new declaration of the rights of man”[24]), they joined a firm belief in the magically efficacious value of poetry pushed to the absolute extreme. “In solving the main problems of life”,[25] the dictates of the unconscious would substitute itself for other psychic mechanisms.
4. From its first appearance, Surrealism was thus a report on the historic bankruptcy of bourgeois society—though only grasping the latter on the spiritual plane. It perceived and denounced the crisis of the bourgeoisie as being essentially a crisis of its psychic mechanisms, from which the Surrealists expected a concrete liberation resulting from the discovery of other psychic mechanisms. The disillusionment of the Surrealists regarding these soon led them to face the alternative of either acknowledging the need for a revolutionary struggle within present-day society, or simply accepting their self-imprisonment in the artistic representations they wanted to surpass—the latter being the sole area of the real world that their surrender to the dictates of the unconscious could effectively transform.
II. Aims and themes
The dictatorship of the dream
1. André Breton’s first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) opens with a contemptuous critique of real life. “Man, that inveterate dreamer” is satisfied by nothing, except the memories of childhood.[26] The imagination alone gives access to “the true life” that Rimbaud said was absent.[27] The dream and poetry freed of all conscious control are indiscriminately translations of this. One moves toward “the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality”.[28]
2. In the idealism of its first phase, surrealism defined itself as an insurrection of the spirit. In the third issue of The Surrealist Revolution, the insulting ‘Address to the Pope’ declared “no words can stop the spirit,” and the eulogistic ‘Letter to the Buddhist schools’ said that “logical Europe crushes the spirit endlessly […].”[29] At the same time the movement reproduced, somewhat abusively, a phrase of Hegel’s on a card:[30] “One cannot expect too much from the strength and power of the spirit”.[31]
3. To say everything is to completely reject the tyranny of social and mental rationality.[32] Surrealism was defined by Breton as, “pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern”.[33]
4. Surrealist poetry, “ultimately, can do without poems”.[34] However, inseparable from the possibility of saying everything must also be the possibility of doing everything. Although the desire to carry out revolutionary action in the real world quickly led Surrealism to various tactical considerations, the Second Manifesto of 1930 would still evoke, to the end of expressing its revolt, “the simplest Surrealist act,” which would consist of “shooting at random, for as long as you can, into the crowd”.[35] The Surrealists would take up the defence of some contemporary criminal actions: the Papon sisters who slaughtered their employers,[36] and Violette Nozières who killed her father.[37]
“Change Life”
1. In seeking to apply Rimbaud’s watchword, (“change life”), by identifying it with one of Marx’s, (“transform the world”), the Surrealists in practice relied upon collective experimentation with specific processes.[38] Automatic writing was initially expanded upon during the “time of trances”—in which speech was given in a hypnotic state, notably by Robert Desnos.[39]
2. The founders of the Surrealist movement, individually and as a group, practiced a systematic wandering in everyday life (this was foreshadowed, in a derisory fashion, towards the end of their participation in the French Dadaist movement with the organised visit to the Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre church[40]). A group would randomly walk along roads, departing from a town arbitrarily chosen on a map. Breton would write, in Nadja, that his steps carried him “almost invariably without specific purpose” toward the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle; or that every time he found himself at the Place Dauphin, he felt “the desire to go somewhere else gradually ebbing”.[41] Aragon, in Paris Peasant, would evoke the passages of the 9tharrondissement and the nocturnal exploration of Buttes-Chaumont.[42]
3. Without doubt, the most immediately effective technique by which the Surrealists modified their conditions of existence, and the reactions of their entourage, was the deliberate recourse to collective scandal. For example, the sabotage of conferences and theatrical performances;[43] the insults and violence at the banquet given in honour of the poet Saint-Pol-Roux;[44] and the insulting pamphlets against Paul Claudel, or when Anatole France died (A Corpse).
4. But the quest for the marvellous—of encounters expected from “objective chance”, which is the very response that desire called for, when passing by bizarre objects whose meaning is unknown, such as those discovered in the flea markets of Saint-Ouen[45]—would finally play out around encounters with other people: friendship and love. On the Rue de Grenelle, the Surrealists opened a “Centre” in which any who could respond to aspects of their research were invited to present themselves. A text of Breton’s, entitled ‘The New Spirit’ and collected in The Lost Steps, related the attempt, inexplicably impassioned, of finding an unknown person that Aragon and himself had successively seen some moments before in the street.
5. The most famous of these meetings was with the young woman, Nadja, reported by Breton in the book which bears her name. Nadja was spontaneously Surrealist. Dream and life were mixed-up for her. Freudian slips and coincidences directed her behaviour. In the end, she was committed to an insane asylum. With regards to this, Breton’s comment, “all confinements are arbitrary,” reminds us that surrealism, though often attracted to explore the boundaries of madness, denied that we could precisely define its frontier.[46]
Surrealist values
1. “The word ‘freedom’ alone is all that still excites me”, wrote Breton in the first Manifesto.[47] The entirety of the Surrealist movement can be defined as the expression and defence of this central value. They identified it with the revolt against all constraints which oppressed the individual—first by affirming an absolute atheism. The cause of freedom drove surrealism to rally around the perspective of social revolution, and then to denounce its authoritarian falsification.
2. For Surrealism, passionate love is the moment of true life (even in realist poetry). A life which deploys itself in the dimension of the marvellous, which abolishes the repressive logic that is inseparable from the dominant productive activity. Even though Surrealism declared itself in favour of the general liberation from morality, as well as saluting the emancipatory value of the “utopian” critique of Fourier, more restrictively its own conception of love was in principle monogamous (above all through the impact of Breton’s personal influence).[48] The Surrealists would chiefly exalt “mad love, unique love”.[49]
3. The reign of poetry as a unitary reality—well beyond poems or fugitive poetic moments that dispense “at well-spaced out intervals” a grace which opposes itself “in all respects to divine grace”[50]—depends upon the hypothesis that “there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions”.[51] The “determination of this point” has been the essential motive of Surrealist activity (Second Surrealist Manifesto).[52] In its research, Surrealism wanted to mix the most modern and diverse experimental means with the occultist tradition.
4. Although they wanted to guard against defining an aesthetic or even attaching any importance to artistic activity as such, Surrealism traced a distinct definition of beauty, certainly applicable beyond the artistic universe, but in actuality rendered in the determinate artistic creations the Surrealists nonetheless furnished: for instance, the “convulsive beauty” that Breton announced at the end of Nadja.[53] Envisaged solely for “passionate ends”, it is the beauty born from the “puzzling” encounter with new relations emerging between objects and existing facts.[54]
The means of communication
1. Above all, surrealism found expression in painting and poetry. In these it obtained the most remarkable results. Automatic writing—of which Breton would say that its history is that of a continuous misfortune[55]—was quickly abandoned to the profit of a partially worked-up poetry.[56] Painting followed two principal directions: the exact reproduction of elements whose coexistence appeared contradictory (e.g., Magritte); and a formal freedom which constituted an enigmatic ensemble (e.g., Max Ernst).
2. Surrealism produced films within the narrow limits imposed upon it by the problems of economics and censorship. It sought a fusion of poetry and plastic expression in the poem-object. The dream accounts and various formulas for irrational collective play were also the “fixed forms” created by its activities.[57] Except in the case of the Belgian Surrealist André Souris, surrealism was not preoccupied with music, in which the contemporaneous experiments of Edgar Varese (after the semi-Dadaism of Erik Satie) pushed toward the general course of artistic dissolution. In principle Surrealism was contemptuous toward the novel, ignoring James Joyce, whose work marked the complete destruction of this genre by way of a liberation of language the counterpart of that which had ruined the old poetry. In contrast, surrealism did not intervene in architecture due to its lack of material means. Nonetheless, the Surrealists paid the utmost attention to some of the free creations and dreamlike currents in this domain: that of Postman Cheval[58] and Gaudi in Barcelona.
3. The critical activity of surrealism was considerable. This was primarily the case in the accounts of its own research into the dream and life (e.g., Nadja, Communicating Vessels). Increasingly, and in parallel, there was also the rediscovery and re-evaluation of past cultural works, both in painting—from Bosch to Arcimboldo—and among writers. The Anthology of Black Humour presented by Breton constituted the most famous monument of this latter aspect of the Surrealist oeuvre.
4. The theoretical and programmatic work which accompanied all the stages of the movement was principally carried out by André Breton. In Surrealism’s first phase, one must add to Breton’s Manifestoes, the writing—in different ways—of Pierre Naville, Antoine Artaud, Louis Aragon and Paul Nougé.[59] Later, Pierre Mabille (Egregores) and Nicolas Calas (Hearths of Arson) attempted a deepening of theory.[60] At the end of the Second World War, Benjamin Péret in The Dishonour of the Poets would defend the Surrealist positions on poetry and revolution, against the formal and political reaction of patriotic poetry.[61]
III. The men and their work
André Breton
1. The principal works by which André Breton asserted himself as the leading theoretician of surrealism were: The Lost Steps (1924), Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), Introduction to the Discourse on the Paucity of Reality (1927), Nadja (1928), TheSecond Surrealist Manifesto (1930), Communicating Vessels (1932), Mad Love (1937), and Anthology of Black Humour (1940).
2. Though his theoretical activity has long inclined cultivated opinion to underestimate Breton’s poetic work—to the advantage of those Surrealists considered more specifically poets (notably Paul Éluard)—today it is difficult not to recognise the highest poetic accomplishment of the movement in André Breton’s oeuvre. His principal publications are: Earthlight (1923), Free Union (1931), The Revolver with the White Hair (1932), Fata Morgana (1940), and Ode to Charles Fourier (1945).
3. André Breton’s activity as a critic, often mixed in with those of his books that should rather be designated theoretical works (in particular, The Lost Steps and Anthology of Black Humour), was also deployed, throughout his life, in a great number of articles and prefaces that considered all those old and contemporary works—from Maturin to Lautréamont, and from Germain Nouveau to Maurice Fourré—that could be related to the Surrealist spirit. In 1949, he unmasked—upon a first reading—a supposed unpublished work of Rimbaud’s, which had been authenticated by experts (documents pertaining to this collected in Flagrant délit).
4. One must reserve a special place for his critical and theoretical work on painting. It is expressed in books (from Surrealism and Painting in 1928 up until L’Art magique in 1957, the latter work in collaboration with Gérard Legrand), and in the numerous prefaces for exhibitions, which toward the end of his life became his principal work.
5. Finally, the most irreplaceable part of Andre Breton’s activity was his role as instigator and ringleader of the Surrealist movement, which, since its origin, has been identified with his life. Breton was the strategist of the entire struggle.
The Surrealist poets
1. Of all the early Surrealists, Benjamin Péret (1899-1959) remained ever faithful to the initial project—just as nothing corrupted the friendship that bound him to Breton. As well as fighting for the Spanish Revolution in the POUM militia, all his life Péret chose subversion, which he expressed in the supremely free form and content of his poetry: Dormir, dormir dans les Pierres (1925), From the Hidden Storehouse (1934), and I Won’t Stoop to That (1936).[62] His entry of the poem ‘Epitaph for a monument to the war dead’ into an Académie Française competition has been noted as the greatest scandal a Surrealist poem ever provoked.[63]
2. Paul Éluard (1895-1952) was the first Surrealist to be recognised as possessing the qualities of an authentic poet—despite belonging to the movement. After Capital of Pain (1926), he would publish several collections which benefited from a certain notoriety: Love, Poetry (1929), La Vie immédiate (1932), La Rose publique (1934), and Cours naturel (1938). Abandoning surrealism in 1939 to rally to the French Communist Party, Éluard was the author who maintained the most personal tone during the Resistance.
3. In contrast to his poetic collections—Le Mouvement perpétuel (1925), Persécuté, Persécuteur (1930)—Louis Aragon contributed, above all, to Surrealist expression in his prose works: Paris Peasant (1926) and Treatise on Style (1928), after producing one of the major works of the pre-Surrealist period: Anicent or the Panorama (1921). However, it was the polemics and prosecutions set in train by his political poem ‘Red Front’ in 1931 that produced his rupture with his Surrealist friends. Aragon joined with the Comintern line, and from then on dedicated himself to a militant and didactic poetry (e.g. Hourra l’Oural!, 1936), consisting of a return to traditional versification, which was to blossom in his neo-classical poems of the Resistance (‘Le Crève-Cœur’, 1940—‘La Diane française, 1945).
4. A little earlier, in 1930, Robert Desnos (1900-1945) renounced the “essential, unforgettable role”—as Breton emphasised in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism[64]—which he had played from the beginning of surrealism (Mourning for Mourning, 1924, Liberty or Love, 1927), to dedicate himself to a restoration of regular verse. He remained faithful to a political engagement which led him to the Resistance and then to his death in a Nazi concentration camp.
5. Many other poets embellished surrealism: Raymond Queneau, René Char, Tristan Tzara (for a brief time after Dadaism and before he joined the French Communist Party), Jacques Prévert (almost all of his work would only be published 15 years later), and in his youth, Aimé Césaire. The Belgian, Henri Michaux, should be mentioned separately, because he never belonged to the movement, but drew close to it through an undeniably similar inspiration.
The painters and other artists
1. Undoubtedly Max Ernst is the greatest of Surrealist painters. Consistently exemplifying the Surrealist sensibility, Ernst experimented with all the possibilities taken up by subsequent painting: from his work Friends Reunion (Rendez-vous des Amis) (1922), constructed according to the aesthetic of the collage and heralding “pop-art”, to the lyrical abstraction of Europe After the Rain (L’Europe apres la Pluie) (1940-42), which, at the time of the Second World War marked out the path for “action painting”.
2. The Belgian René Magritte (1898-1967), upon discovering his own expressive form at the beginning of surrealism, e.g. The Lost Jockey (Le Jockey perdu), for ever after remained faithful to such precise figurative representations of impossible meetings—of which The Empire of Lights (L’Empire des Lumières), painted after the last war, is perhaps the most striking realisation.
3. Many other painters, originally from various other countries, participated in the Surrealist movement (Hans Arp, Yves Tanguy, André Masson, Victor Brauner, Salvador Dali, Oscar Dominguez, Wolfgang Paalen, Roberto Matta, Toyen, Arshile Gorki), or were to some degree influenced by its results and momentarily fell under its sign.
4. Furthermore, surrealism has defined the work of many other creators operating in other arts. For instance, the American photographer Man Ray, and the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti (the latter for a brief time until the early nineteen thirties). Undoubtedly, the most celebrated example is that of the cineaste Luis Buñuel. In 1929 he realised, in collaboration with Salvador Dali, the short film The Andalusian Dog (Un Chien andalou), and in 1931, the longer film The Golden Age (L’Age d’Or), which was almost immediately sabotaged by activists of the extreme right and then banned by the police. In both films lies the essential expression of cinematic surrealism.
The lost poets
1. If many of the original and later participants abandoned the Surrealist revolt after a time to settle down under various artistic styles, some, on the contrary, disappeared by living this revolt to the absolute extreme—and the refusal it proclaimed. They were swept away by the madness and despair that constituted the other face of the Surrealist demand for total liberation.
2. The most well-known case is that of the poet Antonin Artaud (Umbilical Limbo, 1924[65]). An actor as well, Artaud conceived a “theatre of cruelty” (i.e. direct aggression aimed at modifying the existence of the spectator), which is today at the centre of the most advanced theatrical research. Entirely devoted to an all-consuming metaphysical revolt, and quickly proving incapable of following the attempts at political revolution which preoccupied his comrades, Artaud was soon alone, and then found himself locked away for many years in an asylum where he wrote the astonishing Letters from Rodez. He would die soon after the Second World War, released but by no means pacified (e.g., To Have Done with the Judgement of God).
3. Leaving no other work apart from the texts collected in 1934 under the title Papiers Posthumes,[66] Jacques Rigaut openly displayed his passion for suicide, comparable to that which would later rule over the Italian writer Cesare Pavese. But what was an “absurd vice” to the latter, appeared a logical necessity to Rigaut the Surrealist. He played a part in that borderline tendency of surrealism that was always inclined to contemptuously judge the acceptance of the existing conditions that evidently included Surrealist activity—despite its extreme declarations. Some years before his death, at the beginning of the movement, Rigaut would address this critique: “You are poets, whereas I am on the side of death”.[67]
4. A similar desire for self-destruction possessed René Crevel, author of the story Difficult Death (1926), and the violent pamphlet Le Clavecin de Diderot (1932). In 1925, in the second issue of TheSurrealist Revolution, Crevel responded quite positively to an enquiry entitled Is suicide a solution?: “Human success is fake money, lubricant for wooden horses. […] The life that I accept is the most terrible argument against myself”.[68] In 1935 he would commit suicide according to a procedure he described exactly in his 1924 book, Détours.
5. It is necessary to place Jacques Vaché here too, who killed himself some weeks after the 1918 armistice. He had written that “I object to being killed in wartime”.[69] Met by the young André Breton in 1916 in a military hospital in Nantes, Vaché certainly exercised the stronger influence. He diverted [détourné] Breton from what still attracted him to the vocation of poet.[70] Vaché lived and affirmed a “theatrical and joyless futility of everything”.[71] Nothing of modern culture—Alfred Jarry excepted—could resist his systematic disdain. Though dead before knowing of Dada, Vaché prefigured its general attitude. As in the case of Rigaut, the sole book of Vaché’s that exists, War Letters (1919), is a posthumous collection, only containing the rare letters that he wrote, almost all of which are addressed to Breton.
IV. The history of the movement
The revolt of the spirit
1. Napoleon’s celebrated remark to Goethe, “Destiny is politics”, can be applied more absolutely to the destiny of surrealism than all other modern adventures. Surrealism quickly found itself desiring to surpass its pure voluntarism of the spirit in order to meet political reality—first as progress, then defeat. Surrealism never went beyond this defeat, and all the parallel attempts that wanted to repeat the “automatic” innocence of its beginnings were simply disgraceful repetitions.[72]
2. The idealism of surrealism’s first phase was expressed in its most extreme form by Louis Aragon. Having evoked “senile Moscow” in his contribution to A Corpse (devoted to the death of Anatole France), he found himself entangled in a polemic with Jean Bernier, editor of the communist review Clarté.[73] In the second number of The Surrealist Revolution Aragon responded: “You have chosen to isolate as a prank a phrase which testifies to my lack of appetite for the Bolshevik government, and with it all of communism. […] I place the spirit of revolt well beyond all politics. […] The Russian Revolution? forgive me for shrugging my shoulders. On the level of ideas, it is, at best, a vague ministerial crisis. It would really be prudent of you to treat a little less casually those who have sacrificed their existence to the things of the spirit.”[74]
3. Above all under the influence of Antonin Artaud, the third number of The Surrealist Revolution (April 1925) was almost entirely dedicated to a hymn for the East—in which its thinking, pessimism, and even mysticism, is clearly preferred in its entirety to the technical logic of the West.[75] Asia is the “citadel of all hopes”.[76] But it is always a question of its thought. Nevertheless, for Artaud this coexistence of purely metaphysical demands and theatrical preoccupations would lead to his expulsion the following year.
4. In the same year, 1925, the Rif rebellion in Morocco—repressed with difficulty by the united action of the French and Spanish armies—gave the Surrealists the opportunity to intervene on the political terrain. In common with the editors of the journals Clarte and Philosophies (Norbert Guterman, Henri Lefebvre, Georges Politzer), they signed the manifesto The Revolution First and Always (October 1925) which declared, “We are not utopians: we conceive this Revolution only in its social form.”[77]
5. In 1926, Pierre Naville would go even further, in his essay La Révolution et les Intellectuels—Que pensent faire les surréalistes ?[78] He would rally entirely to Marxism, presenting the proletarian struggle as the sole concrete perspective and would thus quit the Surrealist movement.
In the service of the revolution
1. Under the pressure of these experiences, the Surrealists became close to the French Communist Party. Breton, who declared himself a partisan of all revolutionary action in July 1925, “even if it takes as its starting point the class struggle, and only provided that it leads far enough,”[79] joined the Communist Party a year later, at the same time as his friends Aragon, Éluard, Péret and Unik. They presented their position in the brochure Au Grand Jour (1927).[80]
2. The disillusion was rapid. The communists showed a keen distrust of all those who adhered to strange, independent preoccupations. Breton could not bear the trivial militantism that they wanted to impose upon him.[81] At the same time they deplored the respect that the communists showed for those that the Surrealists had condemned as bourgeois cultural trash (e.g., Romain Rolland, Henri Barbusse). The Surrealists’ opposition did not extend to an analyse of the evolution of either the Russian regime or the Communist International in the previous decade. So recently born from the desire “to have an end to the ancient regime of the spirit”,[82] the Surrealists would attribute the weakness of the Party at this moment strictly to its “materialist” and political functions, founded uniquely on its defence of “material advantage” (Breton, Legitimate Defence).[83]
3. Additionally, another tendency was constituted from Surrealism. Rejecting its politicisation, this tendency would evolve into a revival of literary activity by rejecting the group discipline that established Surrealism. The essence of this current’s common expression was the revolt against Breton, who was identified—not without cause—with such discipline. Breton was the target of the virulent A Corpse of 1930, written by Raymond Queneau, Jacques Prévert, Robert Desnos, Michel Leiris, and Georges Bataille.[84] Though never a member of the Surrealist group, Bataille gathered for a time the dissidents around his journal Documents.
4. From 1930 the journal of the movement (which would cease to appear in 1933) changed its title, becoming Surrealism in the Service of the Revolution. Breton’s circle was dissatisfied with the Communist Party but declared that they would place themselves at the command of the Third International. Contrary to their opponent, Pierre Naville, who had become a partisan of Trotsky’s and his International Left Opposition, the Surrealists remained oriented toward the orthodox Communist organisation while claiming to keep their distance.
5. This ambiguous position would lead to a new crisis for Surrealism. In 1931 Aragon and Georges Sadoul rallied completely to the Communist line and renounced their Surrealist friends.[85] In 1933, Breton, Éluard and Crevel were formally excluded from the Party, because of an article in the Surrealist journal written by Ferdinand Alquié, which denounced “the wind of cretinization blowing from the USSR”.[86]
Surrealism alone
1. In France, after the fascist coup attempt of 6 February 1934, the Surrealists took the initiative of issuing a Appel à la lutte [Call to Fight],[87] which would become the first platform of the future Vigilance Committee of Intellectuals.[88] This committee, which demanded that worker organisations realise “unity of proletarian action”, would play a role in the origins of the Popular Front of 1936 in France.[89] But while the formation of the Popular Front would result in the dissipation of the contempt nourished among the left against the Communist Party—even silencing those critiques considered detrimental to common action (the intellectual milieu notably would orient itself toward a sympathetic position with the Communist Party)—the Surrealists would always find yet more adversaries in the Party, and so become more isolated. In 1933, in the brochure On the Time When the Surrealists Were Right, they denounced Soviet Russia and its “all-powerful leader under whom this regime is turning into the very negation of what it should be and what it has been”.[90]
2. The Surrealist declaration, The Truth About the Moscow Trials, read by Breton at a meeting on 3 September 1936, asserted: “we consider the verdict of Moscow, and its execution, to be abominable and unpardonable. […] We believe such undertakings dishonour a regime for ever.”[91] Stalin was denounced as “the great negator and principle enemy of the proletarian revolution.”[92] Further, “Defence of the USSR” must be replaced with the slogan “Defence of Revolutionary Spain”.[93] The same declaration saluted the revolutionary forces of the CNT-FAI and the POUM, and announced that the Stalinists “who have entered into a pact with the capitalist states, are doing everything in their power to fragment these elements [i.e. the CNT-FAI and the POUM].”[94] In 1937 the Surrealists were among those who attempted to mobilize international opinion by revealing the persecutions against the POUM and the sabotage of the Spanish Revolution. But alas, already in vain.
3. The final political foray by surrealism was made in 1938 in accord with Trotsky, exiled in Mexico. It was based upon an “International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art”, through which they wanted to associate independent artistic creation with authentic revolutionary struggle.[95] The manifesto, written by Breton and Trotsky, but signed in place of the latter by the painter Diego Rivera, declared: “If, for the development of the material forces of production, the revolution must build a socialist regime with centralized control, then to develop intellectual creation, an anarchist regime of individual freedom must be established and assured from the very beginning.”[96]
4. The Second World War scattered the Surrealists. Breton, Péret, Tanguy, and Calas would go to the Americas,[97] whereas Éluard remained in France and definitively rallied behind the French Communist Party. It marked the end of Surrealism’s political action, and, at the same time, the termination of the truly creative phase of the movement: almost all the most important books of Surrealism had been published before 1939. The most notable artists had already appeared and had produced the essentials of their œuvre, on which they would continue to work thereafter.
5. The nineteen thirties, in which the “Surrealist revolution” met with total defeat, linked to the collapse of revolutionary perspectives across the world and the concomitant rise of fascism and the march to the Second World War, was also the time in which Surrealism became better known in many European countries, the United States, and Japan—and in which different affiliated groups were established. Several “International Expositions of Surrealism”—the first in London in 1936, the second in Paris in 1938—have demonstrated the artistic richness of the movement.
Results
1. In France, after the war, the importance of surrealism was admitted, though initially in a paradoxical fashion. Many former Surrealists were recognised as having major artistic or literary value, but for personal works after their passage through the movement. For instance, Raymond Queneau for his novels (Pierrot mon ami, 1943, The Skin of Dreams, 1945), and his poems; Michel Leiris for his autobiography Manhood (1939); Jacques Prévert, who, with Paroles (1946) was the most popular poet of the time. Aragon and Éluard were recognised as masters of the poetry of the Resistance. Similarly, Tzara, who was also a poet of the Communist Party, though less representative. René Char, former Maquis leader, attained a certain notoriety with his Leaves of Hypnos. Henri Michaux was also discovered. Likewise, among the painters, it is Dali—having become Catholic and Francoist, and a methodical self-publicist—who offered the public a somewhat altered vision of Surrealism. In contrast, the movement was almost unknown in its real history, and figured no more in the actual avant-garde of the development of ideas. This role was now taken up by Existentialist thought and the literary productions of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Maurice Mereau-Ponty.
2. Nonetheless, as the fashions and enthusiasms of the post-war dissipated, Surrealism took its place as the principal current in modern art. A number of books contributed to illuminating this role: Maurice Nadeau’s History of Surrealism, Ferdinand Alquié’s Philosophy of Surrealism, Victor Crastre’s André Breton and Ado Kyrou’s Le Surrealisme au Cinema.[98] At the same time, the resumption of diverse cultural experimentation necessarily led to the acknowledgment of Surrealism’s contribution, insofar as it embodied almost the totality of “avant-garde” results which had to be surpassed.[99] Many foundational Surrealist books were republished in the years immediately prior to this.
3. During the entirety of this time a Surrealist group continued to exist around André Breton. The group expressed itself in a succession of journals: Medium, Le surréalisme, même, and La Brèche. The latest to date is Archibras.[100] This group, composed chiefly of young adherents faithful to Surrealist orthodoxy, preserved a formal functional likeness with surrealism before the war. For instance, it decided upon several exclusions (notably that of Max Ernst, who accepted a Prize from the Venice Biennale).[101] It cannot be said that these epigones produced any striking work whatsoever. The main change in the thought of the group was constituted by an always more distinct recourse to occult interpretations, i.e., from the “Great Initiates” to Gnosis.[102]
4. Without doubt the central contradiction of surrealism was to produce a new artistic era based on the radical refusal of art. Surrealism has always been, nonetheless, conscious of this difficulty. Knowing well that it must reach beyond the artistic world, it attempted to finally break through this frontier—along which it still meanders—by way of revolutionary practice and its expectation of finding a sort of magical path. This paramount incompatibility was aggravated by circumstance: Surrealism found its time dominated by the contradiction of the revolutionary process itself. It did not clearly recognise this contradiction and reacted to the collapse of revolutionary perspectives by reinforcing its tendency to believe in traditional magic.
5. It is in such an art wrapped in magic (an art moreover that should comment upon itself rather than produce more in order to be finished with art) that Surrealism placed its last hope. It is permissible to think that the results of such a great human project are a little paltry, and that so many of its novelties have fallen into a well-worn conformism. Nonetheless, there remains the example of a demand that bears upon the entirety of life, and the fact that this protest found its own language. Perhaps the last word on the irreducibly successful part of the Surrealist adventure can be found in this prognostication from Breton’s Second ManifestoofSurrealism: “It will fall to the innocence and to the anger of some future men to extract from Surrealism what cannot fail to be still alive, and to restore, at the cost of a beautiful ransacking, Surrealism to its proper goal.”?[103]
TRANSLATOR’S FOOTNOTES
[1] André Breton, ‘Second Surrealist Manifesto [1930]’, in Manifestoes of Surrealism, ed. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1998, p. 164. Translation modified. No doubt Debord considered the Situationist International precisely as these future men beautifully ransacking the Surrealist project.
[2] See, Arthur Rimbaud’s letter to Paul Demeny, 15 May 1871, in Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters: A Bilingual Edition (2005). In the early days of the Situationist International, Debord presented the group as precisely the “movement Breton promised to rally to if it were to appear”—a promise that he never kept (at least by situationist reckoning). See, Situationist International, ‘The Sound and the Fury [1958]’, in Situationist International Anthology: Revised and Expanded Edition, ed. Ken Knabb, Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006.
[4] Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb, Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, [1967] 2014, thesis 191.
[5] Guy Debord, ‘All the King’s Men [1963]’, in Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb, Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006.
[6] André Decollogny, Portrait d’une encyclopédie de l’actualité : Encyclopédie du monde actuel EDMA (Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Bibliothécaire, 1977).
[7] Donald Nicholson-Smith, ‘On the Encyclopédie du monde actuel. Remarks collected by Gérard Berréby’, translated by NOT BORED! (2014).
[10] Jean-Francois Martos calls the Bozingos (Fr.: “lesBousingots”), an “extremist fringe” of Romanticism, “who appeared in France after the revolution of 1830, and who the Dadaists recognised as their forebears”. See, Jean-François Martos, Histoire de l’internationale situationniste, Paris: Éditions Ivrea, [1989] 1995, p. 83. Bohemian poets and artists, their members included Petrus Borel, Gérard de Nerval, Théophile Gautier, Philothée O’Neddy, Xavier Forneret and Aloysius Bertrand. For a brief account of the Bouzingos, see, Enid Starkie, ‘Bouzingos and Jeunes-France’, in On Bohemia: The Code of the Self-Exiled, ed. Cesar Graña and Marigay Graña, London: Routledge, 2017.
[11] In sum, Debord’s perspective on the movement of decomposition in poetry—and by extension all of the arts.
[12] “On a touché au vers ” Literally, “we have touched upon the verse” or more colloquially, “we meddled with the verse”, or even “we have struck a blow against verse”. See, Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Music and Letters [1895]’, in Divagations, ed. Barbara Johnson, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press, 2007, p. 183.
[13] Debord misquotes Rimbaud: “le dérèglement systématique de tous le sens”. The reference is to Rimbaud’s letter to Paul Demeny, 15 May 1871: “The poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement [dérèglement raisonné] of all the senses.”. See, Arthur Rimbaud, Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Wallace Fowlie ; updated and revised by Seth Whidden, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005, pp. 306, 307.
[14] Comte de Lautréamont, ‘Maldoror [1869]’, in Maldoror & the Complete Works of the Comte de Lautréamont, Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2011, p. 193 (sixth canto). Translation modified. For more on the surrealist definition of beauty see section II below, ‘Surrealist values’, point 4.
[15] Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Victory (La Victoire)’, in Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War (1913-1916), ed. Anne Hyde Greet, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980, p. 336, 337.
[16] The term “conversation poems” [“poèmes-conversations”] was used by Apollinaire to describe his use of snippets of overheard conversations in some of his poetry. See, for instance, the poems ‘Les Fenêtres’ (Windows) and ‘Lundi Rue Christine’ (Monday in Christine Street) in Guillaume Apollinaire, Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War (1913-1916), trans. Anne Hyde Greet, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.
[17] André Breton, Anthology of Black Humor, trans. Mark Polizzotti, San Francisco: City Lights Books, [1940/5] 1997, p. 255 (‘Arthur Cravan’).
[18] Tristan Tzara, ‘[Dada] manifesto on feeble love and bitter love [1920/21]’, in The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, ed. Robert Motherwell, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press, 1981, p. 87.
[19] For an account of Impressionism and its milieu, somewhat influenced by Debord’s critique, see T. J. Clark, The Paiting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his followers, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.
[20] See, Paul Gauguin, The Writings of a Savage, trans. Eleanor Levieux, New York: De Capo Press, 1996, p. 214 (Letter to Monfreid, October 1902, Marquesas Islands). Translation modified.
[21]The Magnetic Fields[Les Champs magnétiques] was first published in 1920.
[22] For more on the Spartakist Bund and the German Revolution of 1919, see, Gilles Dauvé and Denis Authier, The Communist Left in Germany 1918-1921, trans. M. DeSocio[1976] 2006; Pierre Broué, The German Revolution 1917-1923, trans. John Archer, Leiden: Brill, [1971] 2005.
[23] See, Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, New York: Everyman’s Library, [1881] 1992, p. 499 (part III, book 9, chapter 7, ‘Mitya’s Great Secret. Met with Hisses’). The argument regarding “everything is permitted” is first presented in part II, book 5, chapter 5, ‘The Grand Inquisitor’.
[24] This demand was inscribed on the front cover of the first issue of The Surrealist Revolution. I suspect its origin was as a sign at the Central Bureau of Surrealist Research, 15 Rue de Grenelle—cf. Louis Aragon, ‘A Wave of Dreams (Une vague de rêves) [1924]’.
[25] The citation is in fact a détournement of a negative assessment of Surrealism that the surrealists published alongside other such examples in the first issue of The Surrealist Revolution (p. 25), under the title of ‘Extracts from the Press’. The entire citation, from L’Echo d’Alger, reads: ‘Surrealism appears to be synonymous with dementia. If it succeeds in replacing other psychic mechanisms in solving the main problems of life, we can abandon all hope of solving the problem of dear life.’
[26] André Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)’, in Manifestoes of Surrealism, ed. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1998, p. 3.
[27] “La vraie vie est absente.” Wallace Fowlie translated this as “real life is absent”. See, Arthur Rimbaud, ‘A Season in Hell (Une saison en enfer) [1873]’, in Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters: A Bilingual Edition, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005, pp. 280, 281 (Delirium I: The Foolish Virgin, The Infernal Bridgroom).
[28] Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)’, p. 14.
[29] Antonin Artaud, ‘Address to the Pope [1925]’, in Surrealism Against the Current: Tracts and Declarations, ed. Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski, London: Pluto Press, 2001, p. 142; Antonin Artaud, ‘Letter to the Buddhist Schools [1925]’, in Selected Writings, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p. 105. Translation modified.
[30] In 1924 and 1925 the Surrealist group made a series of small cards to publicise their existence, particularly that of the Central Bureau of Surrealist Research at 15 Rue de Grenelle, Paris. Some of the cards reproduced quotes from favoured writers; others had slogans that would in their turn became famously associated with the group—for instance: “Parents! Tell your children your dreams”, or “If you love, you’ll love Surrealism”.
[31] The phrase of Hegel referred to, appeared in his inaugural address at the University of Berlin in 1818: “One cannot overestimate the greatness and power of the spirit” (translation modified). In the context of his address, in particular the recent Napoleonic period, Hegel emphasised this “strength and power” not only as a moment of the struggle for independence from the recent French “tyranny”, but also its significance for “spiritual life in general”, and the pursuits of philosophy in particular. No doubt the surrealists “abuse” of this phrase was doubly ironic for Debord. It suggests both the weakness of the “strength and power of the spirit/mind [l’esprit]”, as well as precisely drawing attention to the chief contradiction of the surrealist project: that their revolution of the mind was never able to adequately address the historical materiality of the spirit. Indeed, the young International Letterist Debord attempted to address this question when he and his comrades détourned this abused phrase while addressing a question asked by the Belgian surrealist group in 1954: “Does thought enlighten both us and our actions with the same indifference as the sun, or what is our hope, and what is its value?” To which Debord and his comrades replied, in part: “This world was born of indifference, but indifference has no place in it. Thought is valuable only to the extent that it awakens demands and compels their realization. […] One cannot expect too much from the strength and power of the spirit.”
[32] The Situationist International considered “the insubordination of words” and “the assertion of the right to say everything” the radical pivot upon which the Dada and surrealist movements turned. See, Guy Debord, ‘All the King’s Men [1963],’ and Mustapha Khayati, ‘Captive Words: Preface to a Situationist Dictionary [1966]’, in Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb, Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006.
[33] Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)’, p. 26. Translation modified.
[34] André Breton, ‘The Disdainful Confession’, in The Lost Steps [Les Pas Perdus], p. 7. Debord took up this claim of Breton’s in order to argue for its supersession: “it is now a matter of a poetry necessarily without poems”. See, Debord, ‘All the King’s Men [1963]’.
[35] Breton, ‘Second Surrealist Manifesto [1930]’, p. 125. Translation modified.
[36] In his A Cavalier History of Surrealism, the situationist Raoul Vaneigem writes that “it is hard, though, to explain the failure of the [Surrealist] group to raise a similar cry in support of the Papin sisters [as they did for Violette Noziere]” (p. 26). As far as I can tell, the Surrealist group did not release a dedicated pamphlet in support of the Papin sisters, as they did for Violette Nozière (see next footnote). They did, however, register their approval of the sisters’ murder of their bosses, in the fifth issue of Surrealism at the Service of the Revolution (1933).
[37] Note that Debord reproduces the Surrealist misspelling of the surname Nozière (i.e., by adding an “s”). For more on the Surrealist support for Violette Nozière, see the poem that Breton contributed to the pamphlet the group issued in support of her: André Breton, ‘All the curtains in the world… [1923]’, in Earthlight, ed. Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogow, Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2004.
[38] At the end of his 1935 Speech to the Congress of Writers (a speech moreover that Breton had been prevented from giving in person due to his confrontation with one of the Russian Stalinist dignitaries attending), Breton had pointedly written: “Transform the world,” Marx said; “change life,” Rimbaud said. These two watchwords are one for us. See, Breton, ‘Speech to the Congress of Writers [1935]’, p. 241. We have seen above that the quote, “change life”, was taken from Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell. The Marx quote is adapted from the final thesis of his Theses on Feuerbach. In English this is rendered as “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” In French, “change” is rendered “transformer”—i.e., to transform of change.
[39] “L’époque des sommeils”—literally “the time of sleeps” or “period of sleeps”. I have used the same term—“the time of trances”—Richard Howard used to translate this phrase in his rendering of Maurice Nadeau’s The History of Surrealism (1965). Howard had previously rendered it both hilariously and inadequately as “Nap Period” in his 1960 translation of Breton’s Nadja (p. 31). For more on the “time of trances/period of sleeps”, see, André Breton, ‘The Mediums Enter [1922]’, in The Lost Steps [Les Pas Perdus], ed. Mark Polizzotti, [1969] 1996; René Crevel, ‘The Period of Sleeping Fits [1932]’, in Radical America: Surrealism in the Service of the Revolution, ed. Franklin Rosemont, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 1970.
[40] For a detailed account of the Dadaist visit to the church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, see, Michel Sanouillet and Anne Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, trans. Sharmilia Ganguly, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, [2005] 2012, pp. 177-180 (chapter 12, The “Great Dada Season”).
[41] André Breton, Nadja, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Grove Press, [1928] 1960, pp. 32, 80.
[42] See, in particular, the sections, ‘The Passage de l’Opera’ & ‘A Feeling for Nature at the Buttes-Chaumont’, passim., in Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant [Le Paysan de Paris], trans. Simon Watson Taylor, London: Picador Classics, [1926] 1987, pp. 27-123, 125-202.
[43] For example, the disruption of the Polti banquet. See, Maurice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, trans. Richard Howard, Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, [1944/1964] 1978, p. 103 (chapter 6).
[47] Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)’, p. 4. Translation modified.
[48] For more details regarding their paradoxical positions on sexual morality, see Vaneigem’s A Cavalier History of Surrealism, pp. 49-51.
[49] See, in particular, André Breton, Mad Love [L’Amour fou], trans. Mary Ann Caws, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, [1937] 1987.
[50] Breton, ‘Preface for a Reprint of the [First] Manifesto (1929)’, p. xi. Translation modified. Note that the most commonly available translation, that by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, the translators have rendered Breton’s “une grâce que je persiste en tout point à opposer à la grâce divine” as “a grace I persist in comparing in all respects to divine grace”. A more faithful rendition would draw out Breton’s intent of confronting or opposing his conception of the grace of surrealist activity to that of the divine.
[51] Breton, ‘Second Surrealist Manifesto [1930]’, p. 123.
[53] The final sentence of Nadja reads: “La beauté sera CONVULSIVE OU ne sera pas.” “Beauty will be CONVULSIVE OR it will not be.” Breton, Nadja, p. 160. Translation modified.
[54] Ibid., pp. 159, 50. Translation modified. Note that Richard Howard renders “des fins passionnelles” as “for emotional purposes”, rather than the more appropriately surrealist, “for passionate ends”. Regarding “puzzling encounters” being the very stuff of “convulsive beauty”, recall how Debord (in section I above, ‘The crisis of poetry’, point 4), spoke of how Lautréamont “bequeathed to Surrealism its definition of beauty: ‘beautiful […] as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing machine and an umbrella’.”
[55] “I will not hesitate to say that the history of automatic writing in Surrealism has been one of continuing misfortune [une infortune continue].” André Breton, ‘The Automatic Message [1933]’, in What is Surrealism? Selected Writings, ed. Franklin Rosemont, London: Pluto Press, 1989, pp. 100-101.
[56] I translate ‘une poésie semi-élaborée’ as ‘a partially worked-up poetry’. Debord’s intent is to show how far Surrealism had moved from its founding principles, i.e., ‘pure psychic automatism’ which was consciously opposed to the productions of art.
[57] For instance, perhaps the most famous of its games, ‘Exquisite Corpse’ (cadavre exquis), was in essence a word-game that can also be considered a collective engine for the production of surrealist poems.
[58] Consider Breton’s poem, ‘Cheval the Postman (Facteur Cheval) [1932]’, in Earthlight, ed. Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogow, Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2004.
[59] There is next to nothing of Naville’s work available in English translation, at least from his period of membership of the Surrealist group, and in particular his important Marxist critique of Surrealism which marked the beginning of the end of his membership: La Révolution et les Intellectuels (1926).Artaud’s work has long been available in a variety of accessible translations—for more on Artaud see the section ‘The lost poets’, paragraph 2, below. Aragon until recently suffered a similar fate to many surrealists, but much of his work during his membership of the group (up until his departure for Stalinist climes) has now been translated. Unfortunately, more needs to be done on translating Paul Nougé’s work, some of which has now appeared in English, but so much more remains to be seen.
[60] Similarly, much of Pierre Mabille’s and Nicolas Calas’ most important Surrealist work has not seen translation into English. For the former, see Mirror of the Marvelous ( 1998).
[61] Péret targeted his former comrades Louis Aragon and Paul Éluard, who had adopted uncritically the French nationalism espoused by the Communist Party during the war and occupation of France.
[62] Unfortunately, Péret’s literary work has received less attention from English translators and academics—perhaps due to his uncompromising radicality both artistically and politically. Selections from two of the listed works—From the Hidden Storehouse (De Derrière les Fagots), and I Won’t Stoop to That (Je ne mange pas de ce Pain-là)—are available in translation in Benjamin Péret, From the Hidden Storehouse: Selected Poems, trans. Keith HollamanField Translation Series 6, 1981; Benjamin Péret, Death to the Pigs: Selected Writings, London: Atlas Press, 1988.
[64] Breton, ‘Second Surrealist Manifesto [1930]’, p. 165. Translation modified.
[65] Published July 1925 by Editions de la Nouvelle Revue Française.
[66]Papiers Posthumes [Posthumous Papers] has not been translated in full into English. For selections, see both references to Rigaut’s works in the Bibliography below.
[67] See, Jacques Rigaut, ‘Pensées: Thoughts, Maxims, Jottings (A Selection)’, in Atlas Anthology III, ed. Alastair Brotchie & Malcolm Green, London: Atlas Press, p. 178 (no. 157). Translation modified.
[68] René Crevel and others, ‘Enquête : Le suicide est-il une solution ?’, La Révolution surréaliste, no. 2 (15 Janvier 1925), p. 13.
[69] See, Jacques Vaché, ‘War Letters [Lettres de Guerre]’, in 4 Dada Suicides, London: Atlas Press, 1995, p. 230, Vaché to Breton, 9. 5. 18 (Letter Eleven to André Breton).
[70] See, André Breton, ‘The Disdainful Confession [1923]’, in The Lost Steps [Les Pas perdu], Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996, p. 2.
[71] See, Vaché, ‘War Letters [Lettres de Guerre]’, p. 216, Vaché to Breton, X. 29-4-17 (Letter Four to André Breton).
[72] In this brief phrase we find the essence of Debord’s critique of the failings of the post-surrealist avant-gardes.
[73] For more on Aragon’s argument with Bernier, see, Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, pp. 109-110 (chapter 7).
[74] Louis Aragon, ‘Communisme et Révolution’, La Révolution surréaliste, no. 2 (15 Janvier 1925), p. 32. What is most striking regarding the claim of Aragon’s “idealism”, is that he infamously joined up with the Stalinist inheritors of the Russian Revolution some six years after writing this. The insinuation here is that his “idealism” remained constant—both in terms of his unthinking criticism of the Russian Revolution, and his later embrace of the idealism of those Western leftists who excused the totalitarian horror of Stalinism in defence of its impossible ideal.
[75] For more on this, see, Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, pp. 115-117 (chapter 7).
[76] Robert Desnos, ‘Pamphlet against Jerusalem [1925]’, in The Surrealism Reader: An Anthology of Ideas, ed. Dawn Ades, Michael Richardson, and Krzysztof Fijalkowski, London: Tate Publishing, 2015, p. 103.
[77] Parisian surrealist group, ‘The Revolution First and Always! [La Révolution d’abord et toujours!] (1925)’, in Surrealism Against the Current: Tracts and Declarations, ed. Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski, London: Pluto Press, 2001, p. 96. Translation modified. For more on the relationship between the surrealists and the editors of Clarte and Philosophies, see, Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, chapter 8, ‘The Moroccan War’, passim.
[78] ‘The Revolution and the Intellectuals: What do the surrealists think?’ Unfortunately, this important work has yet to be translated into English. For excerpts, and a discussion of its impact upon the surrealist group, see, Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, chapter 9, ‘The Naville Crisis’, passim.
[79] André Breton, ‘Pourquoi je prends la direction de la révolution surréaliste’, La Révolution surréaliste, no. 4 (15 Juillet 1925), p. 3.
[80]Au Grand Jour (In Broad Daylight). I have not been able to find a complete English translation of this text. For discussion of its content and context, see, Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, chapter 10, ‘Au Grand Jour’, passim.
[81] Debord would later develop a critique of such “militantism” as he saw it in the para-Trotskyist group Socialisme ou Barbarie during his brief membership, 1960-61. See, Guy Debord, ‘To the participants in the national conference of “Pouvoir Ouvrier”, 5 May 1961,’.
[82] Breton, ‘Pourquoi je prends la direction de la révolution surréaliste’, p. 2.
[83] Breton, ‘Legitimate Defence [1926]’, p. 33. The idea that the French Communist Party—and Marxism more generally—expressed a “vulgar” materialism, insofar as it was concerned with the material conditions of the proletariat’s life more than this life itself, would be taken up by Debord and the situationists as a part of their critique of the post-war “bourgeois idea of happiness” that permeated the revolutionary and non-revolutionary left. See, Situationist International, ‘Collapse of the Revolutionary Intellectuals (1958)’, Situationist International Online. For more discussion of the latter, with an eye to the context of the debate, see, Anthony Hayes, ‘The Situationist International and the Rediscovery of the Revolutionary Workers’ Movement’, in The Situationist International: A Critical Handbook, ed. Alastair Hemmens and Gabriel Zacarias, London: Pluto Press, 2020.
[84] Jacques Prévert, ‘A Corpse – excerpt (Une Cadavre) [1930]’, in The History of Surrealism, ed. Maurice Nadeau, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978. For more on the context of the writing of the 1930 A Corpse, see, Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, chapter 12, ‘The Crisis of 1929’, & chapter 13, ‘In the Service of the Revolution’, passim. For Bataille’s illuminating account of A Corpse, written some years later, see, Georges Bataille, ‘Notes on the Publication of “Un Cadavre” ‘, in The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism, London: Verso, 1994.
[85] For more on this, see, Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, chapter 14, ‘The Aragon Affair’, passim.
[86] Ferdinand Alquié, ‘Lettre à André Breton, 7 mars 1933’, Le Surréalisme au service du Révolution no. 5 (1933). For more on this text and its context, see, Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, chapter 16, ‘Surrealist Politics’, passim.
[88] The Vigilance Committee of Antifascist Intellectuals (Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascists) was founded in March 1934.
[89] See, Various, ‘Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes’ (accessed 9 April 2021).
[90] André Breton and others, ‘On the Time When the Surrealists Were Right (Du temps que les surréalistes avaient raison) [1935]’, in Manifestoes of Surrealism, ed. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1998, p. 253. Translation modified; André Breton and others, ‘When the Surrealists Were Right (excerpts)’, in Surrealism Against the Current: Tracts and Declarations, ed. Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski, London: Pluto Press, 2001, p. 111.
[91] Breton and others, ‘Declaration: “The Truth About the Moscow Trials” (1936)’, pp. 117, 118.
[95]Fédération internationale de l’art révolutionnaire independent, aka FIARI.
[96] André Breton, Diego Rivera, and [Leon Trotsky], ‘Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art [1938]’, in What is Surrealism? Selected Writings, ed. Franklin Rosemont, London: Pluto Press, 1989, p. 185. Translation modified.
[97] Breton, Tanguy and Calas would go to New York. Péret went to Mexico.
[98] Neither Crastre’s nor Kyrou’s books have been translated into English.
[99] Here, Debord is gesturing at the post-war avant-garde currents in Europe who were all consciously engaged with the legacy, and supersession of Surrealism and Dada: for instance, Revolutionary Surrealism, COBRA (aka The International of Experimental Artists), the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, Letterism, the Letterist International, and ultimately the Situationist International.
[100]Medium (1953-55), Le surréalisme, même (1956-59), La Brèche 1961-65) and Archibras (1967-69). All of these journals existed in the period after Debord’s own appearance in the milieus of post-war avant-gardism, i.e., in 1951. Perhaps this is why he failed to mention one other post-war surrealist journal, Néon (1948-49).
[101] In 1954—and consequently was expelled from the group.
[102] Breton would come to speak, in 1953, of the “poetic intuition […] finally unleashed by Surrealism” as “the thread that can put us back on the road of Gnosis as knowledge of suprasensible Reality, ‘invisibly visible in an eternal mystery’.” (Breton, ‘On Surrealism in Its Living Works [1953]’, p. 304). Earlier, in the 1940s he had spoken of the beings that may even inhabit such rarefied realms—the “Great Invisibles” (Breton, ‘Prolegomena to a Third Surrealist Manifesto or Not [1942]’, pp. 293-94). However, correspondences between the Surrealist project, and older hermetic and magical traditions were not limited to the group’s late existence—see, Breton, ‘The Mediums Enter [1922]’. As Debord notes, such tendencies became more distinct after the Second World War. For instance, Sarane Alexandrine, a member of the Surrealist group after the Second World War, even believed that the surrealist Pierre Mabille “initiated” Breton “into the secrets of geomancy and prophetical astrology” sometime in the 1930s or 40s (Alexandrine cited in, Tessel M. Bauduin, Surrealism and the Occult: Occultism and Western Esotericism in the Work and Movement of André Breton, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014, p. 24). Debord’s reference to “Great Initiates” is perhaps related to such initiations; it is also the title of Édouard Schuré’s 1889 book, Les Grands Initiés, on the subject of the ancient arts of “initiation” into the ways of esoteric and magical knowledge. Nonetheless, Breton considered such investigations as an expression of a materialist conception of the fundamental identity of thinking and the phenomena of the world. See, for instance, the late discussion of his friendship with Pierre Mabille in ‘Drawbridges [1962]’—Breton’s preface to a new edition of Mabille’s Mirror of the Marvelous (1940).
[103] Breton, ‘Second Surrealist Manifesto [1930]’, p. 164. No doubt Debord considered the Situationist International precisely as these future men beautifully ransacking the Surrealist project.
fig. 1. Who are the enemies of poetry? All those who use poetry as an end in-itself, not as a means for life and liberation. Which is to say all those who fetishize the poem over poetry itself. Graphic detourned from Frank Hampson’s Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, Rogue Planet, April 1956.
I wrote the following essay for the collection Suddenly Curving Space Time: Australian Experimental Poetry 1995-2015 (Brisbane: non-Euclidean Press, 2016). In the essay I perhaps too briefly and bluntly attempted to outline the radical trajectory of avant-garde and experimental art in the 20th century against what now passes for “avant-garde” and “experimental” in the cynical art markets and cafeterias. If I were to write it today, I would be more forgiving of the original surrealists. Whereas I agree with Guy Debord’s critique of the surrealists, notably that André Breton in effect fetishized the irrationality…
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