Guy Debord (1963): Reproduced with gratitude from www.slip.net
The situationist movement can be seen as an artistic avant-garde, as an
experimental investigation of possible ways for freely constructing everyday
life, and as a contribution to the theoretical and practical development of a
new revolutionary contestation. From now on, any fundamental cultural creation,
as well as any qualitative transformation of society, is contingent on the
continued development of this sort of interrelated approach.
The same society of alienation, totalitarian control and passive spectacular
consumption reigns everywhere, despite the diversity of its ideological and
juridical disguises. The coherence of this society cannot be understood without
an all-encompassing critique, illuminated by the inverse project of a liberated
creativity, the project of everyone’s control of all levels of their own
history.
To revive and bring into the present this inseparable, mutually
illuminating project and critique entails appropriating all the radicalism
borne by the workers movement, by modern poetry and art, and by the thought of
the period of the supersession of philosophy, from Hegel to Nietzsche. To do
this, it is first of all necessary to recognize, without holding on to any
consoling illusions, the full extent of the defeat of the entire revolutionary
project in the first third of this century and its official replacement, in
every region of the world and in every domain of life, by delusive shams and
petty reforms that camouflage and preserve the old order.
Such a resumption of radicality naturally also requires a considerable
deepening of all the old attempts at liberation. Seeing how those attempts
failed due to isolation, or were converted into total frauds, enables one to
get a better grasp of the coherence of the world that needs to be changed. In
the light of this rediscovered coherence, many of the partial explorations of
the recent past can be salvaged and brought to their true fulfillment. Insight
into this reversible coherence of the world — its present reality in relation
to its potential reality — enables one to see the fallaciousness of
half-measures and to recognize the presence of such half-measures each time the
operating pattern of the dominant society — with its categories of
hierarchization and specialization and its corresponding habits and tastes —
reconstitutes itself within the forces of negation.
Moreover, the material development of the world has accelerated. It
constantly accumulates more potential powers; but the specialists of the
management of society, because of their role as guardians of passivity, are
forced to ignore the potential use of those powers. This same development
produces widespread dissatisfaction and objective mortal dangers which these
specialized rulers are incapable of permanently controlling.
Once it is understood that this is the perspective within which the
situationists call for the supersession of art, it should be clear that when we
speak of a unified vision of art and politics, this absolutely does not mean
that we are recommending any sort of subordination of art to politics. For us,
and for anyone who has begun to see this era in a disabused manner, there is no
longer any modern art, just as there has been no constituted revolutionary
politics anywhere in the world since the end of the 1930s. They can now be
revived only by being superseded, that is to say, through the
fulfillment of their most profound objectives.
The new contestation the situationists have been talking about is already
emerging everywhere. Across the vast spaces of isolation and noncommunication
organized by the present social order new types of scandals are spreading from
one country to another, from one continent to another; and they are already beginning
to communicate with each other.
The role of avant-garde currents, wherever they may appear, is to link these
people and these experiences together; to help unify such groups and the coherent
basis of their project. We have to publicize, elucidate and develop these
initial gestures of the next revolutionary era. They can be recognized by the
fact that they concentrate in themselves new forms of struggle and a new
content (whether latent or explicit): the critique of the existing world. Thus
the dominant society, which prides itself so much on its constant
modernization, is now going to meet its match, for it has finally produced a
modernized negation.
Just as, on the one hand, we have been severe in preventing ambitious
intellectuals or artists incapable of really understanding us from associating
with the situationist movement, and in rejecting and denouncing various
falsifications (of which Nashist “situationism” is the most recent example),
so, on the other hand, we acknowledge the perpetrators of these new radical
gestures as being situationist, and are determined to support them and never
disavow them, even if many among them are not yet fully aware of the coherence
of today’s revolutionary program, but are only moving in that general
direction.
We will limit ourselves to mentioning a few examples of acts that have our
total approval. On January 16 of this year some revolutionary students in
Caracas made an armed attack on an exhibition of French art and carried off
five paintings, which they then offered to return in exchange for the release
of political prisoners. The forces of order recaptured the paintings after a
gun battle with Winston Bermudes, Luis Monselve and Gladys Troconis. A few days
later some other comrades threw two bombs at the police van that was
transporting the recovered paintings, which unfortunately did not succeed in
destroying it. This is clearly an exemplary way to treat the art of the past,
to bring it back into play in life and to reestablish priorities. Since the
death of Gauguin (“I have tried to establish the right to dare everything”) and
of Van Gogh, their work, coopted by their enemies, has probably never received
from the cultural world an homage so true to their spirit as the act of these
Venezuelans. During the Dresden insurrection of 1849 Bakunin proposed,
unsuccessfully, that the insurgents take the paintings out of the museums and
put them on a barricade at the entrance to the city, to see if this might
inhibit the attacking troops from continuing their fire. We can thus see how
this skirmish in Caracas links up with one of the highest moments of the
revolutionary upsurge of the last century, and even goes further.
No less justified, in our opinion, are the actions of those Danish comrades
who over the last few weeks have resorted to incendiary bombs against the
travel agencies that organize tours to Spain, or who have carried out pirate
radio broadcasts warning of the dangers of nuclear arms. In the context of the
comfortable and boring “socialized” capitalism of the Scandinavian countries,
it is most encouraging to see the emergence of people whose violence exposes
some aspects of the other violence that lies at the foundation of this
“humanized” social order — its monopoly of information, for example, or the
organized alienation of its tourism and other leisure activities — along with
the horrible flip side that is implicitly accepted whenever one accepts this
comfortable boredom: Not only is this peace not life, it is a peace built on
the threat of atomic death; not only is organized tourism a miserable spectacle
that conceals the real countries through which one travels, but the reality of
the country thus transformed into a neutral spectacle is Franco’s police.
Finally, the action of the English comrades [the “Spies for Peace”] who last
April divulged the location and plans of the “Regional Seat of Government #6”
bomb shelter has the immense merit of revealing the degree already attained by
state power in its organization of the terrain and establishment of a
totalitarian functioning of authority. This totalitarian organization is not
designed simply to prepare for a possible war. It is, rather, the universally
maintained threat of a nuclear war which now, in both the East and the
West, serves to keep the masses submissive, to organize shelters for state
power, and to reinforce the psychological and material defenses of the
ruling class’s power. The modern urbanism on the surface serves the same function.
In April 1962 (in the French-language journal Internationale Situationniste
#7) we made the following comments regarding the massive construction of
individual shelters in the United States during the previous year:
Here, as in every racket, “protection”
is only a pretext. The real purpose of the shelters is to test — and thereby
reinforce — people’s submissiveness, and to manipulate this submissiveness to
the advantage of the ruling society. The shelters, as a creation of a new
consumable commodity in the society of abundance, prove more than any previous
commodity that people can be made to work to satisfy highly artificial needs,
needs that most certainly remain needs without ever having been desires. The
new habitat that is now taking shape with the large housing developments is not
really distinct from the architecture of the shelters; it merely represents a
less advanced level of that architecture. The concentration-camp organization
of the surface of the earth is the normal state of the present society in
formation; its condensed subterranean version merely represents that society’s
pathological excess. This subterranean sickness reveals the real nature of
the “health” at the surface.(1)
The English comrades have just made a decisive contribution to the study of
this sickness, and thus also to the study of “normal” society. This study is
itself inseparable from a struggle that has not been not afraid to defy the old
national taboos of “treason” by breaking the secrecy that is vital in
so many regards for the smooth functioning of power in modern society, behind
the thick screen of its glut of “information.” The sabotage in England was
later extended, despite the efforts of the police and numerous arrests: secret
military headquarters in the country were invaded by surprise (some officials
present being photographed against their will) and forty telephone lines of
British security centers were systematically blocked by the continuous dialing of
ultrasecret numbers that had been publicized.
In order to salute and extend this first attack against the ruling
organization of social space, we have organized this “Destruction of RSG-6”
demonstration in Denmark.(2)
In so doing, we are striving not only for an internationalist extension of this
struggle, but also for its extension on the “artistic” front of this same
general struggle.
The cultural creation that could be referred to as situationist begins with
the projects of unitary urbanism or of the construction of situations in life,
and the fulfillment of those projects is inseparable from the history of the
movement striving to fulfill all the revolutionary possibilities contained in
the present society. In the short term, however, a critical art can be carried
out within the existing means of cultural expression, from cinema to painting —
even though we ultimately wish to destroy this entire artistic framework. This
critical art is what the situationists have summed up in their theory of détournement.
Such an art must not only be critical in its content, it must also be
self-critical in its form. It is a communication which, recognizing the
limitations of the specialized sphere of established communication, “is now
going to contain its own critique.”
For this “RSG-6” event we have recreated the atmosphere of an atomic fallout
shelter. After passing through this thought-provoking ambiance, the visitor
enters a zone evoking the direct negation of this type of necessity. The medium
here used in a critical fashion is painting.
The revolutionary role of modern art, which culminated with dadaism, has
been to destroy all the conventions of art, language and behavior. Since what
is destroyed in art and philosophy is nevertheless obviously not yet concretely
eliminated from the newspapers and the churches, and since the advances in the
arm of critique have not yet been followed by an armed critique, dadaism itself
has become a recognized school of art and its forms have recently been turned
into a reactionary diversion by neodadaists who make careers out of repeating
the style invented before 1920, exploiting each pumped-up detail and using it
to develop an acceptable “style” for decorating the present world.
However, the negative truth that modern art has contained has always been a justified
negation of the society in which it found itself. In Paris in 1937 the Nazi
ambassador Otto Abetz pointed to the painting Guernica and asked
Picasso, “Did you do that?” Picasso very appropriately responded: “No. You
did.”
The negation and the black humor that were so prevalent in modern art and
poetry in the aftermath of World War I surely merit being revived in the
context of the spectacle of World War III within which we are now
living. Whereas the neodadaists speak of charging with (aesthetic) positivity
the plastic refusal previously expressed by Marcel Duchamp, we are sure that
everything the world now offers us as positive can only serve to endlessly
recharge the negativity of the currently permitted forms of expression, and in
this roundabout way produce the sole representative art of these times.
The situationists know that real positivity will come from elsewhere, and that
from now on this negativity will collaborate with it.
Without having any pictorial preoccupations, and even, we hope, without
giving the impression of any respect toward a now long outmoded form of plastic
beauty, we have presented here a few perfectly clear signs.
The “Directives” exhibited on empty canvases or on detourned abstract
paintings should be considered as slogans that one might see written on walls.
The political proclamations that form the titles of some of the paintings are
intended, of course, as a simultaneous ridicule and reversal of that pompous
academicism currently in fashion which is trying to base itself on the painting
of incommunicable “pure signs.”
The “Thermonuclear Maps” immediately go beyond all the laborious strivings
for a “new representationalism” in painting, because they unite the most
freeform procedures of action-painting with representations that can claim
to be totally realistic images of various regions of the world in the
first hours of the next world war.
The series of “Victories” — similarly combining the most extreme ultramodern
offhandedness with a minute realism à la Horace Vernet — revives the tradition
of battle paintings. But in contradistinction to the reactionary ideological
regression on which Georges Mathieu has based his paltry publicity scandals,
the reversal here rectifies past history, changes it for the better, makes it
more revolutionary and more successful than it actually was. These “Victories”
carry on the total-optimistic détournement through which Lautréamont, quite
audaciously, already disputed the validity of all the manifestations of
misfortune and its logic: “I do not accept evil. Man is perfect. The soul does
not fall. Progress exists. . . . Up till now, misfortune has been
described in order to inspire terror and pity. I will describe happiness in
order to inspire their contraries. . . . As long as my friends do not
die, I will not speak of death.”
TRANSLATOR’S NOTES
1. The quotation combines three separate passages in Geopolitics of
Hibernation. (Debord does not indicate the ellipses.)
2. “In June 1963 the SI organized a ‘Destruction of RSG-6’ demonstration in
Denmark, under the direction of J.V. Martin. On this occasion the situationists
distributed a clandestine reissue of the English tract Danger: Official
Secret—RSG 6, signed ‘Spies for Peace,’ which revealed the plan and
function of ‘Regional Seat of Government #6.’ A theoretical text, The
Situationists and the New Forms of Action in Politics and Art, was also
issued in Danish, English and French. In one area an ugly reconstruction of a
bomb shelter was set up; in another were exhibited Martin’s ‘Thermonuclear
Maps’ (détournements of Pop Art representing various regions of the globe during
World War III).” (Internationale Situationniste #9, pp. 31-32.) The
exhibition also included some “Directives” by Debord and some “Victories” by
Michèle Bernstein. The latter are also discussed at the end of Response to a
Questionnaire.
New translation by Ken Knabb of the complete text. (The Situationist
International Anthology includes only a few excerpts from this article.)
No copyright.