CHAPTER 1 Introduction The SI had above all brought a new spirit into the theoretical debates about society, culture, and life. This spirit was assuredly revolutionary. Guy Debord, “The Beginning of an Era” ∵ The Situationist International (SI) was a European, mainly Paris-based artistic and political avant-garde group that formed in 1957, went through three distinct phases, and dissolved in 1972. The SI gained notoriety for sparking and fueling student protests at the University of Strasbourg in 1966 after the publication and circulation of Mustapha Khayati’s polemical pamphlet On the Poverty of Student Life, which is subtitled Considered in Its Economic, Political, Psycho- logical, Sexual, and Particularly Intellectual Aspects, and a Modest Proposal for Doing Away with It. The SI’s modest proposal was subversion in the service of the revolutionary project of dismantling Capitalism. In the fall of 1967, Guy Debord, the SI’s leader and principal theorist, published his classic book The Society of the Spectacle. Six months later, student protests at the University of Nanterre and then at the Sorbonne mushroomed into a massive general strike that by mid-May of 1968 saw over ten million workers—two-thirds of the entire French workforce—walk off the job, occupy factories, and protest in the streets, demanding the right to control all aspects of their labor and lives. Debord and several members of the SI were among those who occupied the Sorbonne and who battled the forces of order in the streets, and the SI published an account of its role in the events in Rene Vienet’s book titled Enragés and Situationists in the Occupation Movement, France, May ’68. In the aftermath of May ’68, however, the SI’s cohesiveness began to unravel, and in 1972, Debord formally dissolved the group with the publication of his book The Real Split in the International. For two decades after the SI’s dissolution in 1972, the group was written about mainly in relatively obscure, “underground” publications in Europe and the United States, as Ford has shown in his book The Realization and Suppres- sion of the Situationist International: An Annotated Bibliography, 1972–1992. That underground attention underwent a sea change within the context of the media-fueled nostalgia in France surrounding the 1988 anniversary of May ’68, © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2019 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004402010_001 James Trier - 9789004402010 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 07:27:09PM via free access 2 CHAPTER 1 when retrospective exhibitions about the Situationist International were held in museums in Paris, London, and Boston in 1988–1989. The traveling exhibi- tion was titled On the Passage of a Few People through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International, 1957–1972. This retrospective marked the end of the SI’s relative obscurity in academia and the group’s “entry into the official culture of institutional curricula.”1 Since 1989, an extensive literature about the SI’s ideas, critical practices, and history has been produced by schol- ars from a wide range of academic disciplines. A review of this literature is presented in the second half of this introduc- tory chapter. In that review, I discuss my main contribution to SI scholarship, which is an edited book titled Détournement as Pedagogical Praxis. For now, I want to highlight a statement I wrote in the introductory chapter to that book. I remarked that while writing that book, I realized that much of what I had researched about the SI was actually material that went far beyond the scope of that book, and so I conceptualized another book. As I put it, In [the next] book, I will discuss the Situationist International’s origins, main figures, creative works, writings, history, and post-demise afterlife in academic scholarship and popular culture. Doing that will entail dis- cussing dada, surrealism, the Lettrists, the Lettrist International, psycho- geography, the dérive, unitary urbanism, détournement, architecture, painting, cinema, “scandals,” the Spectacle, May ’68, and more.2 Guy Debord, the Situationist International, and the Revolutionary Spirit is the very book that I described in the above passage. This book is a history of the Situationist International (SI) that begins with a chapter about the pre-SI Let- trist and Lettrist International years, then presents a chronological narrative of the SI’s three phases. Guy Debord’s Masterwork At the center of this book is Guy Debord. Though other SI members were also influential during different phases of the group—especially Danish artist and SI co-founder Asger Jorn—Debord was the most important, powerful, and enduring figure. He co-founded the SI, wrote its provisional platform essay “Report on the Construction of Situations,” served as the main editor of all twelve issues of the SI’s journal, organized the group’s annual conferences, cre- ated several of the group’s most important détournements, played a key role in the subversive actions by SI members during May ’68, and wrote the most well- James Trier - 9789004402010 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 07:27:09PM via free access Introduction 3 known work produced by an SI member. No new members were admitted to the SI without Debord’s approval, and he authored or sanctioned all exclusions of members from the group. In the end, he alone possessed the authority to officially bring the group’s existence to its finality. This is all to say that without Debord, there would not have been a Situationist International. Debord is most known for his classic book The Society of the Spectacle, and his film of the same name is also considered a masterpiece among film schol- ars who have studied his six films, all of which are cinematic détournements. While I agree that both of these are important creative works, I think Debord’s masterwork was the Situationist International itself. Debord masterfully shaped and fashioned the SI into the last influential historic avant-garde group by maintaining the SI’s theoretical and practical coherence, by recording the SI’s history through a diverse array of texts, by collaborating with several mem- bers to produce some of the SI’s most important détournements, and by keep- ing the organization together over a long and tumultuous period of time, all the while envisioning and working toward a revolution of everyday life, which May ’68 seemed to be, at least for a brief period of time. This interpretation of the SI as Debord’s masterwork is one that I will develop throughout this book. Debord as the SI’s Main Archivist “Recuperation” is a term that Debord and SI members used to identify the strategies that Spectacle (Capitalism in its totality) deploys to trivialize and sterilize subversive discoveries and to co-opt revolutionary individuals and groups. SI co-founder Michele Bernstein (Debord’s wife) provided an excellent summation of the dialectical nature of détournement and recuperation when she wrote, “Power creates nothing, it recuperates,”3 meaning that the Specta- cle never consciously creates anything that is threateningly subversive to its domination. On the contrary, the Spectacle works relentlessly to depoliticize or to de-radicalize—i.e., to recuperate—anything that attempts to destabilize and undermine its authority and control, such as the very existence of the SI as a revolutionary avant-garde organization. Debord realized that a main tactic (along with détournement) for combatting the Spectacle’s recuperative strate- gies is to write one’s own history. In a broad sense, this is what Debord set out to do from the beginning of the SI. The SI’s journal Internationale Situationniste was a crucially important record of the group’s history in that every issue provided news updates about the SI’s subversive activities, group conferences, membership, and internal workings, as well as articles that articulated the SI’s revolutionary ideas, political analy- James Trier - 9789004402010 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 07:27:09PM via free access 4 CHAPTER 1 ses, and critiques of spectacular culture. As the journal’s editor, Debord was simultaneously the SI’s main historian. Debord was also the SI’s vigilant archi- vist. He saved copies of nearly everything that the SI ever produced, including the twelve issues of its journal, the photographs that appeared in the journal, the détournements that members created, the group’s provocative tracts and leaflets, all of his letters to SI members, their letters to him, and so on. Most important is the fact that Debord and Jorn established a Situationist Library space in the Silkeborg Museum in Denmark in 1960. This came about in part because Jorn was able to financially support the project, which was a result of his growing fame as a painter, as well as his sudden accumulation of wealth from the sales of his paintings at that time. Silkeborg Museum was chosen as the site for the SI archive because Jorn had grown up in Silkeborg, and he supported the arts community there throughout his life, in part by financially supporting the Silkeborg Museum. The purpose of the Situationist Library was reported in Internationale Situationniste in 1960: “We do not doubt that, in the coming years, many specialist historians from Europe and America, and ultimately from Asia and Africa, will make the journey to Silkeborg with the sole end of completing and checking their research” into the history of the SI.4 (This prediction has indeed come true.) The establishment of the Situa- tionist Library made it possible for the SI to avoid disappearing into oblivion and instead to continually erupt into the present, as it has done since 1989’s international exhibition. Though Jorn’s financial backing was instrumental in founding both the Silkeborg Museum and the SI library, Debord was the one who ensured that as many SI materials as possible made it to the library.