A giant inflatable dog turd broke loose from its moorings outside the Paul Klee Center in Switzerland and brought down power lines before coming to a halt in the grounds of a children’s home. The Paul McCarthy sculpture, the size of a house, reached a maximum altitude of 200 meters. Other civilizations had their chosen forms: from the Obelisk of Luxor to Michelangelo’s David. The futurist poet Marinetti found his crashed motor car more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace, but he might have balked at flying dog shit.1 In the twenty-first century, the insomnia of reason does not breed monsters, but pets. No wonder there are no longer any gods, when what is expected of them is that they descend from Mount Olympus with plastic baggies and clean up.
We are bored with this planet. It has seen better centuries, and the promise of better times to come eludes us. The possibilities of this world, in these times, seem dismal and dull. All it offers at best is spectacles of disintegration. Capitalism or barbarism, those are the choices. This is an epoch governed by this blackmail: either more and more of the same, or the end times. Or so they say. We don’t buy it. It’s time to start scheming on how to leave the twenty-first century. The pessimists are right. Things can’t go on as they are. The optimists are also right. Another world is possible. The means are at our disposal. Our species-being is as a builder of worlds.2
Sometimes, to go forward, one has to go back. Back to the scene of the crime. Back to the moment when the situation seemed open, before the gun went off, before the race of champions started. This is a story about a small band of artists and writers whose habits were bohemian at best, delinquent at worst, who set off with no formal training and equipped with little besides their wits, to change the world. As Guy Debord later wrote: “It is known that initially the Situationists wanted at the very least to build cities, the environment suitable to the unlimited deployment of new passions. But of course this was not easy and so we found ourselves forced to do much more.”3
Where does one find this kind of ambition now? These days artists are happy to settle for a little notoriety, a good dealer, and a retrospective. Art has renounced the desire to give form to the world. Having ceased to be modern, and finding it too passé to be postmodern, art is now merely contemporary, which seems to mean nothing more than yesterday’s art at today’s prices.4 If anything, theory has turned out even worse. It found its utopia, and it is the academy. A colonnade adorned with the busts of famous fathers: Jacques Lacan the bourgeoismagus, Louis Althusser the throttler-of-concepts, Jacques Derrida the dandy-of-difference, Michel Foucault the one-eyed-powerhouse, Gilles Deleuze the taker-from-behind. Acolytes and epigones pace furiously up and down, prostrating themselves before one master—Ah! Betrayed!—and then another. The production of new dead masters to imitate can barely keep up with consumer demand, prompting some to chisel statues of new demigods while they still live: Alain Badiou the Maoist-of-the-matheme, Giorgio Agamben the pensive-pedant, Slavoj Žižek the neuro-Hegelian-joker.5
In the United States the academy spread its investments, placing a few bets on women and people of color. The best of those—Susan Buck-Morss, Judith Butler, Paul Gilroy, Donna Haraway—at least appreciate the double bind of speaking for difference within the heart of the empire of indifference. At best theory, like art, turns in on itself, living on through commentary, investing in its own death on credit. At worst it rattles the chains of old ghosts, as if a conference on “the idea of communism” could still shock the bourgeois. As if there were still a bourgeois literate enough to shock. As if it were ever the idea that shocked them, rather than the practice.6
Beneath the pavement, the beach. It’s a now well-worn slogan from the May–June events in Paris, 1968, at the moment when two kinds of critique seemed to come together. One was communist, and demanded equality. The other was bohemian, and demanded difference. The former gets erased from historical memory, as if one of the world’s great general strikes never happened. The latter is rendered in a language that makes it seem benign, banal even. As if all that was demanded were customer service. Luc Boltanski: “Whole sections of the artistic critique of capitalism were integrated into management rhetoric.”7 What is lost is the combined power of a critique of both wage labor and of everyday life, expressed in acts. What has escaped the institutionalization of high theory is the possibility of low theory, of a critical thought indifferent to the institutional forms of the academy or the art world. A low theory dedicated to the practice that is critique and the critique that is practice.
And so: two steps back, that they might enable three steps forward. Back to the 1950s and ’60s, when another twenty-first century seemed possible. Back to the few, the happy few, who thought they had discovered how to leave the twentieth century for sunnier climes, though not quite as warming as ours. We do not lack for accounts of the Letterist International (1952–57) and the Situationist International (1957–72) that succeeded it. The Beach Beneath the Street claims no originality whatsoever. Rather, it’s a question of retrieving a past specific to the demands of this present. An account that resists the sorting and selecting which parcels out a movement into bite-size morsels, each to be swallowed by a specific discipline: art history, media studies, architecture, philosophy or literature. The Situationist project implied the overcoming of separate and specialized knowledge, and has to be recalled in that spirit.
It is also easy prey for biographers, who spotlight this or that protagonist, creating little subjective narratives like the plot of a novel, or (dare we hope to sell the rights) a movie. The Letterist International and the Situationist International were collective and collaborative projects. Sure, some figures stand out (first among equals, Guy Debord); but to reduce a movement to a biography or two is to cut a piece away from what made it of interest in the first place: the game of tactics and ruses, moves and cheats, by which each played with and against the other.8
Even when the Situationists are treated as a movement, the supposedly minor figures often drop out of the story, or become mere props to the great men among them. Alternatively, in order to make a coherent narrative and write the biography of a movement as if it were a subject, the differences among its members are suppressed, or turned into the stakes of a mere drama of personalities.9 Here, instead, is a large cast of disparate characters, some more celebrated than others, where Guy Debord and Asger Jorn rub shoulders with Patrick Straram, Michèle Bernstein, Ralph Rumney, Pinot Gallizio, Jacqueline de Jong, Abdelhafid Khatib, Alexander Trocchi and René Viénet. Where they come together, where they create something, is a situation. But situations are temporary, singular unities of space and time. They call for a different kind of remembering.
Some artifacts produced by the Situationist International are perhaps too well remembered. Do we really need another commentary on Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle? Is not the one he wrote himself enough?10 Perhaps today one could only do it justice by refusing to paraphrase it. The Beach Beneath the Street will bypass more than one such landmark on its route through the Situationist International, but it will also draw attention to some less well-known moments. The criterion for inclusion is not historical importance but contemporary resonance. Mention will also be made in passing to certain prominent landmarks of high theory: Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and so forth. But only in passing. The Beach Beneath the Street will not engage them on their own terrain. Rather, it opens towards another terrain.
In this version of the glorious times and notorious lives of the Situationist International, the phenomenon emerges out of the practice of everyday life, and the attempt to think it begun in Paris in the 1950s by the Letterist International. It creates a space for itself by taking its distance from certain precursors. Some are familiar: Jean-Paul Sartre, Georges Bataille, Henri Lefebvre, Le Corbusier. Some less so: Paul Nougé, Maurice Saillet. The Letterist International find common cause with Asger Jorn, who developed his own distinctive practice and a distinctive set of theories. Jorn brings into the picture Constant Nieuwenhuys (known as Constant) and Pinot Gallizio. Our attention then turns to the collective existence of the Situationist International, which unites some of the Letterists with Jorn’s associates in 1957.
Along the way we shall look at a number of artists, writers and activists who entered the orbit of the Situationist International but drifted off to create their own works, each of which develops some aspect of the shared project, if often in contradictory directions. They include Michèle Bernstein’s writings on love and play, Jacqueline de Jong’s journal the Situationist Times, Alexander Trocchi’s project sigma, and Constant’s New Babylon. It is not as if these are fragments awaiting some sort of synthesis, however. Rather, each appropriates some elements from the Situationists as common property, and adds to it in its own way. This account of the post-Situationist legacy of borrowing and correcting is intended to encourage more such takings and leave-takings. The well has not yet run dry. The chapter on Henri Lefebvre shows what the Situationists took from him, as well as what he took from them. The Beach Beneath the Street concludes with the Situationists’ own account of the revolutions of the late 1960s—those in Paris, but also the Watts rebellion in Los Angeles. In contrast to those groups which made a profession of turning failed revolutions into literary or philosophical success, the Situationists chose with the ebb tide of the early 1970s to disband.
Guy Debord spent a lot of time working on how to remember situations, how to document them and keep them in a way that could ignite future possibilities. For the most part, he created legends. “When legend becomes fact, print the legend,” as the newspaperman says at the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). Much of the literature on the Situationists seems designed to be disabling, to prevent any real creative use of this body of work for critical practices in the twenty-first century. The authorities on this period delight in drawing attention to the follies then committed, as if their own complacency of thought was in some sense a higher achievement. For them, all is safely consigned to the archive, enclosed in a time one can visit like a tourist before returning home to the workaday world. The Beach Beneath the Street makes more than occasional reference to the events of a more recent past, in which the cogency of Situationist thought and action still registers. Leaving the twentieth century was the aim the Situationist International once ascribed to itself. Leaving the twenty-first century might not be a bad ambition. On paper, at least, we have longer to achieve it.