CHAPTER 6 The SI’s Second Phase, Part One, 1962–1966

First, like everyone, I appreciated the effect of slight drunkenness; then very soon I grew to like what lies beyond violent drunkenness, when one has passed that stage: a magnificent and terrible peace, the true taste of the passage of time. Although in the first decades I may have allowed only slight indications to appear once or twice a week, it is a fact that I have been continuously drunk for periods of several months; and the rest of the time, I drank a lot. , Panegyric ∵

With the exclusions of the Spur artists at the Gothenburg conference in Feb- ruary of 1962 and the resignations of Jorgen Nash, Jacqueline de Jong, and the rest of the Scandinavian artists in March, Guy Debord became the unchal- lenged leader of the Situationist International (SI). One effect of purging the artists was that the SI’s membership decreased to a third of what it had been throughout most of the SI’s first phase. The seven remaining SI members were Debord and Michele Bernstein of the Paris section; and Attila Kotanyi of the Belgian section; Uwe Lausen of the German section; JV Mar- tin of the Scandinavian section; and , who was not affiliated with a section. On the surface, the depleted membership might seem to have left the SI in a weakened state. A more substantive interpretation, however, is that Debord, by breaking with the artists, had created a stronger organiza- tional situation. Debord had accomplished this before with his pre-SI group the Lettrist International (LI). As shown in Chapter 2, after Debord excluded LI members who he believed were no longer contributing meaningfully to the group, the LI became more organizationally cohesive and politicized. The LI’s main activity after the exclusions was publishing its journal Potlatch, which included many articles that expressed the LI’s critical analyses and views of political events occurring in and around the globe. This more intense and focused political orientation also characterized the SI during the group’s second phase. This is borne out in issues 7–10 of Internationale Situ- ationniste, which appeared during 1962 to 1966—i.e., the period covered in

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi: 10.1163/9789004402010_006 The SI’s Second Phase, Part One, 1962–1966 211 this chapter, up to but not including the student protests at the University of Strasbourg. Another major effect of purging the artists was that Debord halted the SI’s program of staging anti-art interventions in museums and art galleries. The SI’s withdrawal from the cultural terrain of the Art Spectacle meant that the group’s primary activity for several years was working on its journal. Most accounts about the first four years of the SI’s second phase create the impression that nothing really happened within the group until the SI-influenced student pro- tests at the University of Strasbourg erupted during the fall of 1966 (discussed in the next chapter). For example, Anselm Jappe encapsulates these years by stating: “For the next four years, roughly speaking, rather less was heard from the Situationist International, while Debord and Vaneigem worked on their respective books.”1 Jappe added that except for publishing its journal, “the SI did not have a very visible public existence between 1962 and 1966. By around 1965, the working out of the Situationist analysis was essentially complete, and the group turned its attention to the search for ways of putting it into prac- tice.”2 Another example is Peter Wollen, who summarizes the years 1962–1967 in a few sentences: “After 1962 Debord assumed an increasingly central role in the SI, surrounded by a new generation of militants who were not professional artists. The earlier artistic goals and projects either fell away or were transposed into an overtly political (and revolutionary) register within a unitary theoretical system. In 1967 Debord published his magnum opus, Society of the Spectacle.”3 Though the SI moved on from engaging in Art Spectacle interventions, the years from 1962 to 1966 were very important. The SI’s main activity during these years was to publish Internationale Situationniste. The fact is that the continued existence and availability of Internationale Situationniste caused several future SI members to contact Debord out of the blue because they came across and were greatly impressed by current and earlier issues of the journal. This was the case with Donald Nicholson-Smith and Chris Gray, two Englishmen living in Paris in the mid-1960s who became members of the English section of the SI and who translated key SI texts into English, which contributed to Debord’s longstanding goal of distributing SI writing in English-speaking countries, specifically the UK and the US. Another instance of someone who contacted Debord after reading Internationale Situationniste is Mustapha Khayati, a student at the University of Strasbourg. Khayati and a few other students became important to the SI for their roles in the Strasbourg scandal. In the fall of 1966, Khayati wrote one of the SI’s most important works—On the Poverty of Student Life—and the distribu- tion of thousands of copies of this incendiary pamphlet to Strasbourg students was a key action in sparking mass student protests at Strasbourg. By selectively admitting these and other new members to the SI during this period, Debord