From: jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books,alt.postmodern
Subject: Re: What do you all think of the Situationists?
Date: 9 Nov 92 20:01:29 GMT
Reply-To: jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Organization: COMANDOS Project, Glesga Yoonie

[ on a thread in rec.arts.books on the Situationists and books thereon ]
ian@spider.co.uk (Ian Heavens) wrote:
> tsdavies@mothra.syr.EDU (T.S. Davies) writes:
>> The Revolution In Everyday Life_ -- Raoul Vaneigem, Paris, 1967

"The Revolution of Everyday Life" in both the English translations I know
(the first one, from Rising Free in London in the mid-70s, is apparently
disastrous).

> This, "The Book of Pleasures" by the same author, and Guy Debord's 
> 'The Society of the Spectacle' are the primary texts in book form, as 
> far as I know.  Collections include "The Situationist International 
> Anthology", ed. Ken Knabb, 'BAMN -By Any Means Necessary", by 
> Peter Stanshill and David Zane Mairowitz.  Anyone know of others?

There is also the arliest history, "Leaving the Twentieth Century", by
Christopher Gray; Gray went on to join the Bagwash crowd in Poona and I've
never met anyone even vaguely associated with the SI have a good word to
say about him.  Note: there are at least three translations of "Society of
the Spectacle" - I'm told the latest is the one to get but I forget what it
is.  Stewart Home's "Assaults on Culture" (Aporia Press, London) is rather
good at putting the Situationists in a context of other radical art
movements; it also tells you all you need to know about the Church of the
Subgenius, which gets mentioned on the net a bit more often than it merits.

Debord has a recent book out with a long Latin title.  He's also written a
Preface to the fourth Italian edition of "Society of the Spectacle", which
makes some rather important remarks about what "terrorism" is really about.
Gianfranco Sanguinetti was saying the same things (perhaps better) around
the same time in a pamphlet called "On Terrorism and the State".  Debord
was the first person I know of to come out and say that the Italian state
found Red Brigade "terrorism", in particular the assassination of Aldo
Moro, extremely convenient; Sanguinetti went further and said the state ran
the Red Brigades and planned the Moro kidnapping itself.  This view is now
almost a commonplace in Italian politics, but the Situationists got there
first.


> There are several 'Situationist' pamphlets and magazines published here:
> "Spectacular Times" ...

This was Larry Law.  He died a few years ago, though some of his stuff is
still available.


> Is Situationism a  mainly European movement (if you can call it that) or
> are there other groups?

There were Ken Knabb and Chris Shutes in the Bay Area, who certainly saw
themselves as full-blown situationists (including the paranoid style that
went along with that).  Fredy Perlman was influenced by them before taking
off into his all-out neo-neolithic phase: his epistolary novel of ideas
"Letters of Insurgents" (written under the pseudonyms "Sophia Nachalo and
Yarostan Vochek") is the most explicit statement of this.


> I rather like them, myself (I've done a lot of arithmetic too).
> I think that they represent the most creative and (occasionally)
> wittiest radical criticism of 'modern life'.  

If you want witty radical criticism, the two groups with the most similar
sense of humour are the American "Processed Word" crowd and the UK group
"Class War" (who adopted the "By All Means Necessary" slogan quoted above).
Neither are situationists by a long shot, though.  (I seem to remember a
Situationist text which argued that their style of humour had outlived its
usefulness - anyone else remember this one?  It seems to have been proved
right by the way Situationist-derived wit and "detournement" technique has
been exploited by advertising and the pop music industry).

Unfortunately the whole idea seemed self-refuting - it wasn't really
possible to be a Situ without believing that your ideas formed the pivot of
history, and it wasn't possible to keep that one up for long without
giggling.  Among the London crowd, the hinge of history was once Nick
Brandt getting his motorbike pinched by an ex-lover after he or she left
him and joined a rival faction.  Despite a similar level of vitriolic
factionalism, the Surrealists seemed to maintain contact with reality (like
hunger, class and war) rather better: see the sort of stuff Paul Buhle and
Frankin Rosemont have been publishing over the last 15 years or so.  The
Leeds/Glasgow "Here and Now" group have been running an extended critique
of all such intellectual-vanguardist movements for quite a while now; I
think they've basically got that one right.


> If you think they're nonsense, what do you think of EuroDisney?

I think Richard Wagner had a word for it...  has Umberto Eco reviewed it
yet?

-- 
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