The Situationist International was founded at a meeting of three women and six men in July 1957. All that remains of this fabled event are a series of stirring documents and some photographs, casual but made with an artist’s eye, by founding member Ralph Rumney.1 The Situationist International dissolved itself in 1972. In its fifteen years of existence, only seventy-two people were ever members. It was born out of the fusion of two and a half existing groups, the Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, the Letterist International and the London Psychogeographical Society (the last represented by its one and only member, Rumney). Its founding conference took place in Cosio di Arroscia a little Ligurian town where founding member Piero Simondo’s family had a small hotel. Or at least that’s the official story. Debord writes in a letter to Jorn: “I think it is necessary for us to present the ‘Conference at Cosio’ as a point of departure for our distinct organized activity.”2 From the beginning, Debord has a fine hand for the tactics of appearances.
Debord the tactician saw the Letterist International as something of a dead end. The dérive could only be taken so far. After he was institutionalized, Chtcheglov would write Debord and Bernstein from the sanatorium explaining that the dérive has its limits, and cannot be practiced continually. “It’s a miracle it didn’t kill us. Iron infected our blood.”3 To even propose a new architecture for a new way of life took more resources than they possessed. The complete renunciation of what one might now call middle-class life cut them off from vital resources. “To reach this superior cultural creation—that which we call the Situationist game—we now think it necessary to be an active force in the actual terrain of this era’s culture (and not on the fringes of it, as we cheerfully were …).” Hence the change of policy from the “pure (inactive) extremism” of the Letterist International.4 Going forward called for taking a few steps back. The project would—temporarily—require some resources to advance its aims. The Situationist game must proceed “by all means, even artistic ones.”5
Debord skillfully positioned himself as the secretary for a new movement, the Situationist International. Of all the roles Debord chose for himself, not to mention those assigned to him by posterity, the one that receives the least attention is that of secretary. Late in life he was to say: “I have been a good professional—but in what?”6 While the question was meant to be rhetorical, one not entirely implausible answer would be—as a secretary. Not the least interesting thing about him might be the tactics with which he ran the Situationist International, and the best way to approach them is via his Correspondence. Prepared by his widow Alice Becker-Ho (b. 1941) and published posthumously, the Correspondence presents a carefully vetted and selected account of Debord the secretary.
The secretary’s task, as Debord conceives it, involves the organizing of exhibitions, provocations, occasional publications and, above all, the journal Internationale Situationniste. It is, Debord writes, “our ‘official organ,’ the ideological coherence of which was made my responsibility.” Debord will act as secretary with remarkable tenacity and industry. Internationale Situationniste would not be a duplicated flyer like the Letterist International’s Potlatch, but a beautifully edited, illustrated, designed and bound affair. By 1960 the author of “Never work!” would be complaining: “I am overwhelmed with work.” Here he is discussing the use of a material called Lumaline for the cover, in a way that will bring a smile to anyone who has ever labored over manufacturing something beautiful: “The effect is obviously superb. But the price is terribly high: 100,000 for the cover (for only 1,600 copies of the journal), but especially 60,000 for supplementary expenses to the printer, representing a lot of work in folding and sewing, entirely by hand—the machines break the Lumaline, which soon tears. And then we will have nearly lost the stock at that stage of assembly (in this process, one loses at least 10 percent due to badly sewn copies).”7
Debord labored in the service of producing Internationale Situationniste as a collective expression, a document of a provisional micro-society whose practice is to treat all of culture as collective property. “Our editorial committee has a heavy hand (and, as you may imagine, no respect for literary propriety).” Détournement was both a signature Situationist practice and a theory of how culture as a totality works. Debord writes to Straram in Canada: “All the material published by the Situationist International is, in principle, usable by everyone, even without acknowledgment, without the preoccupations of literary property. You can make all the détournements that appear useful to you.”8
One makes a movement with what one has. The practice of the exclusion of members from the Situationist International begins very soon after its founding. As a good secretary, Debord has little tolerance for opportunism or ineptitude. He writes to Walter Olmo, a founding member: “I reproach you for having accepted, in particular circumstances, several ideas that are stupid.” Olmo will not last long. Ralph Rumney lasts almost a year. Debord writes to him in March 1958: “you still haven’t done any real work with us.”9 To compound Debord’s annoyance, Rumney boasts of his Situationist connections to art-world acquaintances.
Rumney’s official offense was to submit his psychogeographical report on Venice too late for inclusion in the journal. Between harassment by his mother-in-law, Peggy Guggenheim, and the birth of his son, Rumney had his hands full.10 Since he was the one at Cosio who advocated zero tolerance towards anyone not fully committed to the cause, his expulsion was fair enough. Rumney’s “The Leaning Tower of Venice” went unpublished at the time, but it is not without interest. It took the form of a détournement of the photo-romance strips then particularly popular in Italy, and is an early example of Situationist détournement of narrative graphic art.
Rumney took photographs of the Beat writer Alan Ansen and arranged them as a narrative with captions. “It is our thesis that cities should embody a built-in play factor,” reads one. “We are studying here a play-environment relationship.” Rumney’s photographs follow Ansen on a “trajectory through the zones of psycho-geographic interest.” Its subject is specifically play, as “play and game are not synonymous.” Ansen’s gambols are not constrained by formal rules. There is no boundary marking of the space of a game from the space outside it. Play has no conditions for winning or losing, and no end condition determined in advance. Play simply comes to an end when Runmey spots Lawrence Alloway, the English art critic, and in this case spoil-sport.11
Becoming a Situationist required a certain rigor. Debord: “I am still with the Situationist International and, as long as I am in it, I will keep a minimum of discipline that excludes all collaboration with uncontrollable elements.”12 To today’s middle-class sensibility, submission to a discipline for reasons other than getting paid seems like some kind of perversion, and for that reason membership in the Situationist International seems as unintelligible a sacrifice as the mysteries of religion. A more common model for what remains of the artist in today’s disintegrating spectacle is that of the small business proprietor. Take as an example Jeff Koons (b. 1955), who “staked his budding penchant for expensively fabricated art by working as a commodities broker on Wall Street for six years … Today he has a factory in Chelsea with ninety regular assistants.”13 To be an artist, it seems, has become just another kind of middle-class ambition, the dream of a franchise with your name on it.
The exclusion of members is sometimes taken to reveal some sinister side to Debord’s character, so it is interesting to read in the Correspondence that “Jorn was the first partisan of the measure of exclusion.” Jorn was one of the few Situationists who had ever been a member of an orthodox Communist party. But while the Situationist International is often compared to such a party, the parallel is usually made by people who have never belonged to one. Certainly, to an ear trained by the cold war to protect its precious individualism, the Situationists can sound like invasive body snatchers, as for example in this telegram to an excluded member: “The I without we falls back into the prefabricated mass.”14 What the Situationists were struggling to achieve was a new kind of collective being, unlike both the Communists and previous avant-gardes such as the Letterists.
Situationists were expected to know what was expected of them, and without being told. Debord’s policy as secretary was “to place a priori confidence, in all cases, and only until the first proof to the contrary, in a certain number of recognized comrades, based upon objective criteria.” The reason for most exclusions is not mysterious. It was a failure to live up to expectations. Members are what they do: “No problem in our collective action can be resolved by goodwill.” A certain unsentimental understanding of how friendships form and dissolve, of how character becomes different to itself as it struggles in and against time, underlies the distinctive quality of Situationist subjectivity in which “neither freedom nor intelligence are given once and for all.”15
Bataille had thought that what binds community together is the experience of death.16 Under the guidance of the surrealist turned Stalinist Louis Aragon (1897–1982), postwar communist culture created a real cult out of its dead Resistance fighters. The red flag shrouds its martyred dead, whose blood dyes its every fold. The Situationists borrowed at least this much from the communists—that the exclusion of living members meant social death. Given that communist culture really did comprise an entire social world, to be excluded from the party really did mean excommunication. The Situationists had no such power. But they wrestled with the problem of how to make collective belonging meaningful, as something requiring some sacrifice. The possibility of exclusion made participation in the Situationist game meaningful.
Not the least difference between the Situationists and the Communist Party is that the former rarely recruited. “I have no need of fabricating false disciples.” Nor was adherence to doctrinal orthodoxy required. “Quite surely, never any doctrine: perspectives. A solidarity around these perspectives.” Indeed, doctrinaire postures could be grounds for exclusion. Debord writes to Simondo: “situationism, as a body of doctrine, does not exist and must not exist. What exists is a Situationist experimental attitude”—something like the Jornian materialist attitude to life. This is the paradox of the doctrine of no doctrine. To Pinot Gallizio, who Jorn had recruited for the Imaginist Bauhaus, and who was the key figure among the Italian founders of the Situationist International, Debord writes: “We have always been sure that you are strongly opposed to the metaphysics of which Simondo currently reveals the dogmas.”17 The exclusion of Gallizio would take a while longer than Simondo.
In his letters, Debord often mentions “propaganda” and even “internal propaganda.” Both for external and internal purposes, statements were to be formed and made tactically. The Situationist International formed itself in part out of the material of the art world, but anticipated the overcoming of art as a separate practice. Hard to grasp for the middle-class sensibility of what Debord will call “bourgeois civilization” is that there really might have been a threat to the organization—in the form of the opportunistic exploitation of the potential cachet of the Situationist International, particularly by its artist members. The Situationists were never an artistic avant-garde. Debord: “we already have amongst us too many artistically old men who have missed out on their own nineteenth century.”18 Artists were only accepted as members if they appeared ready to move beyond art, in a “brutal evolution”—as Debord said of the ill-fated German artists of the Spur group.
Situationists create new collaborative play-forms out of the old materials of the separate creative practices, of which art was just one. The moments of inclusion and exclusion within the Situationist International are best explored in relation to this strategy, rather than attempting to decode them as banal dramas of personality. “The most urgent problem, tactically, is to firstly balance, then as quickly as possible surpass the number of painters in the Situationist International with the largest possible number of architects, urbanists, sociologists and others.” This ambition came with its own dangers. “We can hardly have confidence in ‘specialized collaborators’ who do not share Situationist experimental positions. If not, we will discover bitterly that the architects, sociologists, urbanists, etc. are as limited as the painters in their defense of the particular prejudices of their separate sectors.”19 The Situationist International was not a collaboration between specialists, but the overcoming of specialization in the name of a new kind of collective activity.
As secretary Debord tacks this way and that, trying to keep the International together. Debord’s problems are compounded by the presence of several powerful personalities, all of them his senior. Around the time the Situationist International was founded, Debord was twenty-five, Constant was thirty-seven, Jorn was forty-three, and Gallizio fifty-five. These discrepancies should be borne in mind when reading his letters to each of them. Given his relative youth, the self-confidence of the letters is extraordinary. The tone of Debord’s writing fluctuates considerably in his attempts to engage with each of these outsize personalities, even if he does not lack confidence in calling all of them to account. As one of Debord’s favorite writers, the Cardinal de Retz, says: “The talent of insinuation is of more service than that of persuasion, because one can insinuate to a hundred where one can barely persuade five.”20
Giuseppe Gallizio (1902–64), Pinot to his friends, was, by his own account, an “archaeologist, botanist, chemist, parfumer, partisan, king of the gypsies.”21 To which one might add: chancer, amateur, dandy, dilettante. It was he, together with Asger Jorn, who convened the Congress of Free Artists in 1956 in Gallizio’s hometown of Alba. This was the event that laid the groundwork for the formation of the Situationist International the following year in Cosio, where he would become a founding member. Gallizio’s approach was consistently experimental, and he saw the materials and practices of an experimental comportment as available to everyone: “the masses have understood and already the breathlessness of a new poetic moment is anxiously beating at the doors of people bored by the tired ideals fabricated by the self-righteous incomprehension of the mysterious powerful of the earth.”22 Gallizio called his method ensemble painting. His goal was what he called an anti-patent process for the sharing and modification of life.
Gallizio’s ensembles did not just produce rare and singular works, like other artists. They produced industrial painting. These were only very minimally the product of actual machines. The idea was more that painting could be made using mechanisms of repetition and variation to undermine the unique gesture. The result would bring together the creative and singular with the serial and repeated. He invented, in short, a synthesis of the two opposed strands of the avant-garde: surrealism and constructivism, in what Michèle Bernstein called “a shrewd mixture of chance and mechanics.” As art historian Mirella Bandini put it, his project was to “unleash inflation everywhere.”23
Debord pours considerable energy into arranging Gallizio’s debut in the French and German art worlds. At first all goes well: “The tumult over your glory grows great, despite the discretion we maintain.” But art-world success is Gallizio’s downfall within the Situationist International. This is less the fault of the exhibition itself than of the way it is used tactically: “The most serious deficiency was that Pinot, in his practical attitude toward the Parisian public, more or less consciously accepted the role of a very ordinary artist recognized by his peers (by contrast, the exhibition of détourned paintings by Jorn [the Modifications] was, I believe, a very rough break with this milieu …).” The upshot was the exclusion of Gallizio and his son Giors Melanotte for “sickening arrivisme.” As Debord would comment much later: “the Situationist International knew how to fight its own glory.”24
While Debord could recognize, even in retrospect, Gallizio’s “virtuosity,” he was nevertheless the right wing of the Situationist International.25 Its left wing was Constant Nieuwenhuys. He had been a member of the Cobra group with Jorn, but had moved away from painting towards experiments in new kinds of potential urban form. In the “Amsterdam Declaration” of 1958, Debord and Constant called for “the development of complete environments, which must extend to a unitary urbanism” which they saw as “the complex, ongoing activity that consciously recreates man’s environment according to the most advanced conceptions in every domain,” as the “result of a new type of collective creativity.”26 A poetry played by all; an all played by poetry.
It was Gallizio who set Constant on the path to his famous New Babylon project of unitary urbanism when the two of them were together in Alba. Gallizio, who was on the local town council, solved the problem of the town’s antipathy to visiting Romani, or Gypsies, by making some land he owned available for their camp. It was an idea not without precedent. As Alice Becker-Ho writes, quoting from a 1569 text: “Their sojourns in particular villages are always sanctioned by the local squires or dignitaries.”27 Gallizio commissioned Constant to design a new kind of mobile architecture that might house them. Constant’s model was never built, but it set Constant on a new path. He would come to reject art in general, and painting in particular, and like Gallizio posit the machine as the central fact of contemporary creativity, writing: “A free art of the future is an art that would master and use all the new conditioning techniques.”28
Yet Constant and Gallizio were in many respects quite incompatible figures, and not just as personalities. For Constant, art had come to an end. A unitary urbanism of constructed situations supersedes all of the separate arts. “The artists’ task is to invent new techniques and to utilize light, sound, movement and any invention whatsoever which might influence ambience. Without this, the integration of art in the construction of human habitat remains as chimerical as the proposals of [Ivan Chtcheglov].”29 In principle, Debord agrees. “No painting is defensible from a Situationist point of view.” But where Constant insists on the principle, the secretary does not want to get too far ahead of the memberships’s level of consciousness. “Yes, any spirit of the ‘pictorial’ must be hounded and this, though obvious, isn’t easy to get everyone to acknowledge.”30
Debord looks to Constant as a tactical ally, but tries strenuously to keep him from pushing the organization too far too fast. He wants Constant to work on the editorial line for the journal with this in mind: “This will certainly help the really experimental faction in the Situationist International.” But Debord is initially reluctant to break with Gallizio or Jorn, both of whom are earning Constant’s stern disapproval as artists. “I don’t have the right—and I do not have the least desire—to try to impose directives on the painters (for instance) in the name of a real movement that is no more advanced than their work.”31 A shrewd move, since for Debord to attempt to direct the painters would only draw him—and the Situationists—deeper into the obsessions of the art world.
The unraveling of Debord’s relationship with Constant is the great moment in the early life of the Situationist International, and shapes the whole space of what will be possible for it. Debord is caught between the left and right wings of the movement. And though the artists are excluded one by one, Constant is not appeased and resigns anyway, and the movement, so to speak, moves on. But this is the moment, like the opening scene in a novel or film, where circumstances are fluid, where many things are possible. One discovers in the first three years of the Situationist International many potential versions of it, besides the ones of legend or even historical record. This is perhaps why so many keep returning to them, and to these early years in particular, as the scene of a moment in still-living movement, or in other words, a situation.
Debord’s judgments in the Correspondence, whether one agrees with them or not, are not purely capricious. Against Constant and the Dutch section, Debord makes two charges, both in many respects perspicacious. The first is that there is a strand in Constant which, despite his denials, is close to the utopian legacy of Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte, particularly in the way it privileges an intellectual class as the only agents for bringing about a new world: “when you only find progressive forces in the ‘intellectuals who revolt against cultural poverty,’ you yourselves are utopians. What can intellectuals do without liaison with an enterprise that brings global change to social relations?”32 Liaison, in short, with the proletariat. While Jorn was starting to rethink class in interesting ways, the Situationist International was at something of an impasse, caught in the old dilemma between romantic revolt and class struggle.
The second issue concerns the status of unitary urbanism. Where Constant is focused on the way unitary urbanism realizes and overcomes the more limited achievements of the separate arts, Debord is already looking ahead to realizing and overcoming unitary urbanism: “Our necessary activity is dominated by the question of the totality. Take note of it. Unitary urbanism is not a conception of the totality, must not become one. It is an operational instrument to construct an extended detour.”33 While Debord and Constant are allies in their embrace of technicity (against the rather technophobic Jorn), Debord does not think it enough any more to just break down the arts and combine them in the construction of new ambiences, new terrains of play. Unitary urbanism is much less a positive, constructive modeling and more a negative and critical tactic for opposing the kind of tower-block mentality that characterized postwar reconstruction. The chimerical quality of Chtcheglov’s version of unitary urbanism still has a tactical value.
Legend has it that when Debord broke with people he simply cut them dead and moved on. With Constant this was not the case, and for once the correspondence continues on, to the stage of a love gone wrong. “Passion leads you astray,” writes Debord to Constant, sounding for all the world like Madame de Merteuil in Dangerous Liaisons (1782). Playing Valmont, Constant retorts by telegram: “If passion misleads me, indecision causes you to be lost.” Debord resorts to threats: “it is up to you to choose the terrain.”34
“Staying friends with Constant was quite difficult. He liked to fight,” says Jacqueline de Jong. At stake are 200 copies of Constant’s book, which Debord feels are owed to him. It may sound like just a pretext, but one of the essential components of the Situationist International was the internal exchange of documents and their donation to external parties. As this incident highlights, the group was held together by the gift. The gift enters via the writings of the socialist anthropologist Marcel Mauss (1872–1950), which were taken up and expanded into a theory of the general economy by Georges Bataille. Both drew on anthropological work by Franz Boas (1858–1942) and others working among Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest, and their concept of potlatch. This version of the gift linked it closely to reputation. The gift is not selfless charity, nor is it a Christmas present.35 Rather, it is a very special kind of donation, in which the donor gives away valuable time, matter and energy in order to acquire reputation. The journal of the Letterist International was called Potlatch, and despite the meager resources of the group it was given away for free.
The Situationists sold their journal in bookshops, but many were given away and for the same reasons: to exchange time, energy and materials for reputation. The Situationist International was a provisional micro-society founded on its own quite particular economy of donation and reputation. While some of its activities might be supported by selling art to collectors or other banal forms of compensated labor, there is a sense in which the Situationist International was a grand potlatch, consigning to the flames the thought and work of a whole little community, daring the world to match its extravagant consumption of its own time. Hence the donation of copies was no mere pretext in Debord’s quarrel with Constant, for if Constant refused to donate them it would constitute a real break in the economy—if that is what it was—of this micro-society. It was a quite paradoxical economy.
The philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) was Debord’s contemporary, although beyond that they had little in common except perhaps rather nuanced notions of the gift. Derrida: “The gift is the gift of giving itself and nothing else.”36 Marcel Mauss had thought of a gift economy as driven by an underlying generosity, the very mana of socialism. Debord and in particular Jorn practiced it in much the same spirit, and even saw it as the basis for a break beyond socialist thought and action. But Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) took thinking about the gift away from the “shop girl’s philosophy” of everyday life, and in the direction instead of a structural logic of exchange.37 This line of thought would flourish in the hands of Roland Barthes (1915–80) and Louis Althusser, where gift exchange reappears as the structural logic of symbolic exchange, and becomes the technique by which the superstructures of capitalist society can be decoded. They wanted a parallel competence to the marxisant political economy still thought to explain the workings of the base. Derrida proposes instead that the gift must interrupt the economy. The gift is not supposed to be returned. It is outside circulation and circular time. Giving suspends all calculation. The gift is canceled by any reciprocation, return, debt, countergift or exchange. Derrida departs from anthropology by thinking the gift in its singularity, outside of exchange, to reveal just how troubling it is to any such structural logic.
If the recipient of a gift recognizes it as a gift, then it ceases to be one. “If it presents itself then it no longer presents itself.” For Derrida this opens up an intriguing realm of paradox and a way to get payback on his structuralist precursors. For the Situationsts, the very impossibility of the pure gift calls into being a whole terrain of possibility for an art and politics of the impurity of the gift. Every impure donation forces both giver and receiver into the invention of an attitude to life that can accept the donation, but not exchange it. The invention of everyday life could be nothing but the inventive accommodation to donation, to the subtle art of not returning the donation, of giving again in a way that is not circular, that does not simply pass on the debt.
Exchange affirms the identities of givers and receivers, and the value of the thing exchanged. Exchange arises as a way to contain the disturbing capacities of the gift. “The subject and the object are arrested effects of the gift.” This might be the last nobility left to life: to give and not receive, receive and not gift, to invent unreturnable acts (another name for which might be situations). Not only does Derrida construct a theory of the gift, his writing inserts itself into just such an unreturnable practice, or tries to. The Situationist International composed a whole micro-society on the premise of potlatch, that is, the art and politics of the donation. Potlatch is not really sustainable. It’s a game, a challenge. It isn’t a circular exchange. The early years of the Situationist International are a game of potlatch, of the donation time, in which the players, in the end, run out of moves. For Debord in particular, the challenge of the gift of time went, in his terms, unmet. It was time to forget and move on.
In the end, the gifted but impetuous left of the movement is no better for Debord’s purposes than the sprezzatura of the easygoing right. Here, in a couple of sentences addressed to Constant, Debord speaks all at once of a crisis of friendship, of tactics and thought at a crossroads: “I am sure that, here, we have arrived at the point where the Situationist International must immediately choose (or must be abandoned). Because you know well that I have always thought that ‘there are moments at which it is necessary to know how to choose’; that you haven’t needed to teach this to me; and that, if there has been a certain opportunism in the Situationist International, I have been among those (you, too) who have counter-balanced it.”38 The collapse of the Situationist International into the art world that Debord feared did not happen, at least not yet. The vigorous application of the principle of exclusion—that generously ungenerous act—took care of that.
The Situationist International exercises a continued fascination because its members made a gift of their time that was not returned. They did not really take their place in the exchanges of views between the journals and groups of their time. Their beautiful, expensive journal—with Lumaline covers or not—did not so much circulate as spiral off into the void. Until May ’68 appeared, and appeared to many as the return of the gift in spades. But still, something remains of an uncanceled gift.
The early years of the Situationist International are ones in which it may develop itself, elaborate itself, ornament itself—in many possible directions. The movement exercises a lasting fascination on art historians for this reason. All of the major figures of the early years have their favorites, who excise them from the game and hoist them up as their champions. What is perhaps more interesting is to keep these figures in play, to view what passes between them as what matters. And perhaps also what passes unnoticed, undetected in this flux of passions between temperamental men. When Michèle Bernstein writes in her two novels of exactly this remarkable time in which the Situationist International was born, the squabbles that animate the men barely rate a mention. It is just something a character not unlike Debord takes a train to Amsterdam to attend to, before hurrying back to a quite different kind of game. A game in which women not only figure, but which they may even win.