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A University of Sussex DPhil thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details ‘A Lot to Answer for’: The English Legacy of the Situationist International Thesis submitted by Samuel Martin Cooper Literature, Film and Visual Culture DPhil University of Sussex May 2012 I hereby declare that this thesis has not been and will not be submitted in whole or in part to another University for the award of any other degree. Signature: University of Sussex Samuel Martin Cooper Literature, Film and Visual Culture DPhil ‘A Lot to Answer for’: The English Legacy of the Situationist International This thesis draws attention to the overlooked period of English avant-garde activity that arose in response to the Situationist International (SI, 1957-1972). I attempt to consolidate the continued literary, political and artistic relevance of the disparate manifestations of English Situationist practices, while reflecting more broadly on the Anglicisation of Continental avant-garde traditions. The thesis contributes also to the ongoing re-evaluation of the SI through its peripheral and international permutations. The thesis presents an historical narrative in four stages. The first follows the formation of the Surrealist Group in England and its transformation into Mass- Observation. This activity in the Thirties is both prolepsis to and prehistory of the English Situationist tradition, which begins at the thesis’s second stage, in the early Sixties, with the novelist and cultural organiser Alexander Trocchi, one of the first British members of the SI. The third stage introduces the short-lived English Section of the SI and its immediate precursor and successor groups of the late Sixties, all of whom undertook a cultural translation of the SI’s project. The thesis’s final stage identifies contemporary manifestations of what I argue is an English Situationist poetics, which exists independently of self-identifying avant-garde groups. Interwoven through my historical narrative are investigations of three recurring problems: the problem of ‘Englishness’, and its perceived incompatibility with Continental avant-gardism; the problem of influence, whereby neo-avant- gardism is dismissed as the hollow repetition of early twentieth century formations; and the Situationist problem of the radical aesthetic object’s subsumption to a commodity economy. I offer readings of novels, films and visual materials; of tracts, manifestos and journal debates; and of theorists (especially Rancière) whose perspectives on history and political aesthetics are productively dissonant with those of the SI. Anglicised Situationist practices, I propose, are valuable precisely for their contestation of and movement through Situationist theory. Acknowledgements My debt to Dr. John David Rhodes is immeasurable. His guidance, encouragement, and friendship predate this project, and I hope that something of his commitment to academic study as a means of illuminating and understanding the worlds in which we live shines through this work. I would like to thank Dr. Rosalind Galt for her valuable feedback at a decisive moment in the thesis’s composition. I am grateful also to the AHRC for funding the project. I am fortunate to have been able to investigate a topic which attracts great enthusiasm from places not limited to academia, and so I would like to thank and acknowledge my debt to everyone who supplied me with materials, conversations, and opportunities to share my ideas in an exciting variety of forums. Of particular note, Charles Radcliffe and David and Stuart Wise kindly discussed their activities with neither nostalgia nor a sense of finitude. Finally, I would like to thank my parents for their unwavering support and my friends for the same. 1 Contents Abbreviations .............................................................................................................................. 3 Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 4 1.1 Surrealism in England; or, English Surrealism .............................................................. 12 Dialectical Genealogies ................................................................................................................. 13 The Problems of Political Commitment .................................................................................... 26 The Social Presence of English Surrealism ................................................................................. 32 1.2 Surrealism Put to Work: Mass-Observation .................................................................. 37 Surrealist Methodologies ............................................................................................................. 39 Mass-Observation’s Political Ambiguity..................................................................................... 44 2.1 Alexander Trocchi and the Dissolution of the Avant-Garde ...................................... 48 Trocchi and the Situationist International ................................................................................. 50 From Young Adam to Cain’s Book ..................................................................................................... 53 Place(lessness) ............................................................................................................................... 64 The Limits of Literature ............................................................................................................... 70 2.2 Alexander Trocchi’s Invisible Insurrection ................................................................... 72 The Situationist Basis of sigma .................................................................................................... 74 sigma as Situation ......................................................................................................................... 77 The Sigma Folio ............................................................................................................................ 80 The Invisible Avant-Garde .......................................................................................................... 87 3.1 Charles Radcliffe and the English Section of the Situationist International ............ 90 Rebel Worker and Heatwave .............................................................................................................. 91 The Seeds of Social Destruction .................................................................................................. 93 New Leftisms............................................................................................................................... 100 Negative Identity ........................................................................................................................ 104 The English Section of the Situationist International ............................................................. 105 The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution ...................................... 111 The Negation of Style and the Style of Negation ..................................................................... 117 Historical Repetition and Reversal ............................................................................................ 120 Expulsion ..................................................................................................................................... 122 3.2 King Mob ........................................................................................................................... 126 His Majesty King Mob ................................................................................................................ 128 King Mob Echo ................................................................................................................................. 131 Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker .......................................................................................... 136 2 We’re Looking for People Who Like to Draw ......................................................................... 140 The Negation of Language and the Language of Negation ...................................................... 147 King Mob’s Peculiar Romanticism ............................................................................................ 152 The Wordsworthian Authentic ........................................................................................ 157 Blake’s Infernal Method ......................................................................................................... 165 The End of Art ............................................................................................................................ 169 4.1 English Situationist Poetics ............................................................................................ 174 The Poetics of English