Divided We Stand
- An Outline of Scandinavian Situationism
Howard Slater
The reseach behind this introduction springs from a week long continuous drift through various archives in Copenhagen.
Beginning as casual interest in the Scandinavian branch of Situationism it soon developted into more fundamental discussion and
research regarding revolutionary strategies among avant garde movements. Joint research by Howard Slater & Jakob Jakobsen
"It is not the sky we mean, but the past a non existent wall"
- Ron Silliman: Paradise (1984)
"If polyphonic orientation is wanted, the tones must be separated while at the same time they are
interwoven"
- Asger Jorn: Mind And Sense (1964)
Historiography is one thing when it is a history in the abstract that seeks to find origins and from
these origins reassume the reproduction of those already outmoded social relations that, at the
deepest level, always inveigle us towards intrepid discovery and the idealised wish to be
someone other than who we are becoming to be. Another historiography can exist. It can be a
drift in and out of archives; stealing in, taking out, photographing, noting, continuing in a bar or
outside a station by the sausage wagon. You bump into it. Trip over the remnant of a bunker.
Descend down a ladder opposite the barracks. It reanimates you as you slowly discover that the
vista doesn't narrow to a vanishing point but that, once arrived at, the vista widens, can no longer
contain the desire that made it so noticeable, and sets this desire to rove amidst detail, conjecture
and imagined presences. So too, the researchers disappear in the loop of the roundtower, on the
waves of Inderhavnen, in a practice of histogenesis (1). After checking the acoustics of a ruin
they next sidle into the routed spaces of a backlit museum and rifle through a dark case of exile.
No longer is Asger Jorn the star pupil of Fernand Leger, but one of many autodidacts who went to
listen and discuss with Christian Christensen, the Danish anarcho-syndicalist. And Jorn has a
brother too. His name is Nash as there can only be one by the name of Jorn. In the shadows fogs obscure the many bridges - Nash, a poet, reinvents himself... but not quite as a Nashist.
Somewhere nearby and already distancing himself towards a later rapprochement is J.V.Martin,
an illustrator, a painter, a pyromaniac. At the so-called end of it all this latter tops the accounting
list with Debord and the entire Italian section that goes by the name of Sanguinetti. So much for
Pavan and Laugesen. So much for the Situationist Antinational of '74.
We must accept the standard Situationist historiography before we can read the hieroglyphs. We
accept it because our friends wrote it and we know they wrote it so that it wouldn't have to
become too well trod and, being thus well treaded, arise as a litany that incants itself as we
pretend it is ourselves who are speaking and not the assemblage of which we are only a part. In
other words we accept Cobra as Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam. These place cannot be
denied. They do, for the time being at least, exist. And Jorn, existing too, was, like a good striker here, there and everywhere, looking for an inverse geometry of angles. For him, and the others at
Cobra, painting was already a realistic abstract-expressionism, a surplus of energies, but, coming
with a consciousness of its own practice, coming at us with theoretical tangents that sought a
reconciliation of passion and logic, it never quite revelled in the easy light of having its
consciousness made for it. A 1949 a priori: "True realism, materialist realism, renouncing the
idealist equation of subjectivity with individualism, as described by Marx, seeks the forms of
reality that are 'common to the senses of all men'" (2). Pollock was an individualist in a world of
masses. Jorn and the others already had subjectivities, intensities, in a world that had them too.
Jorn always turned up. From CIA to SI via Alba and the International Movement For An Imaginist
Bauhaus Jorn wove people together so that they could better break apart. He was at the founding
conference of the SI in 1957. Barely six months later Debord, a guest in Copenhagen and
brought to meet Christensen whilst meeting Nash, collaborates with Jorn and the two relaxedly
knock-up Fin De Copenhagen as the London Psychogeographical Committee. With its iconic
weather maps recurring against a backdrop of paint drips, demi-lines and newspaper fragments,
this Fin De Copenhagen, already blunting pop art's impact and provoking thoughts of a potential
topography, still seems to suggest the flexible fixity of a situated place as it is buffeted by
meteorological currents no nation or government can control. So too, historians despair at the
impending lack of finality and at the already tangible sense of obsfucation: an obsfucation that
puts us, like the fogs that had us in the centre of nowhere, at both the hub and the periphery of a
mutable culture, in the interland of contradiction. The two cover their tracks because to be tracked
is to no longer be able to play these games of bad passion. Visibility does nothing for subversives
- it beckons them to police cells and art bars that can only offer the conversation of screws,
curators, dealers and journalists. But, on the same trip, visiting the Silkeborg Museum in
Denmark, Debord dreams of building an archive for the Situationist International. So, already, at
the very outset, before any documents or activities have been produced and enacted, with
'everything to invent', Debord, either with a sense of grandeur he feels sure he can live with or in
calling on history to be his judge, has something tangible in mind. Is it, then, a case of what
follows being done with half an eye on posterity? Is it here, on the steps of Silkeborg, where a
Situationist ideology took hold and not in the convenient scapegoats who went by various names
at various times: Spur, Nash, Garnault, Vaneigem. Posterity is transcendence... passion and logic
unite in the interstices of the everyday.
To announce a presence something already present has to be revealed as too seamlessly
enunciating the persistent social relations. At first the SI's targets gave rise to incisive critiques of
cultural practices that had had their day, but wouldn't tire of that day. Jorn's playful demolition of
Lettrist pretension, appearing over the two issues of Internationale Situationniste published in
1960 - Originality & Magnitude and Open Creation And Its Enemies - are not only eclectic
expressions that fulfil Jorn's ethos of writing "to oppose any clear-cut schemes or directives about
art" (3) they work on expanding a never finalised theory of situations towards an extemporised
topology, towards situlogy. Not content with the role of pedagogue and preferring to treat
theoretical matter as an expressionist material, Jorn drew the 'construction of situations' as a
"transformative morphology of the unique". Breaking away from the neutralising equivalences of a
topology based upon geometry, Jorn attempted to offer "an inverse geometry" that took account
not solely of space, but of the transformative action of time. Key here was Jorn's guiding principle
of "the creation of variabilities within a unity, and the search for unity among the variations" (4)
with which he tried to dynamise topology and to overcome the self-atomisation of individualist
artists through his constant support of groupings such as the SI. For Jorn value lay in variability,
in the "morphology of time", that makes uniqueness a common quality. He saw the schematics of
Isou and the Lettrists as a scientific practice of art that dissemblingly sought to extol individual
genius, as an indication that the creative aspect of human life - the persevering with being as a
morphing variability - was forever being seduced towards a functionalism that served capitalism the preservation of being as an individualised unity. In the late 50s, then, this variability as a
human value, the "unique of the identical form", had, for Jorn, a progressive revolutionary value
that could be found in the Situationist International as it grew to include fledgling Italian and
German Sections that were both instigated through contacts Jorn had made. The strongest of
these contacts seems to have been that made with the Spur Group. Together they authored the
first Spur Manifesto and proclaimed a new aim for artistic practice beyond commodification and
non-committal contemplation: "Abstract painting has given us the commonplace of fourdimensional space. The painting of the future is polydimensional. Endless dimension awaits us".
By the Third Situationist International Conference of 1959 Spur had become participants in the
Situationist project. From 1960 they started to issue their own, largely graphic, journal and began
to work even closer with other Scandinavian Situationists such as Staffan Larsson, Katarina
Lindell and J¯rgen Nash. Indeed it was Nash, the one time vice-chairman of the Aspekt
Association - a grouping dedicated to politics and culture - who co-edited the second issue of the
Spur magazine and who, together with Jacqueline de Jong and Danish artist Albert Mertz,
collaborated on a Spur film - So Ein Ding [Such A Thing] - rumoured to have been orchestrated
and urged upon its participants by Jorn. On this same trip to Munich in early 1961, a collectively
authored tract, titled The Avant Garde Is Unacceptable, was printed and distributed as an
intervention against a conference on modernism: "In this society, artists are expected to take over
the role of the Court Fools of the past, expected to take payment for providing society with the
delusion that there is a special kind of cultural freedom"(6). It was the status of this 'freedom' that
would soon lead to a rift in the movement - a rift, each side of which maintained a presence in
Scandinavia and a claim on the title Scandinavian Situationism. This same rift was straddled by
Asger Jorn. He had perhaps, in Open Creation, already made reference to it when he suggested
that there were two tendencies of situlogy - a ludic, playful, experimental tendency and an
analytical, technical and scientific tendency. Rather than seeing these as mutually exclusive Jorn,
ever hopeful for an interweaving, offered that situlogy could give a "decisive push to the two
tendencies".
Can we speak of a rift, a clear cut secession? Does a cultural practice that is fluid, collaborative
and rhizomatic lend itself to an historiographic segmentation? The finer details are always absent,
their enigmas help form an epistemophilic drive that makes research a matter of group analysis,
makes history a possible practice and makes life associational. So, the year 1962, the year of the
schism between the artists and the politicos, the practitioners and the theorists, comes, on this
trip through the archives, to be a little more blurred than we thought. It is this blurring of the edges
that constitutes the dynamic field of homeomorphism, the variability within a unity where the unity
is the accepted facts and the variability forms a chink in what we are led to believe. Not only have
Nash and Jorn decided to form a Bauhaus Situationniste (BS) in 1960 (7), purchasing a farm in
southern Sweden, but Debord, Strijbosch, Bernstein and J.V. Martin are to make an art exhibition
in Odense in 1963. Either side of these events lies the case of Spur. With copies of their
magazine impounded by the German police and the Spur members up in court on charges of
producing 'degenerate art' it was declared by the 'Conseil Central' of the Situationist International
that the Spur Group (i.e. the German Section) had been excluded. The variability within a unity
that Jorn espoused as 'open creation' had been interpreted by the 'Conseil Central' as fractional
activity. Charged with disregarding Situationist discipline - they failed to communicate fully with
Nash and de Jong who were 'Conseil Central' appointees to their 'editorial board' - the Spur
Group were condemned as using the SI in order to 'arrive' as artists. Perhaps more damning, and
indicative of an inconsistent proprietorship over knowledge that would come to haunt the SI, the
Spurists were accused of a "systematic misunderstanding of Situationist theses". That the
'Conseil Central' did not aim their declaration at Jorn and Nash when these two founded the BS at
'Drakabygget' in Southern Sweden, is perhaps indicative of an anomaly of Situationist discipline:
its arbitrary wielding of a fledgling sovereignty. It seems equally haphazard when, in Jean
Sellem's chronology, all the Spurists are to be found as members of the BS alongside Ansgar
Elde, Jaqueline de Jong, Asger Jorn, Ambrosius Fjord (psued), J.V.Martin, J¯rgen Nash and
Hardy Strid. The exclusion of the German Section - who had made their Spur In Exile edition at
Drakabygget - sparked-off an almost immediate protest in the form of the leaflet Danger! Do Not
Lean Out signed by de Jong, Nash and Elde. In it these three say that they were prepared to
criticise the Spur Group (presumably over the planned publication of all issues of their magazine
by an Italian art publisher), but were led to protest against the action of the 'Conseil Central' - Guy
Debord, Raoul Vaneigem, Atilla Kotanyi, Uwe Lausen - which they saw as a 'fait accompli'. A
decision had already been arrived at by the four which the signatories indignantly point out was
itself an indication of 'fractionalist' activity: "An organisation whose essential decisions are not
based on the principle of debate is totalitarian and does not agree with our rules of collaboration...
To call in comrades from other countries only to hand out a printed leaflet is not a very positive
method. It can be explained only as an outcome of the non-activity policy of those four members"
(8). This leaflet was met with a further proclamation from the SI - calling itself the 1'Internationale
Situationniste - that first excludes all 'Nashists' and then goes on to give the "supreme authority"
to represent the Scandinavian section of 1'IS to J.V.Martin. The latter, a painter, who had worked
with J¯rgen Nash in the Aspekt Association, who illustrated an Editions Internationale
Situationniste book of poems by Nash in 1961, and had exhibited with Hardy Strid, also wrote a
press release concerning the ideological conflicts with the Drakabygget group. With the exclusion
of Strid, who was secretary for the Scandinavian section for barely a month, all 'Nashists' had
been excluded from 1'IS by the Sixth SI Conference in Antwerp, leaving J.V.Martin in a somewhat
isolated position in Randers, Northern Denmark. It was Martin who proposed that the term
Nashism be adopted by the 1'IS: "Principally known for his attempt to betray the revolutionary
movement and theory of that time, Nash's name was detourned by that movement as a generic
term applicable to all traitors in struggles against the dominant cultural and social conditions"(9).
This power to allot 'supreme authority' and name 'traitors' is another indicator of the sovereignty
that 1'IS took upon itself. Maybe it was calculated to irrevocably alienate Nash from any claim to
the Situationist 'title' and similarly to ward-off any pretenders to the sovereign mantle: several
months before this round of exclusions, in the autumn of 1961, a magazine called Nye Linjer
[New Lines] had appeared in Copenhagen. Situationist ideas were in other heads.
It is unlikely that the 'Conseil Central' would have been too dismayed at the accusations of their
being dictatorial. Back at the London (1960) and Goteborg (1961) Conferences the debates were
cast as being between the artists and the politicos. This led to a moment when the German
section had to leave the room. Heinrad Prem, a member of Spur, had read a position-paper that
cast doubt over the revolutionary efficacy of that very proletariat that was coming to be the focal
point for the 1'IS ever since it had made contact with the French Socialisme ou Barbarie group.
Prem instantly withdrew the declaration in favour of unity. At Goteborg the debates gave rise to a
ruling on 'antisituationist' art presented by Kotanyi - a move intended to preempt the use of the
term 'situationist' as a mark of avant-garde value. J¯rgen Nash is reported as begrudgingly
accepting this but, in a slip of the pen, the note taker cannot hide his own disgruntlement with
Nash and describes how "only Nash objects, his spite and indignation having become sharper
and sharper throughout the whole debate, to the point of uncontrolled rage" (10). Warming up for
the 'supercession of art' - according to Vaneigem, the actualisation of art and philosophy in
individual lived experience - the Spur and BS exclusions are linked to those differences of opinion
over the revolutionary efficacy of creativity and the status of artistic 'freedom'. Jorn's 'unity of
diversity' and the formation of new counter-values based upon the surplus energies of creativity
was, if it ever had any practical credence within the 'Conseil Central', being outmanoeuvred by
the figure of the revolutionary proletarian as the pivotal agent of an unambiguous transformative
creativity. For Debord et al a difference of 'opinion' over such matters was untenable to the
degree that their coming adherence to Marx's presentation of the material reality of class took
matters beyond opinion. The 1'IS, then, was coming to see the artists in their midst as the
symbols of an ambiguous, readily assimilable, practice that they fetishized in inverse relation to
their being blind to the ambiguities of class - a blindness that eventually impeded their ability to
theorise the recomposition of this class. However, could it also have been that the practice of art
was seen as being too close to the question of the spectacle that the 1'IS was on the threshold of
theorising? The problem with this concept, a reduction of capitalist social relations to those
'mediated by images', cast its shadow over these exclusions as, perhaps, the appearance of an
intransigence informing the self-image of the 1'IS. Accusations of 'dictatorial' behaviour, then,
were nothing when set beside the need to theorise the spectacle, and thus replace artistic
ambiguity with a written coherence that enabled the 1'IS to project an unassimilable self-image as
the proof of a pure and eminent revolutionary intent, a sovereign exemplarity. This is further
compounded when we recall the plan to set up a Situationist archive in Silkeborg (extensively
diagramed by Debord) (10a). Knowing that many of their other concepts were indistinguishable
from the diverse collaborations that they had embarked upon, the theory of the spectacle was,
and has since become, the 1'IS's most renowned, if flawed, contribution to revolutionary theory.
To be propounding such a theory whilst collaborating with visual artists could have been seen to
be incoherent in terms of a projected practice and hence become a major dent to the collective
ego and its bid for an exemplary posterity: "The ambiguity of all revolutionary art lies in the fact
that the revolutionary aspect of any particular spectacle is always contradicted and offset by the
reactionary element in all spectacles" (11). In many ways the conflicts with Spur and the BS were
to some degree encouraged and used by the 1'IS to prune itself of contradictions that may have
eventually led to a deepening of the theory of the spectacle, a politicisation of the practice of art
and a productive extension of its notion of class. As with the Nashism definition, the tone of the
pronouncements are such that any split would be irrevocable. The problem of creativity - the right
to productive socialisation as a counter value - was not resolved, it was polarised. On the one
hand there was the revolutionary creativity of the proletarian movement which was coming to be
expressed by the 1'IS as theory, and on the other hand the specialised creativity of artists
expressed as spontaneous action. On either side of this reified divide both currents of
Scandinavian Situationism would eventually run into problems that orbited the dualism of politics
and culture that the incipient movement had once brought centre stage as the dialectical struggle
of 'everyday life'. Aiming for a 'dual power in culture', as the SI had professed in 1960 and which it
maintained, through the words of Vaneigem in 1965, as the building of a 'parallel society', would
have politicised culture by taking full cognizance of the reproductive function of culture, of the
need for new modes of relationship and the deprofessionalisation of politics and art as 'separate'
activities - all facets of the the revolution of everyday life that the 1'IS had highlighted through the
'construction of situations' and had pursued, not untroubledly, through the writings of Raoul
Vaneigem. Instead the 1'IS was somehow intent on artificially 'leaving' this cultural terrain whilst it
sought an everyday of 'real proletarianized life' and 'authentic revolutionary praxis'. Aims fitting to
the backglance of posterity, but ones that would come to form a transcendent, if not
metaphysical, vanishing point that belittled their own experiences and, in not pursuing the
contradictions thus far raised, hindered their practice.
The Nashist 'faction' based around Drakabygget did not take their exclusion lying down. Following
upon the Danger! leaflet, Nash and de Jong collaborated on a text entitled Critic On The Political
Practice Of Detournement. This handwritten, labyrinthine graphic text, complete with loops,
circles, clumps and spirals of writing, sought to clarify the events up to the exclusion of the
Nashists and offer some further ideas as to why these exclusions took place. Neither referencing
nor developing the arguments of the previous SI conferences perhaps impedes this deliberately
hard-to-follow, excursive text, but the two ironically claim that the practice of detournement had
led to their legitimate protest against the 'Conseil Central' being misrepresented as an attack on
the SI as a movement. They claim that facts had been falsified, elements of the struggle omitted especially their own suspicions about the Spur Group - and that this amounted to their being
victims of a Situationist coup. What is clear is that Nash and de Jong considered that a lack of
organisational clarity had led to areas where a 'sovereign power' had been wielded: "the terms
and theories of the IS were not to be understood by everyone in an absolutely similar way" (12).
One element of their protest - that anyone could be a situationist, a member of a situationist
movement - is one that runs through all their later pronouncements and is one that, informed by
the disagreements highlighted at previous conferences, the 1'IS was coming to rhetoricise around
whilst actively refuting. Nash and de Jong touch on this: "The IS has to be considered either as
an avant-garde school which has already produced a series of first class artists... or as an antiorganisation based upon a new ideology which is situationist and which has not yet found in
details its clear formulations in the fields of science, technique and art". Whether or not this was a
further incitement for Debord to pen the Society Of The Spectacle it is clear that the l'IS was, at
this stage, an anti-organisation - a 'conspiracy of equals' that had announced the return of the
'most total revolutionary programme'. It was proud of this. However, problems around its
organisation, especially the very intersubjective relationships proper to 'everyday life' and inimical
to its professed confrontation with alienated communication, dogged it right up until the end. In
1962, the outrage expressed by Nash and De Jong that such a group could be so undemocratic
as to seek to eject a 'majority' of its own members, could well be indicative that as an organisation
of affinities the 1'IS was self-selecting. The trumpeted exclusions are also indicative of its bid for
'sovereign power' - a political act that announces its own state of exception, its own rules
('creating the sphere of its own reference'), and in so doing disregards any notion of a binding
'contract' being at the origin of its power (13).The 1'IS clearly, then, was in the throes of reorientating itself away from cultural revolution towards a political revolution that it saw as far more
historically grounded in social creativity i.e. with culture not yet as developed as a productive
force the 1'IS saw the proletarian movement as the locus of a productive, constituting power. This
group no longer wanted to be heir to the Dada and Surrealist movement, but to the First
International of Marx and Engels and thus to the potential 'sovereign power' of the working class
as auto-invested in workers councils. What remained, then, was, at least in the years after 1962,
a conflict over the right to develop the direction of concepts and practices that had been
developed collectively. Such conflicts can go some way to accounting for the vehemence around
the exclusion of Nash - not to be repeated as venomously until the resignation of Vaneigem - in
that the very exuberant vehemence dished-out seeks to nullify the threat posed by the areas of
concern represented by the excludee; areas of concern - the everyday - that remained close to
the 1'IS but, being vested in the foibles of individuals rather than the group, being unconscious
loose-ends, dim recollections of a written ethos, are a threat in terms of their highlighting the
limitations of the organisation and in pressurising the idealised coherence of the self-image as it
comes to be increasingly crafted through a posteriorising theoretical discourse. The exclusion of
the Nashists sorely impedes the 'guidelines' of the SI as they were expressed in an unsigned
piece from 1961 called Instructions For Taking Up Arms: "The greatest difficulty confronting
groups that seek to create a new type of revolutionary organisation is that of establishing new
types of human relationships within the organisation itself... Unless this is accomplished, by
methods yet to be experimented with, we will never be able to escape from specialised politics"
(14). The 1'IS could only function effectively as an anti-organisation, a non-contracted grouping, if
a 'new type of intersubjective relationship' had been encouraged and practiced. The exclusions,
as an exercise of 'sovereign power', not only hindered this, but, when also cast as "the only
weapon of any group based on the complete freedom of individuals" (15) compounded it further.
In a Declaration from Drakabygget many of those associated with the Nashist tendency declared
themselves to be a 2nd Situationist International (16). This curious Declaration, which was
earmarked for revision and which bears similarities to Jorn's situationist texts, attempts to make
sense of the divisions that had occurred between themselves and the 1'IS. Drawing an analogy
between the First International and the Second 'social democratic' International, the signatories
clearly state that their aim is one of social democratic reform. This is further problematised by
their claim that such an aim is in line with Scandinavian characteristics and that this clash of
cultures - a matter of two culturally determined different points of view - had led to the inability of
the two groups to work with one another. Taking a swipe at French enlightenment rationality the
'Parisian' point of view is depicted as "purely a matter of position... the Scandinavian outlook is
completely different. It is based on movement and mobility". One wonders whether the issue of
national characteristics is a red herring, an easy capitulation to cultural determinism, a matter of
received ideas standing in the stead of different notions about praxis and enunciation for,
between the lines, the split seems to be being rendered as a conflict between a conceptual and
an expressionist approach, or, to echo Jorn's two tendencies of situlogy, a conflict between the
ludic and the analytical: "The Franco-Belgian Situationists base themselves on the same
principles as Pascal, Descartes... action precedes emotion. Emotion is a primary non-reflective
intelligence: passionate thought/thinking passion". The issue seems to be one in which the
signatories are objecting to a use of theory that they relate to as a blueprint for action that
'dictates' practice. As theoreticians the 1'IS would have probably countered that they relate to
theoretical knowledge as a tool that highlights where best and how best to intervene against
capitalism. The Declaration adds, again echoing Jorn's contention that, in situlogy, the ludic
precedes the analytical: "We do not always distinguish between theory and practice. We intend to
produce our theories after the event....The French work exactly the other way round. They want
everything straight before they start and everybody has to line up correctly". Beyond the subtle
obfuscations of regional characteristics the arguments, which will later be retrospectively cast as
one between anarchists and authoritarian socialists, have, at the outset, a vague Nietzschean
ring to them: a philosophising theory is only creative of prevaricating value judgments, the combat
against culture must needsbe install a culture of affects, a semiotic of the emotions, that "removes
antitheses from things after comprehending that we have projected them there" (17). As with the
reified divide between culture and politics, this division between theory and practice, concept and
expression, passion and logic, is similarly beset by misleading problems that, in line with capitalist
social relations, have the effect of disrupting new means of socialisation and of hindering
productive co-operation. Human productive values are hived-off, separated out into 'spheres' and
set against each other exactly as they are under capitalist relations of production. This may, in
part, explain why both Situationist currents were, at one time or another, attracted to the idea of
taking over Unesco under the auspices of the Mutant programme developed by Debord and Jorn.
Is it at such an international level that these divisions between and within protagonists are
unconsciously desired to be surpassed - the unity that both currents sought, is, symbolically at
least, projected into the entity of a unitary Unesco which becomes the group-fantasy of the whole
person, the fantasy of omnipotent sovereignty, the fantasy of revolution by other means? (18).
Yet the signatories of the 1962 Declaration were astute in pointing to the Achilles heel of the 1'IS,
a practical weakness that was candidly admitted in an internal document written in 1966 wherein
Debord, after stating that the practical activity of the situationists is poor goes on to offer that the
communication of the theory of the 1'IS is "its principal practical link" (19). Along with the absurdsounding hope to develop a 'theory of dialogue' (which should be read alongside Vaneigem's
"The erotic is pleasure in search of coherence"!) this aspect of the 1'IS has an almost
Althusserian ring to it: the production of texts, the development of a theory, becomes a practice in
itself and not something developed as a praxis of 'everyday life'. The 1'IS met the problem of
practice with the production of theoretical texts that may or may not have lent it posterity, but
numbed its contemporaneous activity by meretriciously excluding a wider participation and
attracting only those who sought the 'theoretical accord' that ostentatiously bound the group. It is
as if, after the Nashist exclusions, it was not only that a practice of art, seen as individualistic and
ambiguous, was collapsed into an authorial production that was, when push came to shove,
similarly judged as individualistic and ambiguous, but that the whole issue of practice was
somehow put into limbo, captured in an idealisation of consciousness, and delayed until such a
time as the 1'IS could connect-up with the historic current of a revolutionary workers movement.
Coherence, as it comes to establish orthodoxy, may look good in the archive but, preempting
communication, the need for others, the practice of otherness, it is not the best means of securing
participation, and encouraging new modes of relationship.
Like Instructions For Taking Up Arms, the Situationist Manifesto of 1960 seems to have been a
text which dissident Situationists took to be a definitive statement of Situationist ideas. Alexander
Trocchi used it as the basis for one of the texts of the Sigma Portfolio and the BS also took its
ethos of collective participation to the letter: "Against the spectacle, the realised situationist
culture introduces total participation" (20). It is this combination of participation, creativity and 'the
everyday' that the BS took to be the guiding ethos of its activity and in many ways, by making use
of Situationist theory as the 1'IS had urged, it drew out a sting of proprietorship from the latter
which was not levelled at Alexander Trocchi and the 'loose cultural venture' that was Project
Sigma. Indeed, whereas the latter met with a muted approval, the BS was lambasted at every
opportunity through the figurehead of J¯rgen Nash. By coining the term Nashism rather than
being critical of the BS as a whole, the 1'IS maintained its link to a figure it had banished by
means of an exercise of a 'relation of ban' that ratified its 'sovereign power'. Furthermore, Nash
became almost sacred, a taboo figure that allowed the 1'IS to leave unabreacted its own
unconscious aprorias - those potentially useful contradictions that were beset by collective
myopia - and enabled it to thus savour its own 'sovereign power' - a power that elevated the
individual situationist into an 'exceptional' case. The left-communist Jean Barrot maintained as
much when, talking of the exclusions, he says that "one is obliged to see in this behaviour the
sign of a mystified coming-to-consciousness of the group's impasse, and of a magical way of
saving it" (21). The 'magic' comes in the exercise of a 'state of exception' operated by all
sovereign powers, an exception that establishes its own arbitrary law to which no one has
recourse. Thus, Nash is lambasted and Trocchi is, if not lauded, then at least 'legally' approved. It
was not as if Trocchi shared the 1'IS's hopes for a revolutionary proletariat and was, as a result,
spared, as both Sigma and the BS were far more interested in taking up 'the dual power in
culture' aspect of the situationist project, of working with the productive activity that marked their
'everyday life' rather than being marked-out by their 'separation' from culture. Rather than the
growing sense that the 1'IS was communicating with an 'outside', that culture was something it
consented to act in, Trocchi perhaps articulated something of the drive of the BS when he offered
that Sigma intended to be: "a kind of shadow reality of the future existing side by side with the
present 'establishment' and the process [being] one of general in(ex)filtration"(22). Not being
inhibited by history nor being off-put by the praxis of artistic activity meant that the issue of a
practice-in-waiting that dogged the 1'IS was not one that concerned the BS. Instead it was not a
matter of art being 'realised' and 'suppressed' (the magic formula of supercession), but of forging
a collective project, a 'learning community', around the Drakabygget farm and making
'detournations' of urban life in Denmark and Sweden. So, within months of their being excluded
the BS had produced two issues of the scrapbook-style journal Drakabygget, a book of poems by
Gordon Fazakerley, had collaborated with Jacqueline de Jong's Situationist Times, issued multi-
signed declarations to accompany their street actions and made three short films - Nothing New
In West Germany, Stopforbud (featuring jazz pianist Bud Powell) and Locomotive. Thus the BS
embarked upon sustained 'meta-categorical' activities that were to draw many participating
people into their orbit. Their first collective art action - along with Hans-Peter Zimmer of Group
Spur - was to exhibit as 'Seven Rebels' and to produce a Swedish version of the 1962
Declaration retitled as The Struggle of the Situcratic Society. With the arrival to the group of jazz
musician and art critic Jens J¯rgen Thorsen, whose Co-Ritus manifesto of 1961, formed the basis
of another sub-group, BS activities eventually extended into including a variant of the street
performance that they had experimented with in the 'Seven Rebels' show when, with Hans Peter
Zimmer as 'Christ', the group led a procession through the streets of Odense. The first Co-Ritus
exhibition is noteworthy in terms of its interpretation of participation. Jean Sellem: "The exhibition
was remarkable in that when it opened the walls were completely bare. On the floor... there were
piles of materials - paint, pencil, glue, wood, nails and paper - which could be used for the
construction of collages" (23). This exhibition at the Galerie Jensen in Copenhagen set the tone
for both Co-Ritus and BS activities. Consisting of a group-constructed work whose assembly was
accompanied by musicians, the resultant collage, as much the work of visitors as 'showing'
artists, was cut-up and its separate parts taken away by all the participants. Arising from this
Nash and Thorsen together with Dieter Kunzelmann of Group Spur, were encouraged by local
residents to do something with a large grey fence that surrounded a development site owned by
Gutenberg House publishers. The three took this as a chance to demonstrate in "favour of artists
taking over the town centre as field of activity" and succeded in painting slogans and murals on
the fence only to be arrested and fined for their endeavours. Nash and Thorsen in an interview
given to Aspekt in 1963 spoke of their take on the "situationist idea" being "based on utilisation of
art and the forces of creativity within art being used directly in the social environment" (24). Other
actions that blurred the line between peformance art and politicised demonstration were to follow.
By the time of the publication of the fourth issue of Situationist Times in 1963, the BS together
with Jacqueline de Jong and all four members of Group Spur had collaborated on the
construction of a labyrinth for the Facett 63 show at Malmo's Radhushall. Only given a wall space
of five meters squared to work in, Jean Sellem recounts how "Thorsen.. came upon the idea of
increasing the available space by constructing a spiral labyrinth on the floor area of the exhibition
room through which the visitors could wander...". Another manifesto, entitled The Situationists
From Drakabygget, The Spiral Labyrinth And The Situationist International, accompanied their
construction and provided another opportunity to lampoon the 1'IS: "The first Situationniste
International was a lamb-like pious group that never pursued anything more than theoretical
discussions... It is true that the Drakabygget group was the most radical in the sense that they
wanted to realise what the others only talked about" (25). The BS, then, had little need of backing
from the 1'IS. They developed Jorn's 'situlogy' by referring to Kierkegaard's philosophy of
situations and, like Trocchi, sought to make use of the 'construction of situations' as a means to
catalyse a change in social relations, to experiment with 'ways of behaving' and of being together.
For the BS this took their combative art practice along the vector of direct action in the streets. In
1965 they formed part of a committee that organised a Demonstration For The Freedom Of
Expression in Copenhagen that brought upwards of three thousand into the streets. Playing with
a Danish law that forbade the performing of music in public spaces, an illegal festival, a
'detournation', took place at Stroget in Central Copenhagen. Whether this was an indication of the
most shopworn forms of artistic production, as the 1'IS had suggested of the activities of the BS,
is debatable as the BS never claimed their activities as 'art'. For them their actions of
'communicative urbanism' were part of a Situationistic movement, a collective unity that didn't
loose its variety.
In comparison to the 1'IS's paralysing concern to 'constitute a global critical theory', the BS were
resolute cultural revolutionaries that prided themselves on being 'active' rather than
'contemplative', on being inclusive rather than exclusive. They, too, disparagingly mocked the
'happening' and its spectacular development of a renewed objectal focus for art, seeking instead
to transform creativity from its traditional formalisation of everyday life into an experiment in social
relations. J¯rgen Nash, looking back at these activities in 1964, updated the 1962 Declaration to
state that "according to Scandinavian situationist philosophy action is the result of emotion and
arises out of emotion" (26). For the BS the organisational strictures of the 1'IS were seen as too
disciplinarian, as placing a restriction upon who it was possible to collaborate with, and thus
restricting the terrain of possible activity. Action for them could not be preplanned as, in the
process of planning, the original emotion, the energy of the thought could be lost, and with it the
energy that could be vital to attracting participation was frittered away. Against this incipient
anarchism, the discriminating tendency of an 'idealised consciousness' with its dream of
sovereign coherence was seen as finding its apotheosis in "an adherence to old-fashioned,
classical and ultra-rigid patterns of organisation" (27). Despite its avowed aim to 'create a new
type of revolutionary organisation' the 1'IS was practicing, according to the BS, like any other
orthodox political grouping. This resonates with the way that a sovereign power was incarnated
within the 1'IS as an organisation. It was, in its own eyes, positively creating the sphere of its own
reference, defining itself through the exclusions, and yet its sovereign power could not operate
effectively (and operated dictatorially for the BS) because, being reliant on the 'bare life' - the
everyday productive co-operation - of the working class, the 1'IS was disabled from putting this
power into practice and came instead to instaurate politics within the group as a separate activity.
This is not to infer that the BS, as cultural revolutionaries, had tackled these issues and
surmounted them. Whilst the BS could, from their 'collective centre' at Drakabygget, found a
"freely organized movement" based upon "voluntary associations of autonomous work groups"
(28) and adopt an ethos of productive co-operation, their having anarchistically demonised
politics, and thus the scope for any renewal of politics; their having shunned the organisational
issue, meant that the BS would soon be left with an inverse autonomy to that of the 1'IS - to be a
little too symmetrical it could be said that the BS had plenty of fully sociable 'bare life', but little
grasp on a potential subversive use of sovereign power; be it that around its own institution at
Drakabygget or that of the working class. For the BS, operating in a social democracy of
consensus, there was no creative, militant lessons to be learned from its working class: "The
labour movement was once considered to be the salt of the earth. Today it is more like a milch
cow whose udders are being pumped in an effort to get more and more material benefits at the
expense of the mind" (29). As with Alexander Trocchi and Project Sigma, the BS, holding dear to
the ludic trajectory of 'situlogy', rejected work and the contradictions of wage-labour outright and
instead negotiated the risk of artistic assimilation, confident that artists could become catalysts,
the pivotal agents of social change. However, their playful and spontaneous approach, whilst
leading to actions, demonstrations and occupations, neglected any thought of strategy or tactics.
Like the counter-culture it was a foreecho of, the BS was inclined towards hitting out at the
symbols of capitalistic society - 'atom bombs, popes and politicians' - without indicting capitalist
social relations, and thus left these very real and interconnected forms of power to continue
unperturbed in a solely symbolic existence separated from the everyday. One participant, Bjorn
Rosendahl, offered that "The weakness of the Bauhaus Situationist was that all the fresh actions
revealing society to itself were never properly followed up. Instead the actions came in cascades.
It was bracing... but all that untamed power was never used in full" (30). This may be the danger
of Nash's totally emotional explanation for action. With passion disconnected from logic, instinct
can become indistinguishable from a drive and expressionism can become undifferentiable from
exhibitionism. So, neither the 'anti-organisation' of the 1'IS, nor the 'avant-garde school' of the
Drakabygget group got any nearer to the 'semiotic of the impulses', the 'culture of affects', that
was, as a revolution of 'everyday life', a reconciliation of passion and logic, desired by both: "A
mode of thought that would restrict behaviour, or a mode of behaviour that would restrict thought both comply with an extremely useful automatism: they ensure security" (31). Security does not
imply risk, it implies the preservation of being, the continuation of orthodox social relations. Both
the BS and the 1'IS remained affixed to the means of expression they felt most comfortable with.
One facet of the conflict between the two competing groups was that which centred around the
differences between two European cultures. It is into this area that Asger Jorn returns. Having
resigned from the 1'IS in 1961 whilst still funding it, Jorn, who also funded de Jong & Nash's
Danger Do Not Lean Out leaflet, threw his support behind the BS and not only made polemical
contributions to the first issues of the Drakabygget magazine but is rumoured to have funded this
magazine as well. However, tensions are reported to have arisen between Jorn and the BS,
particularly a conflict centred around disagreements he had with Thorsen's notions of art as a
'communicative action' as exemplified by the Co-Ritus interventions. Not isolating himself
completely from the Situationist movement - he made contributions to the fifth issue of the
Situationist Times - Jorn founded a Scandinavian Institute for Comparative Vandalism (32) which
was inaugurated by the publication of Guy Debord's Contre Le Cinema in 1964. Through this
Institute, which was intended to give his maverick views of art practice an institutional legitimacy,
Jorn sought to negotiate a passage between the academic practice of art history and his interest
in Nordic folk art. He had the intention of publishing an ambitious project drawing together
decades of investigation into a millenia-long Nordic presence in European culture. Taking its title
from the discovery of 'graffitied' elements on Norman churches - which Jorn was convinced
displayed the presence of a Nordic craftsmen - the Institute was concerned with redressing the
balance of a Greco-Roman hegemony over European culture. In many ways the work of the
Institute was responding to a perceived lack of cultural confidence that Scandinavians felt in
relation to the rest of Europe - an inferiority that was once more played out in the debacle of the
1962 exclusions. With Jorn's project in mind we can see how his work perhaps influenced the BS
when they spoke of the cultural incompatibilities between themselves and 'Paris'. The 1'IS would
not have given much credence to this as for them such cultural differences were 'resolved' by the
dialectic of class struggle: the working classes have no country. However, this not only begs the
question of a working class culture, a culture of productive co-operation that can get beyond a
capitalistic definition of value and aesthetics, it highlights how the variabilities of inter-subjective
differences within the Situationist movement were submerged beneath the dream of theoretical
coherence for the 1'IS and recollapsed onto the cultural determinism of regionalism for the BS. As
a visual artist Jorn offered an avenue away from this impasse by using the very ambiguities of a
visual semiotic that he felt could both override and draw attention to the overlooked ambiguities
and unsuspected authoritarianisms of language. Jorn's project, with its use of a 'comparative'
method of art history that gave greater weight to the un-captioned juxtaposition of images from
different places and times, was weighted in favour of visual essays rather than a use of images
that illustrated theoretical texts. It was thought that this method was best suited to reveal the
differences, the variabilities within similar forms and motifs (33). While it is undoubtedly a method
that is a lot more 'open' than a directly textual approach in that the latter guides us towards the
seduction of interpretation and resolutions, the 'comparative' method allowed Jorn not only to
cross the disciplinary boundaries between art history and archeology, it led him beyond strictly
national boundaries and beyond the abyss of aesthetics that his former comrades of the 1'IS were
scared of falling into. In some ways Jorn was developing a visual theory of 'living art', expanding
the boundaries of creativity beyond the aesthetic towards an everyday use value for creativity,
one in which form, rather than being necessarily aesthetic and necessarily opposed to 'lived
experience' - the ambiguity of an art practice that had to be superceded for the 1'IS - was simply
the carrier for the expression of variabilities, a unity of variables. Thus for Jorn, not only was it
that the "most commonplace, obvious and traditional art is most valuable, because it is the
common property of the largest number of people over the longest span of time", it was also a
matter of these variabilities running seamlessly through the texture of 'everyday life': "what gives
the individual a social value is their variability of behaviour in relation to other people" (34).
Irrespective of aesthetic legitimacy, then, folk art or 'living art' with all its intimate banalities was,
for Jorn and the BS, an expression of variability and difference, a basic communicative need, a
matter of relational energies that could strengthen the bond of association to the detriment of a
sovereign individualism. The fact that Jorn's work both undermined the smooth categorisation of
art history and the notion of artistic production as something entirely self-reliant and original,
rather than as that which "consists of some portion of originality combined with traditional
elements", may have found its advocates with those members of the BS that, in the 1962
Declaration, stressed the 'tradition-directed' aspect of their activity. Their work was not avantgardist in the sense of its being about new forms, but in the way that it sought to fill these forms
with its own variabilities. In this way, inspired by Jorn, the BS understood Situationism to be a
movement within which any creative person could participate - for them anyone who tries to live is
an artist. Unfortunately, these more general conclusions were offset by the framework of 'Nordic'
culture that Jorn was fascinated by and which the BS, initially at least, also supported. It is
reported by Lars Morrell that long term collaborants Group Spur grew wary of the 'Nordic
centrism' of the 1962 Declaration and distanced themselves from the more all embracing idea of
a 2'IS. This had the effect of weakening any chances for such a 2'IS to gain any momentum
outside of Scandinavia until the persistence of its activities and its ethos of open participation
gave impetus to a revivified situationistic movement that made Drakabygget an important node in
the diffuse network of an international counter-culture.
The 1962 exclusions had led to a state of affairs wherein the claim of the 1'IS to be an
international organisation was gravely weakened. The fourteen exclusions in two months had just
about removed all non-French speaking participants from the project and all but decimated the
German and Scandinavian sections. These latter survived in the guise of Uwe Lausen in
Germany and J.V. Martin in Denmark. Whereas the former poet Lausen would himself be
excluded in 1965, Martin remained a member right up until 1972 when, with only Debord and
Sanguinetti left, he presided over an anthology of SI texts entitled Der Er Liv Efter Fodslen [There
Is Life After Birth]. With its being offered that the communication of its theory was the principal
practice of the 1'IS it perhaps became a matter of no little import that Martin edited three issues of
Situationistisk Revolution between 1962 and 1970. With the exception of the one issue of Der
Deutsche Gedanke [The German Thought] which was published in 1963 there was no other
foreign language journal published by the 1'IS until the Italian and American Sections published
theirs in 1969. In many ways this amounted to a far from negligible role for the Scandinavian
Section that is reflected in the 'Situationnistes Chronologie' entries for the mid period of the 1'IS.
Beginning with a press release over the exclusion of the Nashists, Martin had by November of
1962 presided over the first issue of Situationistisk Revolution and arranged a conference at the
University of Aarhus. In many ways these events were necessary for the 1'IS in order to counter
what they saw as a Nashist recuperation of situationist ideas. To this end the first issue of
Situationistisk Revolution made public the events around the exclusion of the Nashists, reissuing
the proclamation from March 1962, and including two texts by J.V. Martin that polemicised around
these areas - Antipolitical Activities and In Front Of The Wall Of A Modern History Of Culture.
Other key texts from the early years of the 1'IS were also made available through translation into
Danish. These included Manifesto, The Situationist Frontier, Instructions For Taking Up Arms,
Preliminary Problems In The Construction Of Situations, Debord's Theses on Cultural Revolution
and his Critique Of Urban Geography. If any theme could be gleaned from this collection of SI
texts then a predominant one, running throughout many of them, is, the 'construction of
situations'. This means of politicising the everyday, of instaurating a "real and direct
communication" (35) that could have lent itself to an exploration of intersubjectivity and a viable
anti-organisational practice is, in never having been embraced in all its intimate banality, and in
being enticed down the theoretical avenue of 'unitary urbanism', the one Situationist concept that
lends itself to reconception and wider practice (Jens J¯rgen Thorsen's 'communicative urbanism'
and his consistent exploration of the 'situation' as an experiment in social relations was one such
reconception). However, for the 1'IS, whose Theory Of The Derive has the effect of delimiting
rather than expanding a common activity, the 'construction of situations' was perhaps a too
ambiguous practice as the 1'IS were already wary of the 'situation' being reconceived as the
'happening'. It may be that this co-option of the 'situation' to the spectacle, the mediation of what
was intended to be an unmediatable practice of communication, soon led the 1'IS towards taking
a more stringent and proprietorial line on the 'construction of situations', closing it down until it
became a specialised activity: "... the situation defined by the SI can be constructed only on a
foundation of material and spiritual richness. This amounts to saying that the first ventures in
constructing situations must be the work/play of the revolutionary avant-garde; people who are
resigned in one way or another respect to political passivity, to metaphysical despair, and even
being subjected to an artistic pure absence of creativity, are incapable of participating in them..."
(36). The 1'IS, presumably a collection of coherently formed individualities, saw itself as the
avant-garde in relation to both artistic practice and politics. Its conflict with the Nashists was,
within a year, followed up by a conflict with Dutch 'Stalinist surrealists' and with an ongoing
polemic against Henri Lefebvre and the left journal Arguments. Whether these polemical conflicts
were considered 'situations' or not is perhaps difficult to tell, but their often expressed aim of
avoiding the role of specialists is continually undermined by a proprietorship of ideas that makes
participation in the Situationist project dependent upon prior knowledge rather than on the
potential becomings instaurated by praxis. Indeed, in kindly offering the 'situation' as the
construction of 'micro societies', a self-institutional activity, Vaneigem too, quickly moved towards
limiting its capabilities by adding the proviso that such 'societies' should be "maintained in a
permanent state of practical readiness by means of strict theoretical discrimination" (37). That the
first issue of Situationistisk Revolution also carried the small Anti-Public Relations text that
requests, however jokingly, aspiring members to demonstrate their written theoretical abilities is
not only a further indication of a self-appointed avant-garde role, but is another pointer towards
the way that the 1'IS was coming more and more to equate revolutionary practice with the
production of 'coherent' revolutionary texts. As they said themselves, their 'direction' was coming
to be more concerned with the "theoretical organisation of contestation" (38). This idealisation of
consciousness - seen in the charge of 'misunderstanding situationist texts' levelled at Spur and at
the Nashists - and idealised to the point of transcendence in its claim to be 'coherent', became
the sole basis upon which inter-subjective relations were carried out within the 1'IS. It thus not
only hindered the 'construction of situations', but lead to a neutralising of the contradictions, the
incoherencies and intimate banalities, of 'everyday life'. This had been raised by Nash and de
Jong: "Misunderstandings and contradictions are not only of an extreme value, but in fact the
basis of all art and creation, if not the source of all activity in general life" (39). In other words
practice, the rapid alternation between activity and passivity, between passion and logic, reveals
antagonisms that not only inform consciousness, but drive that consciousness to be best
articulated as transformative action.
J.V. Martin and the Scandinavian section - which at best included only two other fully admitted
members: Peter Laugesen in the mid sixties and Bengt Ericson in the late sixties - were, then, a
crucial component of the 1'IS. Before the publication of the second issue of Situationistisk
Revolution in 1968, which carried a large proportion of Situationist texts on the May Events as
well as a republication of Debord's thesis on Cultural Revolution, the Scandinavian Section had
provided the focal point for activities that did not always hinge around the production of written
texts. The first of these was the Destruction Of RSG-6 show held in Odense in June 1963. When
we bear in mind that the 1962 exclusions have been referred to as the 'break' with artists this
show, based around the threat of thermonuclear war and presenting the scandalous findings of
the 'Spies For Peace' group concerning the existence of a dozen Regional Seats of Government
(nuclear bunkers) in England, is notable for its continuation of artistic practice and its return to
conflict within the art institution. For the show Debord exhibited several of his hastily made
Directives which consisted of slogans - such as 'realisation de la philosophie' - painted onto
framed canvases. J.V.Martin exhibited a series of 'thermonuclear maps' - gaudily coloured
outlines of regions of the world partially obliterated by dark scorch marks - and Michele Bernstein,
subverting the tradition of battle paintings, made model tableaux titled after revolutionary defeats
but renamed as victories (40). Whilst, with this show, it may have been useful for the 1'IS to
combat the 'falsifications' of the BS in Scandinavia there is a lingering sense that the 1'IS required
the RSG-6 to draw a conclusion to its critique of art practice by presenting a 'critical art' tied into
the findings of the 'Spies For Peace' group. It wanted somehow to resolve the ambiguities that it
had noted in an article commenting on the Spur/Nashist debacle: "It seems to us that Nashism is
an expression of an objective tendency resulting from the SI's ambiguous and risky policy of
consenting to act in culture while being against the entire present organisation of this culture and
even against all culture as a separate sphere (But even the most intransigent oppositional attitude
cannot escape such ambiguity and risk, since it is still necessarily has to coexist with the present
order)" (41). How can one 'act in culture' and be against 'all culture as a separate sphere' unless
one has transcended culture idealistically? It is precisely this ambiguity and risk, the antagonisms
of the 'everyday', that the 1'IS wanted to escape from and in so doing somehow leave behind a
cultural practice that they saw as an 'alibi for alienation', an easily assimilatable freedom. Its
pursuit of theory - an apt repository for an idealised consciousness - was seen as the means
through which ambiguity and risk could be overcome and the organisation's idealised self-image
ensured; a self-image nurtured by the pursuit of a written coherence. However, was it not that the
1'IS, in rejecting cultural activity, was in danger of leaving behind the very 'everyday' terrain that
could keep practice alive for it, that would make the accord between its members more than just a
theoretical one? In the 1960 text co-authored with Canjuers, Debord had written that "this sphere
reserved for creative activity is the only one in which the question of what we do with life and the
question of communication are posed practically" (42). In many ways the 1'IS was torn between a
take on creativity that pitted the practice of art against the constituting creativity of the working
class. The two, already synthesised as the productive co-operation of labour power, were kept
more or less separate by the 1'IS who, in a text accompanying the RSG-6 show, preferred to talk
of the 'supercession' of both art and revolutionary politics. The problem with such 'supercession'
was that in becoming programmatic, in transcending social relations, it placed practice in the
shadow of posterity and made participation almost impossible. With its call for the 'supercession'
of art and the surpassing of existing revolutionary groupings, the 1'IS was effectively calling for an
end to its practical existence and announcing its idealism - an idealism increasingly exacerbated
by its isolation. Having its practice determined for it by its 'theoretical coherence' meant that it
was, by trusting in written language to be the sole semiotic of communication, becoming far more
individualised than the BS which could later boast of a whole raft of people and groups passing
through the 'collective centre' of Drakabygget - from Dutch Provos and the Mexican Situationist
Group to 1'IS excludees such as Attila Kotanyi. For the 1'IS subjectivity, rather than being
intensified by the variables of different situations and modulated by participation, was becoming
preserved from the 'outside world', a vessel of 'practical readiness' that was not only in danger of
making the 1'IS into an ivory tower, but running the risk of insulating itself from the very creative
antagonism of the working class. The theory of the spectacle, with all its implications of an
inescapable passivity, ensured not only that the audio-visual would be demonised to the benefit
of written language, but made sure that revolution became a matter of knowledge rather than the
creation of a new social relation, a culture of affects. If the working class were subject to
pacification, then rather than the revolution being a matter of a "mode of being" as Jean Barrot
points out, a matter of practical existence and struggle, an ontological revolt, it becomes a matter
for a logic separated from passion, it becomes to be about a technocratic application of
knowledge (methodology). Under the rubric of the spectacle the constituting power of the working
class would have been negated by pacification and thus, then, the self-selected role of
Situationists as exemplary leaders becomes necessary. To this end the 1'IS tended to theorise
and agitate around consumption rather than production. For it consumption was to be subverted
because that represented the 'creative' moment of proletarian life being inveigled towards passive
leisure. The fact that the working class were being 'creative' in their production of social cooperation, their social relations, was something that bypassed the 1'IS. Not only did they idealise
creativity in the figure of the 'artist', consigning it to specialisation, they came to see the creativity
of the working classes as being endlessly postponed until the moment that they constituted
workers councils - when they demonstrated a form of consciousness that the 1'IS was waiting to
recognise. Even an idealised working class was not ideal enough. Thus Guy Debord's famous
refrain that the workers should become dialecticians was as self-defeating to the 1'IS's project as
abandoning the terrain of culture wherein the combat against leisure and pacification could have
been fought. Even after the May events, the 1'IS, not dramatically expanding its numbers or
range of contacts, began, in the absence of any practical experience that could inform its
theoretical wanderings, to add another layer to its idealism. Rather than simply festishizing its
'coherent' theory (the mark of its revolutionary intent) it began to fetishize its own organisation
and presented the two as being indicative of its revolutionary actuality. In other words the 1'IS - all
the king's men - became sovereign over its own sovereign power.
Although, in 1964, Debord was to collect his film scripts from the late 50s and publish them as
Contre Le Cinema through Jorn's Institute For Comparative Vandalism, the 1'IS's attempt to
supercede art was compromised when it made one last foray into the 'sphere' of art with the
Operation Playtime show. Once again this collective exhibition, unsurprisingly omitted from the
Situationniste Chronologie, was organised in Denmark by J.V.Martin and included, once again,
work by Martin and Bernstein (who had resigned in 1967) with the addition of five 'Nothing Boxes'
by Rene Vienet. This time Martin exhibited a series entitled Golden Fleet - roughshod geopolitical
paintings featuring coastlines, strategic arrows and toy battleships sprayed over with metallic
paint. For the catalogue, released as a supplement to the second issue of Situationistisk
Revolution (along with a translation of The Explosion Point Of Ideology In China as a separate
issue), Martin wrote a montaged text called Ny-irrealisme - "The neo-realist lives in an unreal
world but won't admit it. Long live the neo-irrealist who lives in an unrealistic society but admits it"
- that expounded on the theory of detournement which had become, by this point, the last
remaining weapon in the cultural armoury of the 1'IS and one that Debord was to heavy-handedly
utilise in his film version of the Society Of The Spectacle. Indeed along with AndrÈ Bertrand, J.V.
Martin was a prime exponent of the practice of detourned comic strips, a practice that, with his
'comics erotico-politiques', saw Martin the subject of a law suit brought against him by the Danish
section of the American-backed Moral Rearmament movement, principally for the clandestine
distribution of these comics in Spain. Taking full advantage of the ensuing scandal which was
reported in the Danish press, Martin issued a tract - In Namen Des Volkes - that dealt with his
being charged with 'crimes against morality and good custom' by retorting that "indeed the
Situationists were ... actively employed in the moral disarmament of society as we know it". The
lawsuit was dropped, not least, the 1'IS astutely claimed, because the "suppression of
publications injurious to the Francoist order by the social democratic authorities of a country
officially opposed to Francoism was somewhat paradoxical" (43). Barely two months after this
scandal of January 1965 J.V.Martin was an active hand in the organisation of an anti-NATO
protest in Jutland after it had been decided by NATO commanders to station two units of German
troops at barracks in Randers. Martin, together with local dockers, resistance veterans and
students from the University of Aarhus, organised a committee to oppose the entry of the German
troops into Randers. After attracting much press attention and drawing protesters from all over
Denmark, the first and only column of German troops arrived at the barracks in the midst of
violent clashes between the protesters and the Danish Army units that had converged in
readiness. Although the unit finally entered the barracks the fallout of the conflict did not dissipate
as two days later a firebomb exploded in a room of Martin's apartment in Randers. He was
promptly arrested only to be released the next day as the police, changing their minds as is the
wont of their sovereign power, moved their attention to another demonstrator called Kanstrup. A
sequence of legal charades, which included Kanstrup having the terrorism charge reduced to
possession of explosives, led the 1'IS to rightly finger Kanstrup as a provocateur and to take the
'Incident in Randers' as an indicator of a rising tide of social unrest which, quite generously for
them, they also credited to the Dutch Provos. But, however efficacious these events were in
drawing out the passive control of a celebrated Danish social democracy it is perhaps a little
flighty of the 1'IS to suggest of the Randers Incident that "the SI's practice showed its excellence"
therein. In an intriguing aside to their write-up of the events in Randers it is mentioned that many
of the paintings that had been shown at the RSG-6 show had perished in the bomb blast. It was
added that "the 'blanket' of art now finds itself burnt". In this flush of enthusiasm for political
provocation - an intervention participated in by only one Situationist, J.V. Martin - the 1'IS seems,
in conspicuously celebrating the loss of 'artworks', to be suggesting again that it had superceded
art. However, whereas art was seen as a privileged concession, the creative activity of written
theory was not, as far as the 1'IS was concerned, subject to the same ambiguities and
contradictions. Raoul Vaneigem who could see the 'semantic realm' as a principle site of struggle,
could also write: "ideology is the falsehood of language, radical theory the truth of language" (44).
Armed with such 'truth' the 1'IS, coming to see itself as the 'unknown theory' of a movement
growing in confidence and scope, contained a similar iconoclastic egotism to that of the artistic
sphere it claimed it had superceded. It was the measure of truth, it was the incarnation of
consciousness. In the text accompanying the RSG-6 show, The Situationists And The New
Forms Of Action In Politics And Art, Guy Debord wrote "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" (45). Like good avantgardists ahead of the field the 1'IS, enthusiastic about the 'new' and their own 'newness' and
seeking to be the intermediaries of the future, could not only dissemble about the social-relations
(the 'relation of ban') from which they had sprung, but could offer their consciousness, an
idealised consciousness resolved into writing, as a model consciousness that others should
follow. One aspect of this tendency, and a damaging one in the long run, can be seen in J.V.
Martin's Nashism motion and in the project for a Situationist Encyclopaedia or Dictionary of
definitions for which Mustapha Khayati wrote a preface. Whilst these projects did not develop
beyond the Definitions of 1958 and whilst they may have been exemplary detournements that
touch on a critique of received knowledge and pedagogy (and in the case of Khayati on the
'semantic realm' as a site of struggle) the same reification of meaning that they sought to combat
was still persistently present. The seeds of a 'situationist ideology' are thus here as well, in the
very titles of a full span of texts - Theory of the Derive (1958), Minimum Definition of
Revolutionary Organisations (1967), How Not To Understand Situationist Books (1969),
Provisional Statutes Of The SI (1969) - and in the way that a control over future interpretations is
exercised in conformity to the demands of posterity.
Whilst the incidents in Randers and J.V.Martin's pivotal role in them could perhaps be indicative
of what Debord later referred to as a "concession to 'united action' with the semi-radical currents
that are already beginning to take shape" (46) they were nonetheless practical, collaborative
activities that received profuse press attention and caused a stir in Denmark. In some ways the
1'IS capitalised upon this direct action, making it the marker of a practice that had otherwise
become stunted by the continual refusal of the 1'IS to collaborate sustainedly with other people
and by its search for an elusive theoretical 'coherence' that was having it practice politics as a
'separate' activity. These both amounted to an idealisation of consciousness that hierarchically
judged the actions of others by means of the yardstick of the idealism incarnated in the self-image
of the 1'IS. Their self-alloted avant-garde status, then, led them to momentarily offer their support
to "those Danish comrades who over the last few weeks have resorted to incendiary bombs
against the travel agencies that organise tours to Spain" (47). Whether or not any Situationists
were involved in these campaigns, it is nonetheless indicative of a drive to become associated
with something more than the 'semi-radical' - the exemplary actions of the exemplary. Terrorism,
whilst it can provoke moments of crisis, has always been an endeavour that belittles and
regresses emerging social relations, it is a vanguard action that, in the long run, seeks to
impatiently transcend the reformulation of revolutionary practice in the 'everyday'. Whilst the 1'IS,
through Giofranco Sanguinetti, later revealed state terrorism as a strategy of counter-revolution
they never seriously embraced such actions. The vanguardism of the 1'IS was more a matter of
their seeking to be the headless leaders of an emerging movement through a deployment of
theoretical perspectives, an overestimation of which put them, at the time, in an authoritative
relation to the burgeoning counter-culture which they never ceased to castigate. Just as the
incidents in Randers involved many people who were not members of the 1'IS, so too the other
Situationist scandal of this period, that fermented by 1'IS sympathisers around Strasbourg
University and the collaborative authoring of On The Poverty Of Student Life in 1966, was carried
out by dissident students. Jens J¯rgen Thorsen reported that those involved were eventually
excluded by the 'de Bordist section' even though they had no want to be thus included. He also
noted how these exclusions followed upon a moment of collective production and draws attention
to the similar treatment of the Mexican Situationist Group and some of the American Groups Black Mask and Up Against The Wall Motherfuckers (48). The 1'IS was, then, prone to limiting the
efficacy of any forms of intervention that did not match up to its ideal. This had the effect of
elevating its own (non) actions, inferring them to be at the hub of a movement without a centre,
whilst, damagingly to it and its claims to be the most contemporaneous theorists, it began to
loose touch with the changing conditions of capitalism. Whilst the 1'IS could, in its Minimum
Definition Of Revolutionary Organizations, urge itself and other organisations to act as the
"negation... of the prevailing social spectacle which, from news media to mass culture,
monopolises communication between people around their unilateral reception of images of their
alienated activity" (49), it could simultaneously block itself from any further theorising of how the
continuing production of a 'social imaginary' was changing the conditions of everyday life and the
very terrain of revolution. By naming the 'spectacle' the 1'IS, recursively fleeing from its own
nemesis (ideologisation of social relations), separated itself from those shared social conditions
and, as was its wont with denying anything but an idealised working class creativity, it
undermined an awareness of the 'productivity' of the spectacle as an additional force in the
reproduction of capitalist social relations and, crucially, as a new weapon in their subversion.
Thus, whilst it sought maximum exposure for its own scandals, it could discount the
interventionist activities of the Nashists as seeking the "grossest commercial publicity" with the
"active collusion of some journalists" (50). This collusion may well have involved Jens J¯rgen
Thorsen. In the early 60s Thorsen worked as a journalist for a Danish tabloid and it may have
been his practical understanding of the workings of the media industry that led to the success of
the scandal of the Little Mermaid. This incident, occurring in 1964 (the same year that Asger Jorn
refused the Guggenheim prize), was titled by the BS as The Little Mermaid Loses Her Head. It
was carried out by providing the media with an anonymous action, the decapitation of the Little
Mermaid statue in Copenhagen harbour, and then promising, over a period of weeks to unveil
both the head and the perpetrator. Having provoked a national crisis - the statue is a powerful
totem of the Danish social imaginary - having provoked the deployment of the Danish police's
murder squad, the BS, being closely monitored by the police, informed the media that they would
release all details of the event in the next issue of the Drakabygget magazine which would be
available at an exhibition - The Situationists In Art - to be held at Varberg. On the day of the
opening a crowd gathered at this coastal town and, being urged to the sea's edge by Hardy Strid,
was soon greeted by the sight of an incoming boat. As the boat moored in the bay a frogman
swam inland carrying a bundle until, once in view of the crowd, he clambered onto a rock only to
drop the bundle into the sea and swim back to the boat. Looking back on this event Thorsen
referred to it as "a complete new use of mass media" and it could also be possible to say that it
was something of the creation of a 'spectacle', an in(ex)filtration of the social imaginary, that
being unresolved and anti-climactic, showed, in the form of the spectacle, the simultaneous
arousal and thwarting of desire that the 1'IS identified as a facet of mediatised experience.
As a by-product of their theory of the spectacle the 1'IS soon set a dangerous trap whereby any
publicised event, any social gathering, could be demonised as being indicative of pacification. As
Jean Barrot points out the 1'IS were obsessed with forms - commodity, councils, spectacle,
gallery - and this blinded them to the content-element of the form, the social relations that accrue
in and around the forms. To this end the reduction of social life to one mediated by images and its
concomitant reduction of sensory perception to a state of passive spectatorship denied the
'modalities of being' and reduced affectivity to being an inferior adjunct of knowledge. This played
itself out in the exclusions whereby participating individuals were seen as finalised 'forms' with no
scope for becoming; which in itself says something about the scope of practice within the 1'IS.
For the 1'IS - who continued to pillory such people as Nash, Kotanyi, Godard, Lefebvre,
Castoriadis - you were one thing and always that one thing; social circumstances, only changing
at the moment of revolution, were, until then, static. In many ways Debord's theory of the
'spectacle' encourages such a view, or is the logical outcome of it, for it declares communication
to be as unilateral, as finished as a coherent theory. In describing the ideological progression of
capitalism Debord's theory of the spectacle did not take account of the participatory aspect of all
social life, even those aspects of it which can be oppressive and harmful. This very point had
been raised by Jorn in the early years of the 1'IS and was inimical to the activities of the BS. For
Jorn, writing in The Critique Of Economic Policy, the work of art was a "source of counter value".
This counter value was not dependent on the form that art took, but hinged on those very
'modalities of being', the energies which persist in a perceiving person, that the 1'IS denied by
their reduction of perception to passive spectatorship. One of the effects of Debord's theory was,
then, to deny the productive aspect of reception which Jorn and the BS took for granted and
which, as a result, opened up a field for their practice as it shut yet another terrain down for the
1'IS. The BS not only trusted the energies of the perceiving person, their ability to think and act
for themselves, but, with events such as the Co-Ritus, aimed for the 'death of the spectator' by
establishing and instituting communicative fields rather than damning all communicative fields as
'spectacular'. Jens J¯rgen Thorsen, perhaps refusing to have his activity determined by capitalist
ideology, wrote that the communicative phase in art has its basis in "the disappearance of the
spectator and his replacement by the participator. A communicative art is an art which lives
between. In the space between people" (51). This space-between could be seen as indicative of
social relations rather than the classical forms of art and politics, of modalities rather than
representations, and it was this accent placed upon a situationistic artistic activity by Thorsen and
the BS, their opening up of spaces and their encouragement of communicative participation
through an 'anti-objectal' non-representative practice, that led Thorsen to offer that the death of
the spectator was simultaneously the death of the 'classic artist'. This point, used to criticise Jorn
for "still working as a classic artist on classic art according to classic perception", was similarly
indicative of why the 1'IS, aspiring to be 'classic theorists', had fallen into a stupor of coherence.
With the advent of the theory of the spectacle and the turn to the functional, propagandist use of
detournement, the 1'IS was, despite its talk of the supercession of art, still occupying the position
of the 'classical artist'. When Thorsen, in criticising the happening, stated that "the public is sitting
gazing like in a theatre or as of in front of a painting looking for the true basic conception" he
inadvertently hit at a problem running through the 1'IS: their theory of the spectacle, their
coherence, was nothing other than a 'true basic conception', an aspect of reality presented as an
indisputable fact and communicated unilaterally like any other 'classical' work. As the mouthpiece
of correct consciousness the 1'IS had no need to involve itself in anything because it had nothing
to learn from others. Thorsen said as much when he offered of the 1'IS that "this rigid hate of
action was exactly the thing the Bordists were criticised for during the May events 68 when they,
like technocrats, spent their time in a restaurant far away from the battlefields handing out pieces
of good advice" (52). Whilst this is not the place to go into the role of the 1'IS in the occupations
movement it is interesting to note that Rene Vienet, in his book on the occupations, offered that
the "SI explained the deepening and concentrations of alienations by the delay of the revolution".
This strange statement offers somehow that the revolution, the great day, resolves 'alienated'
social relations rather than it being a case that a change of social relations can help bring the
revolution about. The revolution is participated in by more than just ideologues, and emanates
from more than just one place. Whilst the coming revolution was to have absolved the 1'IS from
its alienating practice of exclusions, the BS, as cultural revolutionaries interested in opening up
'communicative fields', added to the general ferment for which no one group or ideological brand
was responsible, by occupying a pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Having planned to do this with
the co-operation of Italian anarchists the BS, taking advantage of the withdrawal of the Swedish
delegation, managed to get past a cordon of police by using fake press passes (supplied by
Thorsen?) and joined up with a month long occupation of the 'Academia de Belli Arte'. Although
the Biennale was subject to a concerted boycott and was besieged by anarchists the BS decided
in conjunction with a meeting of the World Anarchist Council held in Stockholm the previous
month, to send themselves in as a Trojan Horse to establish a 'pavilion of revolt'. This had the
effect of symbolically creating a situation in which protest occurred both outside and within the
Biennale: the protest was 'everywhere' a process of in(ex)filtration, it had caused the deployment
of cordons of police and yet had broken them. To accompany their action the BS issued a
Declaration. Signed by Nash, Thorsen and Caesar and titled Declaration To Our Italian Artists
And Comrades: Follow Courbet (53) the three signatories outlined several stages of action.
Beginning with an outline of the planning of the occupation the Declaration proclaimed that by
sending in the BS as a Trojan horse it had revealed how the "terror-police" defends "the artpolice". The second stage was to call for others to "leave the art academies". So the BS having
been involved in the planning of the protest outside, having broken in, now urged others to break
free of the "cultural concentration camp" that such Biennales represent. The final stage, drawing
upon the example of Gustav Courbet's protest at the 1855 World Exhibition in Paris, called for
"permanent art barricades" to be established. The BS, with a nod to their experiences within the
1'IS, finished their declaration with the words "Divided We Stand", and thus, acknowledging
participation and process rather than mutually exclusive positions, it could be said that they
offered a new social relation of differences, a variability within a unity, that not only assured
participation, but offered practical means to overcome the traps of individualism about which Jorn
had forewarned the Situationist movement: 'the idealist equation of subjectivity with individualism'.
Having, in the 1960 article The Adventure, doubted whether artists were capable of concerted
action together, the later years of the 1'IS, marked by the disintegration of British, American and
Italian Sections, are a sorry tale of its organisational implosion. They are also the tale of how the
1'IS came to be indistinguishable from its main theorist, Guy Debord, and how the sovereignty of
individualism, ever present within it, came to be explicitly inscribed into its final moments.
Beginning with the Minimum Definition Of Revolutionary Organisations, adopted by the 7th
Conference of the 1'IS in Paris 1966, the 1'IS sought to provide the growing movement of
contestation with a 'mission statement'. This document, appearing in the third issue of
Situationistisk Revolution in 1970, substitutes the 1'IS for a wider movement whilst professing to
be what it isn't. It is another moment in the accelerating appearance of a 'situationist ideology' that
began on the steps of Silkeborg. From its opening sentence, that has it that the "only purpose of a
revolutionary organisation is the abolition of all existing classes...", to the last sentence, that
claims any moment of 'victory' as its own, the 1'IS set itself apart from the wider movement and
advises others to do the same (54). This text, which is the first to enshrine the 1'IS as a
revolutionary organisation, does nothing to say how that organisation should function as a social
relation and instead offers that its 'total democracy' is conditioned by each member having
"recognised and appropriated the coherence of its critique". If 'total democracy' is the mark of the
organisation what need does it then have to define itself as an organisation? Whatsmore, if a
condition of participation is 'recognising' and 'appropriating' the critical coherence of the 1'IS, and
if, as has been hinted, this coherence is nothing more than a claim, a written expression of its
idealised consciousness, then is it that the 1'IS is claiming that participation in a revolutionary
organisation is tantamount to a faith, a belief in the coherence of that organisation? Both these
aproria's, themselves expressive of "ideology as a separate power", are indicative of the bid for
posterity, the vanguardism of the 1'IS, its need to appear in conformity to its 'self-image'. The
pride of place given to its 'coherence' also bears out Jacques Camatte's contention that theory
can turn into repressive consciousness: "theory, instead of helping establish contact with reality,
becomes an agent of separation, of removal, and in the end is transformed into a protrusion, an
ejection from the world" (55). With the publication of Debord's Society of The Spectacle just
around the corner and with Vaneigem's book delayed to appear at the same time, there is a
sense that the 1'IS was gearing-up to stake its claim to be the avant-garde of the revolution. The
Minimum Definition text was thus essential to enable a presentation of these 'coherent' works of
theory as being expressions of an organisation greater than their individual authors. However, in
the report to the Paris Conference, Guy Debord touched upon various organisational aprorias that
were neither further addressed by him nor by other members. In this report, the same one that
assesses the practical activity of the 1'IS as being poor, there are vague inklings given as to
remedies and reasons. Without explaining the sacralizing exclusions Debord is momentarily
critical of a purely theoretical practice that he offers indications that 1'IS texts could be
misinterpreted as 'grandiose' and 'prestigious'. He also urges the 1'IS to develop an unalienated
communication via a "recapturing the faculty of speech". All the same he cannot stop himself from
littering this report with exhortations of an idealised notion of practice that is trapped in the
shadow of 'coherence' i.e. 'real common practice', 'real common activity', 'really possible activity'.
With this report it is almost as if Debord has a dim recollection of what he had previously written
on the 'construction of situations', but for him and others these 'situations' had become
superceded not only by moments of insurrection and scandal, but by organisational issues. The
'construction of situations', moving away from its original innovatory formulation as a means of
overcoming alienation through inter-subjective communication and investigation into the
'everyday' - the reforging of social relations and community - had become a means of carrying out
a once criticised militant activity under another guise. The 1'IS's call for a reactivation of the
workers councils, in which the working class expressed its constituting power, became a
substitute for the 'construction of situations', which, with their affective component, had become
too closely associated with the 'sphere' of art. Its turn to 'councilism', first mooted in Instructions
For Taking Up Arms, was a way that the idealism of the 1'IS was exacerbated and not abated.
Rather than seeing the councils as an historic expression of the working class movement, the 1'IS
saw the councils as an idealised practice, as a transcendent form of ideal organisation: "this is
where the objective conditions of historical consciousness are reunited. This is where direct and
active communication is realised" (56). To suggest that communication can be 'realised' at some
distant point or by means of a specific form, is to maybe suggest, like Vienet above, that
communication is not a process, an inter-relational practice, but a possession proper to
individuals.
After the May Events, throughout which the 1'IS had called upon the working class to form
workers councils, the last issue of Internationale Situationniste, published in 1969, contained
another essay on organisation that was to set the tone of their practice until their demise in 1972.
This text, an 'authentic' version correcting those versions of it that had been circulating without
the 1'IS's permission, again seemed concerned with putting the record straight for posterity.
Wanting to distance themselves from being seen as Anarchists, this text, The Organisation
Question For The SI, was written by Debord in April 1968 with a postscript added in August 1969
and became known as the 'April Theses'. Despite the experiences of the May Events this text
alarmingly reveals the problems that had beset the 1'IS since the exclusion of the Nashists in
1962 and thus since its 'supercesion of art'. As it had offered in 1960, the 1'IS was still a "group
based upon the complete freedom of individuals", but now this was a freedom valued in relation
to the expression of a critical theory in which "everyone is responsible for what he does
personally without any reference to an organisational community" (57). This statement, based
upon a ratification of sovereign individualism above that of social relations, not only equates
critical theory with contemplative individuals rather than with a practical assemblage, it effects a
simultaneous isolation of any individual member of the 1'IS at the moment that they are admitted
to the organisation, and thus pre-empts the development of any social relations inside the 1'IS as
an organisation. With social relations being at best conducted through the intermediary of text,
the 1'IS, in fetishising its organisation as a symbol of revolutionary actuality, was, in part,
fetishizing its own organisation as an educational establishment; a competitive environment in
which members were called upon to "demonstrate their abilities" and show "real capabilities".
Worse than this perhaps, and attesting to a sovereign 'state of exception', it becomes a matter of
the 1'IS being declared as an organisation only when it suits Guy Debord; for if 'everyone is
responsible for what he does personally without any reference to an organisational community',
then could the 1'IS be said to exist as an organisation? It follows from this that the 1'IS was very
much an 'obscure object of desire', a phantasm that blocked any expression of a situationistic
group subjectivity, by having those subjectivities cathect the imaginary entity of 'coherence'. By
thus incarnating an idealised consciousness, based upon sovereignty of individualism (and
therefrom upon a proprietorialism, a right to possession and exclusivity), the 1'IS, even after, and
perhaps as part of the burn-out of the May Events, could never hope to regain a practical foothold
- in its stead there arises an almost metaphysical desiring, a transcedence of time and space:
"The SI must now prove its effectiveness in a subsequent stage of revolutionary activity"
[emphasis added]. Like a similarly paralysing tautology at point seven of this text - "truth is
verifying itself" - what is demanded of much needed participants is a propensity to discipledom
that, in a similar deflective operation to that attending the excludees, is rejected scornfully as the
passive idolatry of the 'contemplatives' in its ranks. If anything could secure the 1'IS as an
actually-existing entity then it was the exclusions, but even these were seen as a way to avoid the
practical antagonisms of contradiction as they were, for Debord, "responses to objective threats
that existing conditions hold in store for our actions". The exclusions were a defence against a
threat to the idealised self-image, means of removing its connection to reality and enabling the
1'IS, as Camatte suggested, to "frame reality with its concept". If for Debord the 1'IS's 'concept'
was the spectacle... for Vaneigem it was coherence itself that had become the 'concept': the
"expulsions and breaks are the only defence of an imperilled coherence" (58). To establish
coherence as the benchmark of participation is tantamount to dictating that inter-subjective
relations within an organisation be carried on in an atmosphere of fear and reserve and whilst, in
the 'April Theses', Debord offers that "coherence is acquired and verified by egalitarian
participation in the entirety of a common practice, which simultaneously reveals shortcomings and
provides remedies", he neglects to consider that when that 'common practice' (already deemed
superfluous) is absent, when there is meretricious competition enshrined within an organisation,
then any resultant practice can only base itself on revealing the 'shortcomings'. Under the terms
of this logic it seems that the 1'IS only existed as a 'common practice', as an organisation, when it
was expelling someone and that this steady stream of expulsions became not only a way to
artificially create antagonisms within the group, but to seek to present the exclusions as a
revolutionary practice itself (e.g. the issuing of a tract on the expulsion of Atilla Kotanyi in 1963).
So, when Debord candidly wrote in the 'April Theses' that "the exclusions have almost never
marked any theoretical progress in the SI: we have not derived from these occasions any more
precise definition of what is unacceptable" he is not only drawing attention to the way that the
removal of contradiction, the test of practice, impaired the 'theoretical progress' of the 1'IS, he is
articulating once again the 'sovereign power' that exists abstractedly in the 1'IS: the
'unacceptable' cannot be made any more 'precise' because it is the (repressed) preserve of an
individualism (that cannot be questioned), a sovereign freedom unrestrained by social relations, a
matter of 'exceptional' cases who, gathered together under the illusion of 'common practice',
came to form nothing more than an 'ideological model of socialisation' (58a).
Although the 'April Theses' were intended as a discussion document Debord added at their end
that "in order to make the form of this debate consistent with what I see as their content I propose
that this text be communicated to certain comrades close to the SI or capable of taking part in it,
and that we solicit their opinion on this matter." Aside from the meretricious tone that suggests
that some phantom 'capabilities' are needed in order to attend a debate on organisation, this text
seems to ask for participation at the same time that it inbuiltly rejects it. Debord, who was to
complain of his increasing centrality in the 1'IS, perhaps gives an indication here as to why this
was so: he not only infers here that he has provided the content for a form, but that the content he
has provided (the 'April Theses') should determine the form that the debate should take. There is
nothing new in ascribing an authoritarianism to Guy Debord, but it is maybe also a case, in view
of the theoretical leanings of the 1'IS, its contemplative tenor, that the most contemplative would
come to assume the role of leader. But with the 1'IS we are not so much dealing with the
problems of a leader, but with what Jorn, in criticising Isodore Isou and the Lettrists, called the
"personification of the anonymous" (59). The problem with an organisation that is simply the
collection of a group of individuals who are sovereign over their own 'private consciousness', who
thus have no concern for the space between people, and consequently for an unrepressed
activation of social relations as the situationistic formation of what Thorsen called a
'communicative field', is that the organisation they have formed projects in front of them a mask to
cover over a rampant individuality grounded on an unstated repression (the 'unacceptable' that
cannot be made any more 'precise'). One facet of such an individuality is that it not only seeks
itself as its own ideal, but it projects its ideals forward before it as an unresponsive disavowal of
intimate communication that helps it protect the sovereignty of its own experience. Thus, with the
April Theses, Debord could call for a debate and pre-empt it. His individual expression substituted
itself for a group articulation and, under the guise of the 1'IS, became anonymous. This is to say
that Debord identified so absolutely with the 1'IS, came to represent it, that what has been called
here its 'self-image' would eventually be indistinguishable from his own. Guy Debord, rather than
being the leader of an organisation, was, as its foremost contemplative, the author of its main
theory, the ideal of that organisation. His authority, then, comes with his being the admixture of
his own written idealism and with his status as the ego-ideal for the other 1'IS members. So
instead of the 'unalienated communication' that they sought, Debord and the 1'IS gave succour to
a modality of individuality - the narcissistic idealism of a 'private consciousness' - that came to fill
the spaces between people with an air of defensiveness, proprietorship and mutual reproach.
This enshrining of alienation (repression) within the group, assured by the ever impending
practice of exclusions, was also the continual reinforcement of its duplicitous take on organisation
and 'common practice': if the 'unacceptable' could not be made any more 'precise' then, Debord,
as sovereign, as ego ideal, could exercise a 'state of exception' at anytime, against anyone and
for anything. Perhaps, then, it is little wonder that individualism within the 1'IS would intensify to
such a self-protective and narcissistic degree, that the organisation would slowly come to freeze
over with mutual fear and accusation. So, when Debord complained of people being simply proud
to be members of the 1'IS without their doing anything, rather than look into the reasons for this
and discover an unsubverted sovereign power, an ego ideal governing the interplay of relations,
he once more projected out the ideal-image of the 1'IS (his own self-image, his ego-ideal) which,
with less and less people to exclude, he would later turn onto the pro-situ milieu. In other words
the individualist deficiency enshrined within the 1'IS - its idealism, its image of itself, its alienated
relations - was projected onto others rather than being confronted as an inescapable facet of
shared social life under capitalism. And so, the conflicts that occurred in its final years seem to
have, instead, centred around those pertaining to the organisation of the 1'IS into national
sections. At the Delegates Conference held in Wolsfed and Trier in 1970, J.V.Martin is reported
as denouncing "the complete and scandalous lack of interest of the whole international about the
Scandinavian area" (60). Martin is also reported at being dissatisfied with the "faulty
communication from the French section" and some disgruntlement with what was perceived as
French centrism was levelled at the 1'IS from the American section who in turn referred to the
'infantilism of the sections'. With this obscuring of sovereign individuality and with exclusions thus
proceeding unabated until the dissolution of the 1'IS in 1972 it is difficult to agree with Jean Barrot
when he, drawing out the ramifications of the 1'IS's councilism, says that for the 1'IS the
"revolution appeared as the extension of inter-subjective situations to the whole of society" (61).
From many points of view, including that of J.V.Martin who enquired at the Trier Conference into
what was happening with "our best weapon i.e. construction of situations", the Situationist project,
as expressed by the 1'IS, floundered precisely because it could not explore the very dynamic of
group subjectivity, an exploration that may have revealed to it the narcissism, idealism, avantgardism and repressive consciousness that made an organisation into an individuality, a
personification of sovereign power. Raoul Vaneigem who was closest and yet most distant from
this exploration, who could offer that "the project of participation enhances the transparence of
human relationships" also offered a cause for the malaise, in the 1972 postscript to his book, as
being due to radical theory becoming "independent of the self-movement of revolutionary
consciousness". Collective practice, the shifting of the ego-ideal, the relational ground of
individuality, is conspicuous by its absence, replaced by an ideal and autonomised
consciousness.
The same year that the 1'IS dissolved, the BS, having made an intervention at the Royal Danish
opera house the year before by blowing whistles and hurling leaflets from the balconies, made
one of their art barricades outside the Documenta exhibition in Kassel. Called Anti-DocumentaArt-Work this formless collection of junk, an 'anti-object', greeted visitors as they approached the
Museum Fridericianum. Whether or not the piece they assembled is considered as an art work or
as a social action, a moment of communicative urbanism, it is still some kind of testament to the
persistence of the BS. This is one group that seems not to have disintegrated into acrimony and
this is perhaps a result of the fact that it never saw itself as something it could never be; it did not
work under the shadow of posterity and only began to turn its attention to its historification as a
means of making sure that it did not become invisible to later generations. Busy making actions
and interventions the BS only rarely concentrated on theoretical production and, as with the
collaboration between Nash and de Jong, the end result was always provisional, always seen as
an adjunct to its activities rather their defining moment. As with Jorn, the BS were theoretical
expressionists. So, if the BS could be seen to be growing towards Anarchism, then it was not an
Anarchism of position, one that could be used to provide them with answers fitting neatly into
language, but an Anarchism that was consulted to bolster and politicise their culturalrevolutionary practice. In other words stressing "experiment through action, through creating or
intervening in situations" (62), the practical activity that haunted the 1'IS was the motor of the BS.
Having experienced the hot end of the exclusions the BS were well aware that their organisation
could be a 'communicative field' itself and that this 'field', potentially instaurated anywhere and at
any time, was dependent upon a new social relation that could come to expression by means of
the group functioning as a social organism. Of Drakabygget Thorsen wrote: "Nearly all the new
collectivities base themselves upon group marriage thus transforming the collectivities into sorts
of pagan monasteries. The Bauhaus Situationniste on the contrary has only one goal: to achieve
freedom for everybody on the place. Freedom to work, to come or leave, join or not join" (63).
Whilst this plays a little into the traps of 'lifestylism' that Jean Barrot criticised the 1'IS for, it is
nonetheless a matter of the BS creating the form and movement of their own liberation. To his
credit Debord saw this same movement as best expressing the content of the workers councils in
which "the proletarian movement is its own product and this product is the producer himself" (64).
However, Debord restricted this very 'becoming', this situationistic activity, to the workers councils
as a superior form of organisation, whereas the BS were able to extend this 'productive cooperation' to the full spectra of life, a mixed semiotic, rather than having it rest on an historically
determined form that was rapidly being supplanted by a developing capital. These developments
- variously termed over the years as 'real domination of capital', as 'anthropomorphosis and
escape of capital', as 'biopolitics' etc. in which more and more of life falls under the
determinations of capital, in which individuals become the colonies of capital - were hinted at
continually in the early years of the 1'IS, but their ramifications, the situationistic construction of
new social relations and communicative fields, came less and less to motivate the 1'IS. If
anything they became part-and-parcel of the individualism enshrined within the 1'IS. Vaneigem,
described as its weakest point by Jean Barrot, was perhaps more like the one 'charged' with
expressing the group's 'unconscious': "Oppression is no longer centralised because oppression is
everywhere. The positive aspect of this: everyone begins to see... that first and foremost it is
themselves that they have to save, they themselves that they have to choose as centre..." (65).
Strangely enough, considering the accusations of self-interest hurled at them by the 1'IS in 1962,
the BS as well as Group Spur, continued their activities well beyond the 1972 tidemark because
their members saw the significance of an ongoing 'combat against culture' rather than its
supercession and, crucially, could work together collectively. Thorsen, writing in the first Co-Ritus
manifesto of 1961, identified individualism as a utopian leaning and went on to say that such
individualism had "produced the divide between the individual and the group, between the ideal
and the banal, between art and anti-art, between the creator and the sheep" (66). The problem of
individualism that had wrecked the 1'IS, leading to its legacy being identified with one person,
had, through a continual ethos of 'inclusivity', made of the BS a grouping that never sought to
integrate its members to an ideal-ego. Rather than thus make way for the sovereign domination
of personalities and a conflict of egos thinly veiled by a written 'coherence' that could be
objectively judged by 'history' the BS, pursuing the space between people and a mixed semiotic,
were intent on producing a non sovereign socialisation: "turning the possibilities of art into the
possibilities of social space"(67).
The 'realisation and suppression' of art that was much vaunted by the 1'IS takes on, when put
against the activities of the BS, an individualist hue that insinuates that the 1'IS were in
'possession' of art. When Vaneigem offered that the supercession of art was "the actualisation of
art and philosophy in individual lived experience" he did nothing more than reconfine creative
activity to the bounds of the individual. Something similar occurs when the 1'IS claims to have
superceded revolutionary theory: they come to possess the work of Henri Lefebvre, Socialisme
ou Barbarie and its offshoot Informations Correspondance Ouvrieres, and go no further. Like any
ownership without use the concepts they wield become ornamental, a matter of style and whether
or not the act of plagiarism involved is a theft on behalf of the revolution, it is, in the case of the
1'IS, wielded in an exclusive manner; it belongs to them rather than to a wider movement. For the
BS 'supercession' existed as a generosity that extended to their own dematerialisation as artists
(the 'death of the classic artist'). Art was to be 'placed in new relations', it was to be the spur for
the creation of new social relations in which individualism, the repressive barrier to
communication, was to be superceded and severed from the paradigm of sovereignty. As if to
drive this point home J.V.Martin and Jens J¯rgen Thorsen began to collaborate together on
extemporised paintings and on a statement entitled All Culture Is Collective. Rallying against the
individualist ideology of artistic creation and auteurism the two write: "Down with art which is selfcontented and ego-centric, which contemplates its own navel! Up with generating everybody's art
for all" (68). Discussions between the two are reported to have fed their way into Thorsen's
project for a Situationist Antinational which was publicised in a magazine of the same name in
1974. Some new such Situationist grouping had been mooted by the BS as long ago as their
creation of the 'pavilion of revolt'. Here in an additional Declaration intended to collect signatories
of those groups sympathetic to overcoming "aesthetical isolation" and the manipulation of cultural
life, it was further stated that the BS "was against the principal of national representation and
authorisation of art by which the process of international artistic activation is suppressed" (69).
Perhaps overcoming the Nordic centrism that, in warding-off Group Spur, had led to the project
for a 2'IS to falter, Thorsen, with half an eye on the disagreements between national sections
within the 1'IS, saw a chance to reaffirm an internationalism not based upon nationality but upon
a willingness to surmount such barriers. In his draft manifesto for the Situationist Antinational,
Thorsen asked what had become of the 1'IS: "Why did it lead to a series of mutual exclusions and
attacks, to the passivating philosophism which forced the movement on its knees, made it split
into bits and alienated it in relation to its own existence, transforming it into a new ideology?" (70).
His answer to this was that nationalism had developed within the 1'IS which in turn fed a fight to
be 'chief-ideologist'. Whilst it could be said that national differences were more a means of
covering over the individualism within the 1'IS, Thorsen perhaps came closer to indicting such
individualism when he wrote that "we will have to exchange the theories of alienation for the
reality of realisation". The alienated communication within the 1'IS was not simply a matter of
language barriers but the barrier of language whereby revolutionary intent had been misleadingly
signalled first by 'coherent' theory, then by a theory of organisation and finally, in the Veritable
Split In The International (1972), by the historification of the organisation. Dealing with this last
book of the 1'IS by Debord and Sanguinetti, Jon Horelick, a member of the American Section who
had, around 1970, wanted to open up discussions about the exclusions within the 1'IS, made a
contribution to Thorsen's project that deals incisively with the problems that led to the increasing
inefficacy and demise of the 1'IS. Earmarking the exclusions as "not the source but the product of
our problems" and continually drawing attention to intersubjective difficulties within the
organisation, Horelick offered that the 1'IS had become an object of contemplation that Debord
and Sanguinetti possessed. The historification of the organisation, already ensured by its long
term bid for posterity, made it a dead object, an art work, that, communicating unilaterally, was
shielded from any successors. For Horelick an "inert common activity which had lost hold even of
its theoretical prerequisites for creative participation" had led to the 1'IS becoming nothing more
than an "organisational void" (71). Whilst Thorsen's Antinational Situationist project, which was
supported by Spur members Heimrad Prem and Helmut Strum, did not get beyond the draft stage
it is an apt antidote to the official situationist historiography. Not only does it open out an offer of
participation - the manifesto is prefaced by an appeal for comment before it is printed and
distributed - it speaks of its intended organisation as a 'new organism'. This is an interesting
choice of words for it implies that the Situationist Antinational was to have been a 'social organ'
rather than a bureaucratic organisation which the 1'IS eventually became. Whilst Thorsen aligns
these 'organisms' with Bakunin's theory of secret societies it is perhaps his intention to infer that
the organisms should function as 'situations' for he has it that the new grouping should be based
upon the "free correspondence between autonomous groups and individuals". It is perhaps that
these secret societies are seen by Thorsen as a way to investigate a subjective dimension,
situations of 'full speech', unencumbered by the need to appear sovereignly 'coherent'. As with
Jon Horelick's text which, picking up on the example of rampant individuality within the 1'IS and
echoing the work of the Italian Autonomists, turns its attention to an examination of the
"subjective stature of the existing proletariat" rather than this class being the repository of an
objectified idealism, the project of the Situationist Antinational was to be one that accepted the
differences between people as a motor of becoming: a group subjectivity, a collective
assemblage of enunciation that draws upon all manner of semiotic and emotional material. That
this impasse gave rise to a post situationist milieu of the "full personal critique" as urged by
Horelick is an indication that the revolutionary project was moving towards a critique of
individuality and to a production of subjectivity that could elude the very individualising function of
organisations that, in conformity to capitalism, had hitherto created dependent-subjects rather
than subject-groups. Key here would be to enter into a different modality of relationship to
language - a theoretical expressionism that drawing-on other semiotic registers, a culture of
affects, could overcome the paralysing adherence to 'coherence' that elevates the sovereignty of
individuals such as Guy Debord into the stature of law-bearers, ego-ideals that stifle the flow of
desire between people and instaurate a communicative censorship within groups. Aiming to
break such a hold, Thorsen, in his draft manifesto, repeated the BS slogan of "Divided We Stand"
and reaffirmed Jorn's ethos of 'variabilities within a unity' - the encounter with others who are not
mirror images of ourselves, not screens for narcissistic projection, but potential precipitates,
active inhabitants of tangential subjectivities, is the means of creating new social relations that
refuse the reduction of social life to the meagre size of easily isolated individualities. As if to
emphasise a new starting point, a reaffirmation of the construction of situations, both Horelick and
Thorsen end their respective texts with the same yearning sentence: "The new anti-hierarchical
groups which emerge today must be like a factory of everyday life..."
Howard Slater
@ Break/Flow
January - April 2001
NOTES
1. Found in a dictionary drift, histogenesis means "the formation of tissues and
organs from undifferentiated cells".
2. Asger Jorn: Forms Conceived As Language. Translated from Cobra No.2 by
Sarah Wilson and Taken from Situationist International Online http://members.optusnet.com.au/~rkeehan/
3. Asger Jorn's Artist Statement from Guy Atkins: Asger Jorn, Methuen London,
1964.
4. Asger Jorn: Open Creation And Its Enemies, translated by Fabian Tompsett,
Unpopular Books 1994. This edition also contains translations of Originality And
Magnitude and Manifesto.
5. Asger Jorn: Open Creation, ibid, p38-39.
6. Spur: The Avant Garde Is Undesirable. Anon translation taken from Situationist
International Online.
7. See Jean Sellem: The Movement For A Scandinavian Bauhaus Situationist - A
Chronology in Lund Art Pess Vol2. No.3, 1992. Sellem's research has been an
indispensable guideline to this text. It shows a Situationist presence in
Scandinavia well beyond the 'official' 1972 shutdown. Guy Debord, with an eye
on the necessary periodisations of posterity wrote, in The Organization Question
For The SI (1968), that the years 1957-1962 "centred around the supercession of
art". See Situationist International Anthology ed. Ken Knabb, Bureau Of Public
Secrets 1981, p298.
8. Jacqueline de Jong, J¯rgen Nash, Ansgar Elde: Danger! Do Not Lean Out! in
Situationist Times No.1, 1962. Perhaps it is not so much an 'outcome of the nonactivity' of the four and more a matter of the four practicing a mode of social
relations based on individualism.
9. Definition in Situationist International Anthology, ibid p112. It is interesting to
note that Raoul Vaneigem makes a revealing reference to the figure of 'the traitor'
as appearing when "the spirit of play has died in a group". He adds "selling out
on play is the prime treachery". See The Revolution Of Everyday Life (1963-65),
Left Bank Books & Rebel Press 1983, p201-202.
10. The Fifth SI Conference In Goteborg in Situationist International Anthology,
ibid p88. Lars Morell in his Poesien Breder Sig - Nash, Drakabygget &
Situationisterne makes reference to a demand for the 'revision' of the SI
movement coming at this conference from Debord, Kotanyi and Vaneigem. The
So Ein Ding project was here labelled as an 'art' film.
10a. Mikkel Bolt in conversation with Jakob Jakobsen.
11. Guy Debord & Pierre Canjuers: Toward Defining A Unitary Revolutionary
Programme (1960) in Situationist International Anthology, ibid, p308. This text
was the outcome of the SI's contact with Socialisme ou Barbarie. In The
Revolution Of Everyday Life, Vaneigem refers to the "artistic spectacle", ibid
p189... and to a core ambiguity of the practice of art as that dividing 'lived
experience' from 'aesthetic form', ibid p84. It would be interesting to discover how
this plays against Jorn's findings in his Pour La Forme published under the
auspices of the 1'IS in 1958.
12. Jacqueline de Jong & J¯rgen Nash: Critic Of The Political Practice Of
Detournement in Situationist Times No.1, 1962.
13. See Giorgio Agamben: Homo Sacer - Sovereign Power and Bare Life,
Stanford University Press, 1998, p109. Agamben has it that "the relation of
exception is a relation of ban", ibid, p28. Are the exclusions an exercise of the
'relation of ban'? It is interesting to note that Nash and de Jong speak of the 1'IS
as an "organisation which has absolutely no rules", ibid.
14. Instructions For Taking Up Arms (1961) in Situationist International
Anthology, ibid p63. In his later denouncement of Vaneigem, Debord at least
credits Vaneigem with collaborative input into the anonymous articles of this
period. Could it be that the 'methods yet to be experimented with' are 'situations'?
15. The Adventure (1960), ibid, p60.
16. Drakabygget Declaration: Situationist Times No.2, 1962. The declaration was
signed by Nash, Thorsen, Fazakerley, Strid, Larsson, Elde, De Jong and Patrick
O'Brien. Gordon Fazakerley, from Widnes in the North West of England, had
been associated with Jorn and Nash from the late 50s, helped build Drakabygget
and was the secretary at Situationist Times. He also published a book of poems
under the auspices of the Bauhaus Situationniste in May 1962 with an
introduction - Hamletomania - provided by J¯rgen Nash. See Gordon Fazakerley:
The Ferryboat, Lund Art Press, ibid, p133-143. Patrick O' Brien was the
pseudonym used by Guy Atkins, Jorn's biographer.
17. Nietzsche quoted by Pierre Klossowski in his Nietzsche And The Vicious
Circle, Athlone 1997, p14.
18. The seizure of Unesco was first mooted in the Situationist Manifesto of 17th
May 1960 and published the same year in Internationale Situationniste No.4. See
Asger Jorn: Open Creation And Its Enemies, ibid, p44-47. For a full version of the
Mutant leaflet see P.H.Hansen: A Bibliography Of Asger Jorn's Writings,
Silkeborg 1988.
19. Report of Guy Debord to The VII Conference Of The SI in The Veritable Split
In The International (1972), BM Chronos 1984, p99-107. This far from perfect
translation still serves as a key document to understanding the unconscious
aprorias of the 1'IS.
20. Situationist Manifesto in Asger Jorn: Open Creation, ibid. A similar hope for
participation is contained in the Vaneigem-inflected Instructions For Taking Up
Arms: "People's creativity and participation can only be awakened by a collective
project explicitly concerned with all aspects of lived experience", ibid.
21. Jean Barrot: Critique Of The Situationist International in What Is Situationism,
Unpopular Books 1987, p33. Reprinted in What Is Situationism? ed. Stewart
Home, AK Press 1996.
22. Alexander Trocchi: A Revolutionary Proposal - The Insurrection Of A Million
Minds in City Lights Journal No.2 1964, p33. Trocchi's proposal appeared in
International Situationniste No.8 (1963) and was a wide-ranging and ambitious
attempt to revolutionise culture. It had an axial role in the British counter culture
of the 60s, diffusing into initiatives such as the Arts Lab, the London AntiUniversity and the Artist Placement Group. As part of the Sigma Portfolio an
essay on 'The New Experimental College (Denmark)' was planned.
23. Jean Sellem: Harry Strid's Work in Drakabygget No.6-7-8, 1982. This article
briefly covers the activities of the BS up to the decapitation of the 'Little Mermaid'
in Copenhagen Harbour in 1964.
24. J¯rgen Nash and Jens J¯rgen Thorsen: Co-Ritus Interview in Aspekt No.3,
1963. As a long term participant in the BS, Jens J¯rgen Thorsen has been a key
figure in documenting their activities. See Friheden Er Ikke Til Salg, Bogan 1980.
25. Jean Sellem, ibid.
26. J¯rgen Nash: Who Are The Situationists? This article first appeared in The
Times Literary Supplement of September 1964 and is an edited and reworked
version of the 1962 Declaration which also includes excerpts from the Mutantmanifesto. In the same supplement Michele Bernstein's contribution speaks of
"the situationist label" being "usurped by certain intellectuals who have been
expelled by the IS... e.g., the followers of Nash in Sweden". For reprints of the
Nash and Bernstein articles see An Endless Adventure ed. Iwona Blazwick,
ICA/Verso 1989, p61-62.
27. Drakabygget Declaration (1962), ibid.
28. J¯rgen Nash, ibid. Nash mentions four such groups. One "on the
Hallandsasen in southern Sweden and two more in Denmark and Sweden". We
have already mentioned Alexander Trocchi and his oft thwarted plan to establish
a Sigma Centre. The project had a twin in Holland energised by Simon
Vinkenoog. There was also the Dutch Provos around Constant and in the later
60s, Kommune1 in which Dieter Kunzelmann of Group Spur was involved.
Another 'Bauhaus' had existed in the USA since the 30s - The Black Mountain
College that drew on the participation of a former Bauhaus lecturer, Joseph
Albers.
29. Drakabygget Declaration (1962), ibid. Asger Jorn, more speculatively, saw
the very existence of a pseudo socialist nation as the death knell of a creative,
revolutionary working class, able to "represent the most pure human value". For
him "With the establishment of the socialist ideology within a fixed geographical
system, this value is transformed into a quality, and that quality in turn into a
spatial quantity. The vision of the world proletariat passes over into its opposite,
that of absolute property with the absolute disappearance of all availability, of all
the proletarian values".See Critique Of Economic Policy (1960) in Transgressions
No.4, 1998, p33. Jorn saw the 'social provocations of youth' as taking the
necessary risks to reassert the 'pure human value' which may have inspired the
1'IS to give notice of R.Keller's and R.Vaneigem's project to "introduce the
aggressivity of delinquents onto the plane of ideas". See The Bad Days Will End
(1962) in Situationist International Anthology, ibid, p87.
30. Bjorn Rosendahl: Bauhaus Situationist In Sweden - A Retrospective in Lund
Art Press Vol2 No.3, 1992, p26.
31. Pierre Klossowski playing-out along with Nietzsche, ibid, p4. Klossowski,
musing on letters Nietzsche wrote when he mistakenly thought that the Louvre
had been destroyed by insurrection in 1871, highlights a whole pathology of guilt
about culture: "As long as culture implies slavery and is the product of
(unavowed) slavery, the problem of guilt persists", ibid, p11.
32. The following draws upon a text by Anneli Fuchs called Asger Jorn And Art
History.
33. The Situationist Times drew upon this method in at least two issues. No.4
focussed on the Labyrinth and No.5 on Rings and Chains.
34. Asger Jorn: Critique Of Economic Policy (1960), ibid, p21.
35. The Situationist Frontier (1960) taken from Situationist International Online.
For a more detailed discussion of the 'construction of situations' see Howard
Slater: Towards Situation, Break/Flow - Occasional Documents, 2001.
36. The Avant-Garde Of Presence (1963) in Situationist International Anthology,
ibid, p110. The stipulations here are tantamount to finishing-off the 'construction
of situations', banning its practice by anyone else except 1'IS members.
Interestingly, Jean-Luc Nancy has offered that sovereignty "is the power of
execution or the power of finishing as such". See his Being Singular Plural,
Stanford University Press 2000, p120.
37. Raoul Vaneigem: The Revolution Of Everyday Life (1965), ibid p153.
38. Ideologies, Classes And The Domination Of Nature (1963), in Situationist
International Anthology, ibid, p107.
39. Jacqueline de Jong & J¯rgen Nash: Critic Of The Political Practice Of
Detournement, ibid. Asger Jorn would concur with this: "All life is an alternation
between activity and passivity... production and consumption... through giving
oneself alternatively to both situations with equal abandonment there arises a
new creation, the dialectical result of apparently incompatible oppositions."
Quoted by Graham Birtwistle in his Living Art: Asger Jorn (1946-1949), Reflex
1986.
40. No images or written accounts of Jan Strijbosch's work are featured in the
RSG-6 brochure that accompanied this 'collective manifestation of the
Situationistisk Internationale'.
41. The Counter Situationist Campaign In Various Countries (1963) in Situationist
International Anthology, ibid, p111.
42. Guy Debord & Pierre Canjuers in Situationist International Anthology, ibid,
p308.
43. The SI And The Incident In Randers (1966). Translated by Reuben Keehan
and taken from Situationist International Online.
44. Raoul Vaneigem: Revolution of Everyday Life, ibid, p74. The problem of
language was raised by the 1'IS in the article All The Kings Men (1963) and by
Mustapha Khayati in Captive Words: Preface To A Situationist Dictionary (1966).
45. Guy Debord: The Situationists And The New Forms Of Action In Politics And
Art (1963), in Situationist International Anthology, ibid, p 317. This avant-gardism
(or simply vanguardism) was taken up in The Revolution Of Everyday Life (1965)
by Vaneigem when he offered that the 1'IS: "will supply a model for the future
organisation of society", ibid, p211. Likewise in The Organisation Question For
The SI (1968), Debord offered that the 1'IS's task as an organisation was to
"unite and radicalise scattered struggles", ibid.
46. Guy Debord: The Organisation Question For The SI (Note added August
1969), ibid, p301.