ConstruCted situations Stracey T02909 00 pre 1 02/09/2014 11:39 Marxism and Culture Series Editors: Professor Esther Leslie, Birkbeck, University of London Professor Michael Wayne, Brunel University Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction Edited by Mark Bould and China Miéville Marxism and the History of Art: From William Morris to the New Left Edited by Andrew Hemingway Magical Marxism: Subversive Politics and the Imagination Andy Merrifield Philosophizing the Everyday: The Philosophy of Praxis and the Fate of Cultural Studies John Roberts Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture Gregory Sholette Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism Robert T. Tally Jr. Marxism and Media Studies: Key Concepts and Contemporary Trends Mike Wayne Stracey T02909 00 pre 2 02/09/2014 11:39 ConstruCted situations A New History of the Situationist International Frances Stracey Stracey T02909 00 pre 3 02/09/2014 11:39 For Peanut First published 2014 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA www.plutobooks.com Copyright © the Estate of Frances Stracey 2014 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7453 3527 8 Hardback ISBN 978 0 7453 3526 1 Paperback ISBN 978 1 7837 1223 6 PDF eBook ISBN 978 1 7837 1225 0 Kindle eBook ISBN 978 1 7837 1224 3 EPUB eBook Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Text design by Melanie Patrick Simultaneously printed digitally by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK and Edwards Bros in the United States of America Stracey T02909 00 pre 4 02/09/2014 11:39 Contents List of Figures vi Series Preface viii Preface xi Acknowledgements xiii Introduction: Lessons in Failure 1 Excursus I: The Society of the Spectacle 4 Excursus II: Constructed Situations 8 Reconstructing Situations 14 1. Surviving History: A Situationist Archive 19 2. Industrial Painting: Towards a Surplus of Life 30 3. Destruktion af RSG-6: The Latest Avant-Garde 44 4. Consuming the Spectacle: The Watts Revolt and a New Proletariat 56 5. Situationist Radical Subjectivity and Photo-Graffiti 76 6. The Situation of Women 94 Coda: Learning from the SI 122 Notes 140 Index 170 Stracey T02909 00 pre 5 02/09/2014 11:39 Figures 1.1–1.8 Guy-Ernest Debord and Asger Jorn, pages from Mémoires, 1959 between pages 18 and 19 1.9 Guy-Ernest Debord and Asger Jorn, endpapers (inside of the front cover) from Mémoires, 1959 23 2.1 A section of Industrial Painting, entitled Le acque del Nilo non passano ad Alba (The waters of the Nile do not go to Alba), 1958 32 2.2 An unwound roll of Industrial Painting – the longest ever made – untitled, 1958 33 2.3 and 2.4 Industrial painting machine and collective assembly line at work 34 2.5 Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio preparing colours 36 2.6 Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio at the opening of his personal show at Galerie Van de Loo in Munich, 1959 38 3.1 Guy Debord, Directive No. 2 [‘RÉALISATION DE LA PHILOSOPHIE’], 1963 50 3.2 J.V. Martin, 2h[ours] 15[minutes] after the Start of the Third World War, from ‘Thermonuclear Maps’ series, 1963 52 3.3 Michèle Bernstein, Victory of the Commune of Paris, from ‘Victory’ series, 1963 (detail) 53 4.1 ‘CRITIQUE DE L’URBANISME (Supermarket à Los Angeles, août 1965)’ from internationale situationniste, issue 10, 1966 59 4.2 ‘PLAYING WITH RIFLED CASH REGISTER’ from internationale situationniste, issue 10, 1966 64 4.3 ‘L’INTÉGRATION, A QUOI?’ (‘THE INTEGRATION OF WHAT?’) from internationale situationniste, issue 10, 1966 69 4.4 ‘“ALL THIS WORLD IS LIKE THIS VALLEY CALLED JARAMA” (CHANSON DU BATAILLON LINCOLN)’ from internationale situationniste, issue 10, 1966 73 5.1 [Riot police shooting] Paris, 1968 82 5.2 [‘Sous les pavés, la plage’] Paris, May 1968 83 5.3 [‘Je jouis dans les pavés’] Paris, May 1968 84 5.4 [‘Soyons cruels!’] Paris, Sorbonne, May 1968 85 5.5 ‘La Récupération Vulgaire (affiche pour un film commercial, automne 1968)’ from internationale situationniste, issue 12, 1969 90 5.6 [‘Cache-toi, objet! Baisse-toi et broute!’] (Piss [or fuck] off, object! Fall and hurt yourself!) Paris, Sorbonne, May 1968 92 vi | construCted situations Stracey T02909 00 pre 6 02/09/2014 11:39 6.1 [In the shower, playing with water] from internationale situationniste, issue 1, 1958 95 6.2 [In overcoat] from internationale situationniste, issue 1, 1958 98 6.3 [On the beach] from internationale situationniste, issue 1, 1958 99 6.4 [Standing in bikini] from internationale situationniste, issue 1, 1958 101 6.5 [Sitting in bikini] frominternationale situationniste, issue 1, 1958 102 6.6 [Brigitte Bardot reclining on horseback] frominternationale situationniste, issue 1, 1958 104 6.7 [Naked on boat] from internationale situationniste, issue 1, 1958 107 6.8 [Reclining in hammock] from internationale situationniste, issue 1, 1958 109 6.9 [J.V. Martin modification of Christine Keeler image] from internationale situationniste, issue 1, 1958 111 C.1 etoy, Share price developments during TOYWAR, 1999/2000 128 C.2 Desktop Theatre,Spectacled Society, 2000 129 C.3 Krzysztof Wodiczko, The Tijuana Projection, 2001 132 C.4 Surveillance Camera Players, Performance of George Orwell’s 1984, 1998 135 C.4.1 Title board 135 C.4.2 The telescreen reminds you that ‘Big Brother is Watching You’ 135 C.4.3 Julie and Winston are the dead 135 C.4.4 Winston is executed by O’Brien 135 C.5 Guy Debord, NE TRAVAILLEZ JAMAIS, 1953 137 Figures | vii Stracey T02909 00 pre 7 02/09/2014 11:39 series preFaCe ‘Marxism and Culture’ is the name of our book series. The Situationists stand askew to both these terms and that is why they are of interest to us. The Situationists ingested Marx, his dialectics, his commitment to revolution, his searing tones of critique and caustic prose, his chiasmic formulations. But they were not Marxologists, defenders of the faith. Marxism came back to life in their raging analyses. They were interested in slamming into their moment, making it liveable, handling Marx as if handling stolen goods. And, as for culture, that was something they made, destroyed, rated above all else and despised, sometimes sequentially, sometimes all at the same time. They were more aesthetic than the aesthetes, more luxurious than the deluxe-edition types. But in a way that junked, mocked, remixed or scorned the culture of the past and present. They paid homage to a few and upset more. The Situationists remain a resource and a rebuke to any efforts to think and act as revolutionaries in the field of culture. Despite their critique of recuperation, they provide a touchstone for attempts to give cultural expression to revolutionary ideas – even after the designation of Guy Debord’s archive as a ‘National Treasure’ of France, when it was acquired, in 2011, by the Bibliothèque nationale de France. History may have rendered positive the most negative of critics and the movement he mobilized, but their successes and failure, which is a social one, still provide many pertinent lessons. The Situationists were the most cultured of all and the most revolutionary. It was the force-field between these two aspects that powered their thought. Even when art was ostensibly abandoned in favour of theoretical-political analysis, it shadowed the political theory as a – or its – negative image. Too frequently the counter-parts of art and politics have been broken apart in interpretations of the Situationist legacy: artists alight on the aesthetic aspects, the avant-garde techniques, the questions of recuperation of culture; politicos debate the questions of form, the analysis of the state, the legitimacy or not of the vanguard party. Sometimes the praxis and theory of the Situationists floats free of the demands of its moment, in dehistoricized accounts. Frances Stracey’s Constructed Situations holds it all in play and, more than that, it observes the shingling of aesthetics in politics and sets everything firmly in specific ‘constructed situations’ that constitute Situationist theoretical practice. These collective acts of counter-cultural and political assault include photo-graffiti, industrial painting, the Jorn–Debord collaboration Mémoires, the first and only Situationist group exhibition titled Destruktion af RSG-6, held at the Galerie EXI in Odense, Denmark in June 1963, writing and editing a journal, inventing strategies for evading the archive, and theorizing and advocating riots. The scintillating moments of cultural and revolutionary collaboration that comprise the viii | construCted situations Stracey T02909 00 pre 8 02/09/2014 11:39 chapters here explore the Situationists’ mode of ‘phenomeno-praxis’, in which art and politics are united in a lived event. The ideas in this book began life as a thesis at University College London, titled ‘Pursuit of the Situationist Subject’. They evolved substantially after the thesis’ submission in 2001, as Stracey, who had studied art and had worked as a medical photographer and librarian, spent several years turning parts of the chapters into journal articles or contributions to edited volumes. In 2005, she reconceived the thesis as a book organized around the notion of ‘constructed situations’. She managed to complete a full draft of the book before dying of cancer in November 2009. The fact that it has taken some time for the book to be published is no disadvantage.