Report on the Construction of Situations : 
And on the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of
Organization and Action
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1957

People :
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Author : Guy Debord

Author : Ken Knabb

Text :
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Revolution and Counterrevolution in Modern Culture



First of all, we think the world must be changed. We want the most
liberating change of the society and life in which we find ourselves
confined. We know that such a change is possible through appropriate
actions.



Our specific concern is the use of certain means of action and the
discovery of new ones, means which are more easily recognizable in the
domain of culture and customs, but which must be applied in interrelation
with all revolutionary changes.



A society’s “culture” both reflects and prefigures its possible ways
of organizing life. Our era is characterized by the lagging of
revolutionary political action behind the development of modern
possibilities of production which call for a more advanced organization of
the world.



We are going through a crucial historical crisis in which each year poses
more acutely the global problem of rationally mastering the new productive
forces and creating a new civilization. Yet the international working-class
movement, on which depends the prerequisite overthrow of the economic
infrastructure of exploitation, has registered only a few partial local
successes. Capitalism has invented new forms of struggle (state
intervention in the economy, expansion of the consumer sector, fascist
governments) while camouflaging class oppositions through various reformist
tactics and exploiting the degenerations of working-class leaderships. In
this way it has succeeded in maintaining the old social relations in the
great majority of the highly industrialized countries, thereby depriving a
socialist society of its indispensable material base. In contrast, the
underdeveloped or colonized countries, which over the last decade have
engaged in the most direct and massive battles against imperialism, have
begun to win some very significant victories. These victories are
aggravating the contradictions of the capitalist economy and (particularly
in the case of the Chinese revolution) could be a contributing factor
toward a renewal of the whole revolutionary movement. Such a renewal cannot
limit itself to reforms within the capitalist or anticapitalist countries,
but must develop conflicts posing the question of power everywhere.



The shattering of modern culture is the result, on the plane of ideological
struggle, of the chaotic crisis of these antagonisms. The new desires that
are taking shape are presented in distorted form: present-day resources
could enable them to be fulfilled, but the anachronistic economic structure
is incapable of developing these resources to such ends. Ruling-class
ideology has meanwhile lost all coherence because of the depreciation of
its successive conceptions of the world (a depreciation which leads the
ruling class to historical indecision and uncertainty); because of the
coexistence of a range of mutually contradictory reactionary ideologies
(such as Christianity and social-democracy); and because of the mixing into
contemporary Western culture of a number of only recently appreciated
features of several foreign civilizations. The main goal of ruling-class
ideology is therefore to maintain this confusion.



Within culture (it should be understood that throughout this text we are
ignoring the scientific or educational aspects of culture, even if the
confusion we have noted is also visibly reflected at the level of general
scientific theories and notions of education; we are using the term to
refer to a complex of esthetics, sentiments and customs: the reaction of an
era on everyday life) there are two parallel counterrevolutionary
confusionist tactics: the partial cooption of new values, and a
deliberately anticultural, industrially facilitated production (novels,
films), the latter being a natural continuation of the imbecilization of
young people begun in their schools and families. The ruling ideology sees
to it that subversive discoveries are trivialized and sterilized, after
which they can be safely spectacularized. It even manages to make use of
subversive individuals — by falsifying their works after their death, or,
while they are still alive, by taking advantage of the general ideological
confusion and drugging them with one or another of the many mystiques at
their disposal.



One of the contradictions of the bourgeoisie in its period of decline is
that while it respects the abstract principle of intellectual and artistic
creation, it resists actual creations when they first appear, then
eventually exploits them. This is because it needs to maintain a certain
degree of criticality and experimental research among a minority, but must
take care to channel this activity into narrowly compartmentalized
utilitarian disciplines and avert any holistic critique and
experimentation. In the domain of culture the bourgeoisie strives to divert
the taste for innovation, which is dangerous for it in our era, toward
certain confused, degraded and innocuous forms of novelty. Through the
commercial mechanisms that control cultural activity, avant-garde
tendencies are cut off from the segments of society that could support
them, segments already limited because of the general social conditions.
The people within these tendencies who become well known are generally
accepted as exceptional individuals, on the condition that they accept
various renunciations: the essential point is always the renunciation of a
comprehensive opposition and the acceptance of fragmentary works
susceptible to diverse interpretations. This is what gives the very term
“avant-garde,” which in the final analysis is always defined and
manipulated by the bourgeoisie, a dubious and ridiculous aspect.



The very notion of a collective avant-garde, with the militant aspect it
implies, is a recent product of the historical conditions that are
simultaneously giving rise to the necessity for a coherent revolutionary
program in culture and to the necessity to struggle against the forces that
impede the development of such a program. Such groups are led to transpose
into their sphere of activity certain organizational methods originally
created by revolutionary politics, and their action is henceforth
inconceivable without some connection with a political critique. In this
regard there is a notable progression from Futurism through Dadaism and
Surrealism to the movements formed after 1945. At each of these stages,
however, one discovers the same desire for total change; and the same rapid
disintegration when the inability to change the real world profoundly
enough leads to a defensive withdrawal to the very doctrinal positions
whose inadequacy had just been revealed.



Futurism, whose influence spread from Italy in the period preceding World
War I, adopted an attitude of revolutionizing literature and the arts which
introduced a great number of formal innovations, but which was only based
on an extremely simplistic application of the notion of mechanical
progress. Futurism’s puerile technological optimism vanished with the
period of bourgeois euphoria that had sustained it. Italian Futurism
collapsed, going from nationalism to fascism without ever attaining a more
complete theoretical vision of its time.



Dadaism, initiated in Zurich and New York by refugees and deserters from
World War I, expressed the rejection of all the values of a bourgeois
society whose bankruptcy had just become so grossly evident. Its violent
manifestations in postwar Germany and France aimed mainly at the
destruction of art and literature and to a lesser degree at certain forms
of behavior (deliberately imbecilic spectacles, speeches and excursions).
Its historic role is to have delivered a mortal blow to the traditional
conception of culture. The almost immediate dissolution of dadaism was an
inevitable result of its purely negative definition. The dadaist spirit has
nevertheless influenced all subsequent movements; and any future
constructive position must include a dadaist-type negative aspect as long
as the social conditions that impose the repetition of rotten
superstructures — conditions that have intellectually already been
definitively condemned — have not been wiped out by force.



The creators of surrealism, who had participated in the dadaist movement in
France, endeavored to define the terrain of a constructive action on the
basis of the spirit of revolt and the extreme depreciation of traditional
means of communication expressed by dadaism. Setting out from a poetic
application of Freudian psychology, surrealism extended the methods it had
discovered to painting, to film, and to some aspects of everyday life; and
its influence, in more diffuse forms, spread much further. Now, what is
important in an enterprise of this nature is not whether it is completely
or relatively right, but whether it succeeds in catalyzing for a certain
time the desires of an era. Surrealism’s period of progress, marked by
the liquidation of idealism and a moment of rallying to dialectical
materialism, came to a halt soon after 1930, but its decay only became
evident after World War II. Surrealism had by then spread to numerous
countries. It had also initiated a discipline whose rigor must not be
overestimated and which was often tempered by commercial considerations,
but which was nevertheless an effective means of struggle against the
confusionist mechanisms of the bourgeoisie.



The surrealist program, asserting the sovereignty of desire and surprise
and proposing a new way of life, is much richer in constructive
possibilities than is generally realized. The limited scope of surrealism
was in large part due to the lack of material means for fulfilling its
aims. But the devolution of its original proponents into spiritualism, and
above all the mediocrity of its later members, obliges us to search for the
failed development of surrealist theory in the very origin of that theory.



The error that is at the root of surrealism is the idea of the infinite
richness of the unconscious imagination. The cause of surrealism’s
ideological failure was its belief that the unconscious was the finally
discovered ultimate force of life; and the fact that the surrealists
revised the history of ideas in accordance with that simplistic perspective
and never went any further. We now know that the unconscious imagination is
poor, that automatic writing is monotonous, and that the whole ostentatious
genre of would-be “strange” and “shocking” surrealistic creations
has ceased to be very surprising. The formal fidelity to this style of
imagination ultimately leads back to the polar opposite of the modern
conditions of imagination: back to traditional occultism. The extent to
which surrealism has remained dependent on its hypothesis regarding the
unconscious can be seen in the theoretical investigations attempted by the
second-generation surrealists: Calas and Mabille relate everything to the
two successive aspects of the surrealist practice of the unconscious —
the former to psychoanalysis, the latter to cosmic influences. The
discovery of the role of the unconscious was indeed a surprise and an
innovation; but it was not a law of future surprises and innovations. Freud
had also ended up discovering this when he wrote: “Whatever is conscious
wears out. What is unconscious remains unalterable. But once it is freed,
it too falls to ruin.”



Opposing an apparently irrational society in which the clash between
reality and the old but still vigorously proclaimed values was pushed to
the point of absurdity, surrealism made use of the irrational to destroy
that society’s superficially logical values. The very success of
surrealism has a lot to do with the fact that the most modern side of this
society’s ideology has renounced a strict hierarchy of factitious values
and openly uses the irrational, including vestiges of surrealism. The
bourgeoisie must above all prevent a new beginning of revolutionary
thought. It was aware of the danger of surrealism. Now that it has been
able to coopt it into ordinary esthetic commerce, it would like people to
believe that surrealism was the most radical and disturbing movement
possible. It thus cultivates a sort of nostalgia for surrealism at the same
time that it discredits any new venture by automatically pigeonholing it as
a rehash of surrealism, a rerun of a defeat which according to it is
definitive and can no longer be brought back into question by anyone.
Reacting against the alienation of Christian society has led some people to
admire the completely irrational alienation of primitive societies. But we
need to go forward, not backward. We need to make the world more rational
— the necessary first step in making it more exciting.

Decomposition: The Ultimate Stage of Bourgeois Thought



The two main centers of “modern” culture are Paris and Moscow. The
styles originating in Paris (the majority of whose elaborators are not
French) influence Europe, America and the other developed countries of the
capitalist zone such as Japan. The styles imposed administratively by
Moscow influence all the workers states and also have a slight effect on
Paris and its European zone of influence. The Moscow influence is directly
political. The persistence of the traditional influence of Paris stems
partly from its long-entrenched position as professional cultural center.



Because bourgeois thought is lost in systematic confusion and Marxist
thought has been profoundly distorted in the workers states, conservatism
reigns both East and West, especially in the domain of culture and customs.
This conservatism is overt in Moscow, which has revived the typically
petty-bourgeois attitudes of the nineteenth century. In Paris it is hidden,
disguised as anarchism, cynicism or humor. Although both of these ruling
cultures are fundamentally incapable of dealing with the real problems of
our time, relevant experimentation has been carried further in the West. In
the context of this sort of cultural production, the Moscow zone functions
as a region of underdevelopment.



In the bourgeois zone, where an appearance of intellectual freedom has
generally been tolerated, the knowledge of the movement of ideas and the
confused vision of the multiple transformations of the social environment
tend to make people aware of an ongoing upheaval whose motivating forces
are out of control. The reigning sensibility tries to adapt itself to this
situation while resisting new changes that present new dangers. The
solutions offered by the retrograde currents ultimately come down to three
main attitudes: prolonging the fashions produced by the dada-surrealism
crisis (which crisis is simply the sophisticated cultural expression of a
state of mind that spontaneously manifests itself wherever previously
accepted meanings of life crumble along with previous lifestyles); settling
into mental ruins; or returning to the distant past.



In the first case, a diluted form of surrealism can be found everywhere. It
has all the tastes of the surrealist era and none of its ideas. Its
esthetic is based on repetition. The remnants of orthodox surrealism have
arrived at the stage of occultist senility, and are as incapable of
articulating an ideological position as they are of inventing anything
whatsoever. They lend credence to increasingly crude charlatanisms and
engender others.



Setting up shop in nullity is the cultural solution that has been most
visible in the years following World War II. This solution includes two
possibilities, each of which has been abundantly illustrated: dissimulating
nothingness by means of an appropriate vocabulary, or openly flaunting it.



The first of these options has become particularly famous since the advent
of existentialist literature, which has reproduced, under the cover of a
borrowed philosophy, the most mediocre aspects of the cultural evolution of
the preceding three decades and augmented its mass-media-based notoriety by
doses of fake Marxism and psychoanalysis and by successive announcements of
more or less arbitrary political engagements and resignations. These
tactics have generated a very large number of followers, avowed or
unacknowledged. The continuing proliferation of abstract painting and its
associated theories is another example of the same nature and scope.



The complacent affirmation of total mental nullity is exemplified by the
recent neoliterary phenomenon of “cynical young right-wing novelists,”
but is by no means limited to right-wingers, novelists, or semi-youth.



Among the tendencies calling for a return to the past, the doctrine of
Socialist Realism has proven to be the most durable, because its
indefensible position in the domain of cultural creation seems to be
supported by its appeal to the conclusions of a revolutionary movement. At
the 1948 conference of Soviet musicians, Andrei Zhdanov [1] revealed the
stake of theoretical repression: “Haven’t we done well to preserve the
treasures of classic painting and to suppress the liquidators of painting?
Wouldn’t the survival of such ‘schools’ have amounted to the
liquidation of painting?” Faced with this liquidation of painting and
with many other liquidations, and recognizing the crumbling of all its
systems of values, the advanced Western bourgeoisie is banking on total
ideological decomposition, whether out of desperate reaction or out of
political opportunism. In contrast, Zhdanov — with the taste
characteristic of the parvenu — recognizes himself in the
petty-bourgeoisie that opposes the decomposition of nineteenth-century
cultural values, and can see nothing else to do than to undertake an
authoritarian restoration of those values. He is unrealistic enough to
believe that short-lived local political circumstances will give him the
power to evade the general problems of this era, if only he can force
people to return to the study of superseded problems after having repressed
all the conclusions that history has previously drawn from those problems.



The form (and even some aspects of the content) of this Socialist Realism
is not very different from the traditional propaganda of religious
organizations, particularly of Catholicism. By means of an invariable
propaganda, Catholicism defends a unitary ideological structure that it
alone, among all the forces of the past, still possesses. But at the same
time, in a parallel operation designed to recapture the increasingly
numerous sectors that are escaping its influence, the Catholic Church is
attempting to take over modern cultural forms, particularly those
representing complicated theoretical nullity (“spontaneous” painting,
for example). The Catholic reactionaries have the advantage over other
bourgeois tendencies of being able to rely on a permanent hierarchy of
values; this inalterable foundation enables them all the more freely to
push decomposition to the extreme in whatever discipline they engage in.



The crisis of modern culture has led to total ideological decomposition.
Nothing new can be built on these ruins. Critical thought itself becomes
impossible as each judgment clashes with others and each individual invokes
fragments of outmoded systems or follows merely personal inclinations.



This decomposition can be seen everywhere. It is no longer a matter of
noting the increasingly massive use of commercial publicity to influence
judgments about cultural creation. We have arrived at a stage of
ideological absence in which advertising has become the only active factor,
overriding any preexisting critical judgment or transforming such judgment
into a mere conditioned reflex. The complex operation of sales techniques
has reached the point of surprising even the ad professionals by
automatically creating pseudosubjects of cultural debate. This is the
sociological significance of the Françoise Sagan phenomenon [2] in France
over the last three years, an experience whose repercussions have even
penetrated beyond the cultural zone centered on Paris by provoking some
interest in the workers states. The professional judges of culture, seeing
such a phenomenon as an unpredictable effect of mechanisms with which they
are unfamiliar, tend to attribute it to mere crude mass-media publicity.
But their profession nevertheless obliges them to come up with bogus
critiques of these bogus works. (Moreover, a work whose interest is
inexplicable constitutes the richest subject for bourgeois confusionist
criticism.) They naturally remain unaware of the fact that the intellectual
mechanisms of criticism had already escaped them long before the external
mechanisms arrived to exploit this void. They avoid facing the fact that
Sagan is simply the ridiculous flip side of the change of means of
expression into means of action on everyday life. This process of
supersession has caused the life of the author to become increasingly more
important than her work. As the period of important expressions arrives at
its ultimate reduction, nothing of any possible importance remains except
the personality of the author, who in turn is no longer capable of
possessing any notable quality beyond her age, or some fashionable vise, or
some picturesque old craft.



The opposition that must now be united against this ideological
decomposition must not get caught up in criticizing the buffooneries
appearing in outmoded forms such as poems or novels. We have to criticize
activities that are important for the future, activities that we need to
make use of. One of the most serious signs of the present ideological
decomposition is the fact that the functionalist theory of architecture is
now based on the most reactionary conceptions of society and morality. That
is, the temporarily and partially valid contributions of the original
Bauhaus or of the school of Le Corbusier have been distorted so as to
reinforce an excessively backward notion of life and of the framework of
life.



Everything indicates, however, that since 1956 we have been entering a new
phase of the struggle, and that an upheaval of revolutionary forces,
attacking the most appalling obstacles on all fronts, is beginning to
change the conditions of the preceding period. Socialist Realism is
beginning to decline in the countries of the anticapitalist camp, along
with the reactionary Stalinism that produced it, while in the West the
Sagan culture is marking a depth of bourgeois decadence beyond which it is
probably impossible to go, and there seems to be an increasing awareness of
the exhaustion of the cultural expedients that have served since the end of
World War II. In this context, the avant-garde minority may be able to
rediscover a positive value.



 

The Role of Minority Tendencies in the Ebbing Period



The ebbing of the international revolutionary movement, which became
apparent within a few years after 1920 and increasingly obvious over the
next three decades, was followed, with a time-lag of five or six years, by
an ebbing of the movements that had tried to promote liberatory innovations
in culture and everyday life. The ideological and material importance of
such movements has continually diminished, to the point that they have
become totally isolated. Their action, which under more favorable
conditions was able to lead to a sudden renewal of the climate of feeling,
has weakened to the point that conservative tendencies have been able to
exclude them from any direct penetration into the rigged arena of official
culture. Once these movements have been deprived of their role in the
production of new values, they end up serving as a reserve pool of
intellectual labor from which the bourgeoisie can draw individuals capable
of adding innovative nuances to its propaganda.



At this point of dissolution, the social importance of the experimental
avant-garde is apparently less than that of the pseudomodernist tendencies
which don’t even bother to pretend to seek change, but which represent
the modern, media-reinforced face of accepted culture. But those who have a
role in the actual production of modern culture, and who are discovering
their interests as producers of this culture (all the more acutely as they
are reduced to a purely negative position), are developing a consciousness
that is inevitably lacking among the modernist representatives of the
declining society. The poverty of the accepted culture and its monopoly on
the means of cultural production lead to a corresponding impoverishment of
the theory and manifestations of the avant-garde. But it is only within
this avant-garde that a new revolutionary conception of culture is
imperceptibly taking shape. Now that the dominant culture and the
beginnings of oppositional culture are arriving at the extreme point of
their separation and impotence, this new conception should assert itself.



The history of modern culture during the period of revolutionary ebbing is
thus also the history of the theoretical and practical defeat of the
movement of renewal, to the point that the minority tendencies became
completely isolated and decomposition reigned everywhere.



Between 1930 and World War II surrealism continually declined as a
revolutionary force at the same time that its influence was being extended
beyond its control. The postwar period led to the rapid destruction of
surrealism by the two factors that had already blocked its development
around 1930: the lack of possibilities for theoretical renewal and the
ebbing of revolution, developments which were reflected in the political
and cultural reaction within the workers movement. The latter factor is
directly determinant, for example, in the disappearance of the surrealist
group of Rumania. On the other hand, it is above all the first of these
factors that condemned the Revolutionary Surrealism movement in France and
Belgium to a rapid collapse. Except in Belgium, where a fraction issuing
from surrealism has maintained a valid experimental position [the Lèvres
Nues group], all the surrealist tendencies scattered around the world have
joined the camp of mystical idealism.



Some of the Revolutionary Surrealists were among those who formed the
“Experimental Artists’ International” (1949-1951), which included
participants from Denmark, Belgium, Holland, and eventually also Germany,
and which published the journal Cobra (Copenhagen-Brussels-Amsterdam). [3]
The merit of these groups was to have understood that such an organization
is necessitated by the complexity and extent of present-day problems. But
their lack of ideological rigor, the limitation of their pursuits to mainly
plastic experimentation, and above all the absence of a comprehensive
theory of the conditions and perspectives of their experience led to their
breakup.



Lettrism, in France, had started off by totally opposing the entire known
esthetic movement, whose continual decaying it correctly analyzed. Striving
for the uninterrupted creation of new forms in all domains, the Lettrist
group carried on a salutary agitation between 1946 and 1952. But the group
generally took it for granted that esthetic disciplines should take a new
departure within a general framework similar to the former one, and this
idealist error limited its productions to a few paltry experiments. In 1952
the Lettrist left wing organized itself into a “Lettrist International”
and expelled the backward fraction. [4] In the Lettrist International the
quest for new methods of intervention in everyday life was pursued amid
sharp struggles among different tendencies.



In Italy — with the exception of the antifunctionalist experimental group
that in 1955 formed the most solid section of the International Movement
for an Imaginist Bauhaus — the efforts toward avant-garde formations have
remained attached to the old artistic perspectives and have not even
succeeded in expressing themselves theoretically.



During the same period the most innocuous and massified aspects of Western
culture have been massively imitated all over the world, from the United
States to Japan. (The US avant-garde, which tends to congregate in the
American colony in Paris, lives there in the most tame, insipidly
conformist manner, isolated ideologically, socially and even ecologically
from everything else going on.) As for the productions of peoples who are
still subject to cultural colonialism (often caused by political
oppression), even though they may be progressive in their own countries,
they play a reactionary role in the advanced cultural centers. Critics who
have based their entire career on outdated systems of creation pretend to
discover engaging new developments in Greek films or Guatemalan novels —
an exoticism of the antiexotic, the revival of old forms long since
exploited and exhausted in other countries; an exoticism which does,
however, serve the primary purpose of exoticism: escape from the real
conditions of life and creation.



In the workers states only the experimentation carried out by Brecht in
Berlin, insofar as it puts into question the classic spectacle notion, is
close to the constructions that matter for us today. Only Brecht has
succeeded in resisting the stupidity of Socialist Realism in power.



Now that Socialist Realism is falling apart, we can expect much from a
revolutionary confrontation of the intellectuals in the workers states with
the real problems of modern culture. If Zhdanovism has been the purest
expression not only of the cultural degeneration of the workers movement
but also of the conservative cultural position in the bourgeois world,
those in the Eastern Bloc who are presently revolting against Zhdanovism
cannot do so — whatever their subjective intentions — merely in the
name of a greater creative freedom à la Cocteau, for example. A negation
of Zhdanovism objectively means the negation of the Zhdanovist negation of
“liquidation.” Zhdanovism can be superseded only through the real
exercise of freedom, which is consciousness of present necessity.



Here, too, the recent years have at most been a period of confused
resistance to the confused reign of reactionary imbecility. There weren’t
many of us really working against it. But we should not linger over the
tastes or trivial findings of this period. The problems of cultural
creation can be resolved only in relation with a new advance of world
revolution.



 

Platform for a Provisional Opposition



A revolutionary action within culture must aim to enlarge life, not merely
to express or explain it. It must attack misery on every front. Revolution
is not limited to determining the level of industrial production, or even
to determining who is to be the master of such production. It must abolish
not only the exploitation of humanity, but also the passions, compensations
and habits which that exploitation has engendered. We have to define new
desires in relation to present possibilities. In the thick of the battle
between the present society and the forces that are going to destroy it, we
have to find the first elements of a more advanced construction of the
environment and new conditions of behavior — both as experiences in
themselves and as material for propaganda. Everything else belongs to the
past, and serves it.



We now have to undertake an organized collective work aimed at a unitary
use of all the means of revolutionizing everyday life. That is, we must
first of all recognize the interdependence of these means in the
perspective of increased freedom and an increased control of nature. We
need to construct new ambiances that will be both the products and the
instruments of new forms of behavior. To do this, we must from the
beginning make practical use of the everyday processes and cultural forms
that now exist, while refusing to acknowledge any inherent value they may
claim to have. The very criterion of formal invention or innovation has
lost its sense within the traditional framework of the arts —
insufficient, fragmentary forms whose partial renovations are inevitably
outdated and therefore impossible.



We should not simply refuse modern culture; we must seize it in order to
negate it. No one can claim to be a revolutionary intellectual who does not
recognize the cultural revolution we are now facing. An intellectual
creator cannot be revolutionary by merely supporting some party line, not
even if he does so with original methods, but only by working alongside the
parties toward the necessary transformation of all the cultural
superstructures. What ultimately determines whether or not someone is a
bourgeois intellectual is neither his social origin nor his knowledge of a
culture (such knowledge may be the basis for a critique of that culture or
for some creative work within it), but his role in the production of the
historically bourgeois forms of culture. Authors of revolutionary political
opinions who find themselves praised by bourgeois literary critics should
ask themselves what they’ve done wrong.



The union of several experimental tendencies for a revolutionary front in
culture, begun at the congress held at Alba, Italy, at the end of 1956,
presupposes that we not neglect three important factors.



First of all, we must insist on a complete accord among the persons and
groups that participate in this united action; and this accord must not be
facilitated by allowing certain of its consequences to be dissimulated.
Jokers or careerists who are stupid enough to think they can advance their
careers in this way must be rebuffed.



Next, we must recall that while any genuinely experimental attitude is
usable, that word has very often been misused in the attempt to justify
artistic actions within an already-existing structure. The only valid
experimental proceeding is based on the accurate critique of existing
conditions and the deliberate supersession of them. It must be understood
once and for all that something that is only a personal expression within a
framework created by others cannot be termed a creation. Creation is not
the arrangement of objects and forms, it is the invention of new laws on
such arrangement.



Finally, we have to eliminate the sectarianism among us that opposes unity
of action with possible allies for specific goals and prevents our
infiltration of parallel organizations. [5] From 1952 to 1955 the Lettrist
International, after some necessary purges, continually moved toward a sort
of absolutist rigor leading to an equally absolute isolation and
ineffectuality, and ultimately to a certain immobility, a degeneration of
the spirit of critique and discovery. We must definitively supersede this
sectarian conduct in favor of real actions. This should be the sole
criterion on which we join with or separate from comrades. Naturally this
does not mean that we should renounce breaks, as everyone urges us to do.
On the contrary, we think that it is necessary to go still further in
breaking with habits and persons.



We should collectively define our program and realize it in a disciplined
manner, using any means, even artistic ones.



 

Toward a Situationist International



Our central idea is the construction of situations, that is to say, the
concrete construction of momentary ambiances of life and their
transformation into a superior passional quality. We must develop a
systematic intervention based on the complex factors of two components in
perpetual interaction: the material environment of life and the behaviors
which that environment gives rise to and which radically transform it.



Our perspectives of action on the environment ultimately lead us to the
notion of unitary urbanism. Unitary urbanism is defined first of all as the
use of all arts and techniques as means contributing to the composition of
a unified milieu. Such an interrelated ensemble must be envisaged as
incomparably more far-reaching than the old domination of architecture over
the traditional arts, or than the present sporadic application to anarchic
urbanism of specialized technology or of scientific investigations such as
ecology. Unitary urbanism must, for example, determine the acoustic
environment as well as the distribution of different varieties of food and
drink. It must include both the creation of new forms and the détournement
of previous forms of architecture, urbanism, poetry and cinema. Integral
art, which has been talked about so much, can be realized only at the level
of urbanism. But it can no longer correspond to any of the traditional
esthetic categories. In each of its experimental cities unitary urbanism
will act by way of a certain number of force fields, which we can
temporarily designate by the classic term “district.” Each district
will tend toward a specific harmony distinct from neighboring harmonies; or
else will play on a maximum breaking up of internal harmony.



Secondly, unitary urbanism is dynamic, in that it is directly related to
styles of behavior. The most elementary unit of unitary urbanism is not the
house, but the architectural complex, which combines all the factors
conditioning an ambiance, or a series of clashing ambiances, on the scale
of the constructed situation. Spatial development must take into account
the emotional effects that the experimental city is intended to produce.
One of our comrades has advanced a theory of “states-of-mind”
districts, according to which each district of a city would be designed to
provoke a specific basic sentiment to which people would knowingly expose
themselves. It seems that such a project draws appropriate conclusions from
the current tendency to depreciate randomly encountered primary sentiments,
and that its realization could contribute to accelerating that
depreciation. The comrades who call for a new, free architecture must
understand that this new architecture will primarily be based not on free,
poetic lines and forms — in the sense that today’s “lyrical
abstract” painting uses those terms — but rather on the atmospheric
effects of rooms, hallways, streets — atmospheres linked to the
activities they contain. Architecture must advance by taking emotionally
moving situations, rather than emotionally moving forms, as the material it
works with. And the experiments conducted with this material will lead to
new, as yet unknown forms.



Psychogeographical research, “the study of the exact laws and specific
effects of geographical environments, whether consciously organized or not,
on the emotions and behavior of individuals,” thus takes on a double
meaning: active observation of present-day urban agglomerations and
development of hypotheses on the structure of a situationist city. The
progress of psychogeography depends to a great extent on the statistical
extension of its methods of observation, but above all on experimentation
by means of concrete interventions in urbanism. Before this stage is
attained we cannot be certain of the objective truth of our initial
psychogeographical findings. But even if those findings should turn out to
be false, they would still be false solutions to what is nevertheless a
real problem.



Our action on behavior, linked with other desirable aspects of a revolution
in mores, can be briefly defined as the invention of games of an
essentially new type. The most general goal must be to expand the
nonmediocre part of life, to reduce the empty moments of life as much as
possible. One could thus speak of our enterprise as a project of
quantitatively increasing human life, an enterprise more serious than the
biological methods currently being investigated, and one that automatically
implies a qualitative increase whose developments are unpredictable. The
situationist game is distinguished from the classic notion of games by its
radical negation of the element of competition and of separation from
everyday life. On the other hand, it is not distinct from a moral choice,
since it implies taking a stand in favor of what will bring about the
future reign of freedom and play.



This perspective is obviously linked to the continual and rapid increase of
leisure time resulting from the level of productive forces our era has
attained. It is also linked to the recognition of the fact that a battle of
leisure is taking place before our eyes, a battle whose importance in the
class struggle has not been sufficiently analyzed. So far, the ruling class
has succeeded in using the leisure the revolutionary proletariat wrested
from it by developing a vast industrial sector of leisure activities that
is an incomparable instrument for stupefying the proletariat with
byproducts of mystifying ideology and bourgeois tastes. The abundance of
televised imbecilities is probably one of the reasons for the American
working class’s inability to develop any political consciousness. By
obtaining through collective pressure a slight rise in the price of its
labor above the minimum necessary for the production of that labor, the
proletariat not only extends its power of struggle, it also extends the
terrain of the struggle. New forms of this struggle then arise alongside
directly economic and political conflicts. It can be said that up till now
revolutionary propaganda has been constantly overcome within these new
forms of struggle in all the countries where advanced industrial
development has introduced them. That the necessary changing of the
infrastructure can be delayed by errors and weaknesses at the level of
superstructures has unfortunately been demonstrated by several experiences
of the twentieth century. It is necessary to throw new forces into the
battle of leisure. We will take our position there.



A rough experimentation toward a new mode of behavior has already been made
with what we have termed the dérive: the practice of a passional journey
out of the ordinary through a rapid changing of ambiances, as well as a
means of psychogeographical study and of situationist psychology. But the
application of this striving for playful creativity must be extended to all
known forms of human relationships, so as to influence, for example, the
historical evolution of sentiments like friendship and love. Everything
leads us to believe that the essential elements of our research lie in our
hypothesis of the construction of situations.



A person’s life is a succession of fortuitous situations, and even if
none of them is exactly the same as another the immense majority of them
are so undifferentiated and so dull that they give a definite impression of
sameness. As a result, the rare intensely engaging situations found in life
only serve to strictly confine and limit that life. We must try to
construct situations, that is to say, collective ambiances, ensembles of
impressions determining the quality of a moment. If we take the simple
example of a gathering of a group of individuals for a given time, it would
be desirable, while taking into account the knowledge and material means we
have at our disposal, to study what organization of the place, what
selection of participants and what provocation of events are suitable for
producing the desired ambiance. The powers of a situation will certainly
expand considerably in both time and space with the realizations of unitary
urbanism or the education of a situationist generation.



The construction of situations begins beyond the ruins of the modern
spectacle. It is easy to see how much the very principle of the spectacle
— nonintervention — is linked to the alienation of the old world.
Conversely, the most pertinent revolutionary experiments in culture have
sought to break the spectators’ psychological identification with the
hero so as to draw them into activity by provoking their capacities to
revolutionize their own lives. The situation is thus designed to be lived
by its constructors. The role played by a passive or merely bit-part
playing “public” must constantly diminish, while that played by those
who cannot be called actors, but rather, in a new sense of the term,
“livers,” must steadily increase.



We have to multiply poetic subjects and objects — which are now
unfortunately so rare that the slightest ones take on an exaggerated
emotional importance — and we have to organize games for these poetic
subjects to play with these poetic objects. This is our entire program,
which is essentially transitory. Our situations will be ephemeral, without
a future. Passageways. Our only concern is real life; we care nothing about
the permanence of art or of anything else. Eternity is the grossest idea a
person can conceive of in connection with his acts.



Situationist techniques have yet to be invented. But we know that a task
presents itself only when the material conditions necessary to its
realization already exist, or at least are in the process of formation. We
have to begin with a phase of small-scale experimentation. It will probably
be necessary to prepare plans or scenarios for the creation of situations,
despite their inevitable inadequacy at the beginning. To this end we must
develop a system of notations, which will become more precise as we learn
more from the experiences of construction. We will also need to discover or
verify certain laws, such as that according to which situationist emotions
depend on extreme concentration or extreme dispersal of actions (classical
tragedy giving a rough idea of the former, dérives of the latter). In
addition to the direct means that will be used for specific ends, the
positive phase of the construction of situations will require a new
application of reproductive technologies. One can envisage, for example,
televised images of certain aspects of one situation being communicated
live to people taking part in another situation somewhere else, thereby
producing various modifications and interferences between the two. More
simply, a new style of documentary film could be devoted to “current
events” that really are current and eventful by preserving (in
situationist archives) the most significant moments of a situation before
the evolution of its elements has led to a different situation. Since the
systematic construction of situations will give rise to previously unknown
sentiments, film will find its greatest educational role in the
dissemination of these new passions.



Situationist theory resolutely supports a noncontinuous conception of life.
The notion of unity must cease to be seen as applying to the whole of
one’s life (where it serves as a reactionary mystification based on the
belief in an immortal soul and, in the final analysis, on the division of
labor); instead, it should apply to the construction of each particular
moment of life through the unitary use of situationist methods. In a
classless society there will no longer be “painters,” but only
situationists who, among other things, sometimes paint.



The main emotional drama of life, aside from the perpetual conflict between
desire and reality hostile to desire, seems to be the sensation of the
passage of time. In contrast to the esthetic modes that strive to fix and
eternalize some emotion, the situationist attitude consists in going with
the flow of time. In so doing, in pushing ever further the game of creating
new, emotionally provocative situations, the situationists are gambling
that change will usually be for the better. In the short term the odds are
obviously against that bet. But even if we have to lose it a thousand
times, we see no other choice for a progressive attitude.



The situationist minority first emerged as a tendency in the Lettrist left
wing, then in the Lettrist International which it ended up controlling. The
same objective movement has led several recent avant-garde groups to
similar conclusions. Together we must eliminate all the relics of the
recent past. We now believe that an accord for a united action of the
revolutionary avant-garde in culture must be carried out on the basis of
such a program. We have neither guaranteed recipes nor definitive results.
We only propose an experimental research to be collectively led in a few
directions that we are presently defining and toward others that have yet
to be defined. The very difficulty of succeeding in the first situationist
projects is a proof of the newness of the domain we are penetrating.
Something that changes our way of seeing the streets is more important than
something that changes our way of seeing paintings. Our working hypotheses
will be reexamined at each future upheaval, wherever it comes from.



Various people (particularly among the revolutionary artists and
intellectuals who have resigned themselves to a certain impotence) will
respond that this “situationism” seems rather disagreeable; that we
have not created any beautiful works; that we would do better to talk about
André Gide; and that no one will see any clear reasons to be interested in
us. They will evade facing the issues we have raised by reproaching us for
using scandalous tactics in order to call attention to ourselves, and will
express their indignation at the procedures we have sometimes felt obliged
to adopt in order to dissociate ourselves from certain people. We answer:
It’s not a matter of knowing whether this interests you, but whether you
yourselves are capable of doing anything interesting in the context of the
new conditions of cultural creation. Your role, revolutionary artists and
intellectuals, is not to complain that freedom is insulted when we refuse
to march alongside the enemies of freedom. Your role is not to imitate the
bourgeois esthetes who try to restrict people to what has already been done
because what has already been done doesn’t bother them. You know that
creation is never pure. Your role is to find out what the international
avant-garde is doing, to take part in the critical development of its
program, and to call for its support.

Our Immediate Tasks



We must call attention, among the workers parties or the extremist
tendencies within those parties, to the need to undertake an effective
ideological action in order to combat the emotional influence of advanced
capitalist methods of propaganda. On every occasion, by every
hyper-political means, we must publicize desirable alternatives to the
spectacle of the capitalist way of life, so as to destroy the bourgeois
idea of happiness. At the same time, taking into account the existence,
within the various ruling classes, of elements that have always tended (out
of boredom and thirst for novelty) toward things that lead to the
disappearance of their societies, we should incite the persons who control
some of the vast resources that we lack to provide us with the means to
carry out our experiments, out of the same motives of potential profit as
they do with scientific research.



We must everywhere present a revolutionary alternative to the ruling
culture; coordinate all the researches which are currently taking place but
which lack a comprehensive perspective; and incite, through critiques and
propaganda, the most advanced artists and intellectuals of all countries to
contact us in view of a collective action.



We should declare ourselves ready to renew discussion, on the basis of this
program, with those who, having taken part in an earlier phase of our
action, are still capable of rejoining with us.



We must put forward the slogans of unitary urbanism, experimental behavior,
hyper-political propaganda, and the construction of ambiances. The passions
have been sufficiently interpreted; the point now is to discover new ones.



 

Translator's Notes


[1] Andrei Zhdanov: one of Stalin’s most powerful officials, responsible
for purging the arts and imposing the doctrine of “Socialist Realism.”


[2] “Françoise Sagan phenonomon”: the way that this teenage writer
became a supercelebrity, every detail of her life being considered
newsworthy despite the relatively mediocre quality of her work.
Spectacularization of vacuous and talentless personalities is of course
commonplace now, but in the 1950s it was seen as astonishing and the
conventional culture critics were at a loss as to how to account for it.


[3] Cobra participants included future SI members Constant and Asger Jorn.


[4] The final break was provoked when the radical tendency (including
Debord and Wolman) disrupted a Charlie Chaplin press conference in October
1952. The esthete lettrists, including the founder of lettrism, Isidore
Isou, disavowed this action. The disrupters responded with an open letter:
“We believe that the most imperative expression of freedom is the
destruction of idols, especially when those idols present themselves in the
name of freedom. The provocative tone of our leaflet was an attack against
a unanimous servile adoration. The disavowal by certain lettrists,
including Isou himself, only reveals the constantly reengendered
communication gap between extremists and ex-extremists.” Lettrist
International participants included Henry de Béarn, Serge Berna, Michèle
Bernstein, Jean-Louis Brau, Ivan Chtcheglov, Mohamed Dahou, Guy Debord,
Abdelhafid Khatib, Jean-Michel Mension, Patrick Straram, Alexander Trocchi
and Gil J Wolman. Those italicized were later among the original members of
the SI. (Chtcheglov was never an SI member, though he is listed in Raspaud
and Voyer’s book as a “membre de loin” — a fellow traveler — and
was perhaps considered a sort of honorary member due to his important early
contributions.)


[5] The SI subsequently renounced any such “infiltration” of other
groups, considering that simultaneous membership in two organizations tends
to lead to manipulation.



     From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org

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     Report on the Construction of Situations -- Publication : June 30,
1957

     Report on the Construction of Situations -- Added : April 21, 2020

     Report on the Construction of Situations -- Updated : January 04, 2022

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