Situationist International Anthology
Ken Knabb
Language: English
Pages: 532
ISBN: 0939682044
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Literary Nonfiction. Politics. Critical Theory. Art. In 1957 a few European avant-garde groups came together to form the Situationist International. Picking up where the dadaists and surrealists had left off, the situationists challenged people's passive conditioning with carefully calculated scandals and the playful tactic of detournement. Seeking a more extreme social revolution than was dreamed of by most leftists, they developed an incisive critique of the global spectacle-commodity system and of its "Communist" pseudo-opposition, and their new methods of agitation helped trigger the May 1968 revolt in France. Since then—although the SI itself was dissolved in 1972—situationist theories and tactics have continued to inspire radical currents all over the world. The SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL ANTHOLOGY, generally recognized as the most comprehensive and accurately translated collection of situationist writings in English, presents a rich variety of articles, leaflets, graffiti and internal documents, ranging from early experiments in "psychogeography" to lucid analyses of the Watts riot, the Vietnam War, the Prague Spring, the Chinese Cultural Revolution and other crises and upheavals of the sixties. For this new edition the translations have all been fine-tuned and over 100 pages of new material have been added.
the victim of, bureaucrats more rational than he. What, then, is the secret of this aberration of one of our famous leftist intellectuals, and one of the most ostensibly “libertarian” among them at that? With him it is no different than with all the others: it is the decisive influence of their vainglorious participation in high society; their common tendency, even more servile than a lackey’s, to be swept off their feet with joy because they have spoken with the greats of this world; and the
scarcely intervened as an autonomous and decisive force. The themes of “self-management” and “workers councils” included in Ota Sik’s technocratic reform did not go beyond the bureaucratic perspective of a Yugoslavian-style “democratic management.” This was also true even of the alternative project, obviously drafted by labor-unionists, presented on 29 June 1968 by the Wilhelm Pieck factory. The critique of Leninism, presented by “certain philosophers” as being “already a deformation of Marxism
it for is to reinforce their police control. They can do nothing but accumulate capital, and therefore proletarians—a proletarian being someone who has no power over his life and who knows it. It is the new proletariat’s historical fortune to be the only consequent heir to the valueless riches of the bourgeois world—riches that it must transform and supersede in such a way as to foster the development of fully realized human beings pursuing the total appropriation of nature and of their own
the social standpoint. The increasing dissatisfaction of the whole of humanity will reach a point where we will all be compelled to execute projects for which we possess the means, projects that will contribute to the realization of a richer and more fulfilled life. CONSTANT The Use of Free Time The most superficial and constantly reiterated platitude of leftish sociologists during recent years is that leisure has become a major factor in advanced capitalist society. This platitude is the
But it is more and more evident that it must finish with Islam, an obviously counterrevolutionary force as are all religious ideologies. It must grant freedom to the Kurdish people. And it must stop swallowing the Palestinian pretext that justifies the dominant policy in the Arab states—a policy that insists on the destruction of Israel and thereby perpetuates itself since this destruction is impossible. The repressive forces of the state of Israel can be undermined only by a model of a