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Report on theConstruction of Situationsand on theInternational SituationistTendencys

Conditions of Organizationand Actionby Guy Debord

Revolution and Counterrevolutionin Modern Culture

First of all, we think the world must bechanged. We want the most liberatingchange of the society and life in whichwe find ourselves confined. We knowthat such a change is possible through

appropriate actions.

Our specific concern is the use ofcertain means of action and thediscovery of new ones, means whichare more easily recognizable in thedomain of culture and customs, butwhich must be applied in interrelationwith all revolutionary changes.

A societys culture both reflects andprefigures its possible ways oforganizing life. Our era ischaracterized by the lagging ofrevolutionary political action behindthe development of modernpossibilities of production which callfor a more advanced organization ofthe world.

We are going through a crucialhistorical crisis in which each yearposes more acutely the globalproblem of rationally mastering thenew productive forces and creating a

new civilization. Yet the internationalworking-class movement, on whichdepends the prerequisite overthrow ofthe economic infrastructure ofexploitation, has registered only a fewpartial local successes. Capitalism hasinvented new forms of struggle (stateintervention in the economy,expansion of the consumer sector,fascist governments) whilecamouflaging class oppositionsthrough various reformist tactics andexploiting the degenerations of

working-class leaderships. In this way

it has succeeded in maintaining theold social relations in the greatmajority of the highly industrializedcountries, thereby depriving asocialist society of its indispensable

material base. In contrast, theunderdeveloped or colonizedcountries, which over the last decadehave engaged in the most direct andmassive battles against imperialism,have begun to win some verysignificant victories. These victoriesare aggravating the contradictions ofthe capitalist economy and(particularly in the case of the Chineserevolution) could be a contributingfactor toward a renewal of the wholerevolutionary movement. Such arenewal cannot limit itself to reformswithin the capitalist or anticapitalistcountries, but must develop conflictsposing the question of powereverywhere.

The shattering of modern culture isthe result, on the plane of ideologicalstruggle, of the chaotic crisis of theseantagonisms. The new desires thatare taking shape are presented indistorted form: present-day resources

could enable them to be fulfilled, butthe anachronistic economic structureis incapable of developing theseresources to such ends. Ruling-classideology has meanwhile lost allcoherence because of thedepreciation of its successiveconceptions of the world (adepreciation which leads the rulingclass to historical indecision anduncertainty); because of thecoexistence of a range of mutuallycontradictory reactionary ideologies

(such as Christianity and social-democracy); and because of themixing into contemporary Westernculture of a number of only recentlyappreciated features of severalforeign civilizations. The main goal ofruling-class ideology is therefore tomaintain this confusion.

Within culture (it should beunderstood that throughout this textwe are ignoring the scientific oreducational aspects of culture, even ifthe confusion we have noted is also

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visibly reflected at the level of generalscientific theories and notions ofeducation; we are using the term torefer to a complex of aesthetics,sentiments and customs: the reaction

of an era on everyday life) there aretwo parallel counterrevolutionaryconfusionist tactics: the partialcooption of new values, and adeliberately anticultural, industriallyfacilitated production (novels, films),the latter being a natural continuationof the imbecilization of young peoplebegun in their schools and families.The ruling ideology sees to it thatsubversive discoveries are trivializedand sterilized, after which they can besafely spectacularized. It even

manages to make use of subversiveindividuals by falsifying their worksafter their death, or, while they arestill alive, by taking advantage of thegeneral ideological confusion anddrugging them with one or another ofthe many mystiques at their disposal.

One of the contradictions of thebourgeoisie in its period of decline isthat while it respects the abstractprinciple of intellectual and artistic

creation, it resists actual creationswhen they first appear, theneventuallyexploits them. This isbecause it needs to maintain a certaindegree of criticality and experimentalresearch among a minority, but musttake care to channel this activity intonarrowly compartmentalizedutilitarian disciplines and avert anyholistic critique and experimentation.In the domain of culture thebourgeoisie strives to divert the tastefor innovation, which is dangerous for

it in our era, toward certain confused,degraded and innocuous forms ofnovelty. Through the commercialmechanisms that control culturalactivity, avant-garde tendencies arecut off from the segments of societythat could support them, segmentsalready limited because of the generalsocial conditions. The people withinthese tendencies who become wellknown are generally accepted asexceptional individuals, on thecondition that they accept various

renunciations: the essential point is

always the renunciation of acomprehensive opposition and theacceptance of fragmentary workssusceptible to diverse interpretations.This is what gives the very term

avant-garde, which in the finalanalysis is always defined andmanipulated by the bourgeoisie, adubious and ridiculous aspect.

The very notion of a collective avant-garde, with the militant aspect itimplies, is a recent product of thehistorical conditions that aresimultaneously giving rise to thenecessity for a coherent revolutionaryprogram in culture and to thenecessity to struggle against theforces that impede the developmentof such a program. Such groups areled to transpose into their sphere ofactivity certain organizationalmethods originally created byrevolutionary politics, and their actionis henceforth inconceivable withoutsome connection with a politicalcritique. In this regard there is anotable progression from Futurismthrough Dadaism and Surrealism tothe movements formed after 1945. At

each of these stages, however, onediscovers the same desire for totalchange; and the same rapiddisintegration when the inability tochange the real world profoundlyenough leads to a defensivewithdrawal to the very doctrinalpositions whose inadequacy had justbeen revealed.

Futurism, whose influence spreadfrom Italy in the period precedingWorld War I, adopted an attitude of

revolutionizing literature and the artswhich introduced a great number offormal innovations, but which wasonly based on an extremely simplisticapplication of the notion ofmechanical progress. Futurismspuerile technological optimismvanished with the period of bourgeoiseuphoria that had sustained it. ItalianFuturism collapsed, going fromnationalism to fascism without everattaining a more complete theoreticalvision of its time.

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Dadaism, initiated in Zurich and NewYork by refugees and deserters fromWorld War I, expressed the rejectionof all the values of a bourgeois societywhose bankruptcy had just become so

grossly evident. Its violentmanifestations in postwar Germanyand France aimed mainly at thedestruction of art and literature and toa lesser degree at certain forms ofbehavior (deliberately imbecilicspectacles, speeches and excursions).Its historic role is to have delivered amortal blow to the traditionalconception of culture. The almostimmediate dissolution of dadaism wasan inevitable result of its purelynegative definition. The dadaist spirit

has nevertheless influenced allsubsequent movements; and anyfuture constructive position mustinclude a dadaist-type negative aspectas long as the social conditions thatimpose the repetition of rottensuperstructures conditions thathave intellectually already beendefinitively condemned have notbeen wiped out by force.

The creators of surrealism, who had

participated in the dadaist movementin France, endeavored to define theterrain of a constructive action on thebasis of the spirit of revolt and theextreme depreciation of traditionalmeans of communication expressedby dadaism. Setting out from a poeticapplication of Freudian psychology,surrealism extended the methods ithad discovered to painting, to film,and to some aspects of everyday life;and its influence, in more diffuseforms, spread much further. Now,

what is important in an enterprise ofthis nature is not whether it iscompletely or relatively right, butwhether it succeeds in catalyzing for acertain time the desires of an era.Surrealisms period of progress,marked by the liquidation of idealismand a moment of rallying to dialecticalmaterialism, came to a halt soon after1930, but its decay only becameevident after World War II. Surrealismhad by then spread to numerouscountries. It had also initiated a

discipline whose rigor must not be

overestimated and which was oftentempered by commercialconsiderations, but which wasnevertheless an effective means ofstruggle against the confusionist

mechanisms of the bourgeoisie.

The surrealist program, asserting thesovereignty of desire and surprise andproposing a new way of life, is muchricher in constructive possibilities thanis generally realized. The limitedscope of surrealism was in large partdue to the lack of material means forfulfilling its aims. But the devolution ofits original proponents intospiritualism, and above all themediocrity of its later members,obliges us to search for the faileddevelopment of surrealist theory inthe very origin of that theory.

The error that is at the root ofsurrealism is the idea of the infiniterichness of the unconsciousimagination. The cause of surrealismsideological failure was its belief thatthe unconscious was the finallydiscovered ultimate force of life; andthe fact that the surrealists revised

the history of ideas in accordance withthat simplistic perspective and neverwent any further. We now know thatthe unconscious imagination is poor,that automatic writing is monotonous,and that the whole ostentatious genreof would-be strange and shockingsurrealistic creations has ceased to bevery surprising. The formal fidelity tothis style of imagination ultimatelyleads back to the polar opposite of themodern conditions of imagination:back to traditional occultism. The

extent to which surrealism hasremained dependent on its hypothesisregarding the unconscious can beseen in the theoretical investigationsattempted by the second-generationsurrealists: Calas and Mabille relateeverything to the two successiveaspects of the surrealist practice ofthe unconscious the former topsychoanalysis, the latter to cosmicinfluences. The discovery of the role ofthe unconscious was indeed a surpriseand an innovation; but it was not alaw of future surprises and

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innovations. Freud had also ended updiscovering this when he wrote:Whatever is conscious wears out.What is unconscious remainsunalterable. But once it is freed, it too

falls to ruin.

Opposing an apparently irrationalsociety in which the clash betweenreality and the old but still vigorouslyproclaimed values was pushed to thepoint of absurdity, surrealism madeuse of the irrational to destroy thatsocietys superficially logical values.The very success of surrealism has alot to do with the fact that the mostmodern side of this societys ideologyhas renounced a strict hierarchy offactitious values and openly uses theirrational, including vestiges ofsurrealism. The bourgeoisie mustabove all prevent a new beginning ofrevolutionary thought. It was aware ofthe danger of surrealism. Now that ithas been able to coopt it into ordinaryaesthetic commerce, it would likepeople to believe that surrealism wasthe most radical and disturbingmovement possible. It thus cultivatesa sort of nostalgia for surrealism at

the same time that it discredits anynew venture by automaticallypigeonholing it as a rehash ofsurrealism, a rerun of a defeat whichaccording to it is definitive and can nolonger be brought back into questionby anyone. Reacting against thealienation of Christian society has ledsome people to admire the completelyirrational alienation of primitivesocieties. But we need to go forward,not backward. We need to make theworld more rational the necessary

first step in making it more exciting.

Decomposition: The UltimateStage of Bourgeois Thought

The two main centers of modernculture are Paris and Moscow. Thestyles originating in Paris (the majorityof whose elaborators are not French)influence Europe, America and the

other developed countries of the

capitalist zone such as Japan. Thestyles imposed administratively byMoscow influence all the workersstates and also have a slight effect onParis and its European zone of

influence. The Moscow influence isdirectly political. The persistence ofthe traditional influence of Paris stemspartly from its long-entrenchedposition as professional culturalcenter.

Because bourgeois thought is lost insystematic confusion and Marxistthought has been profoundly distortedin the workers states, conservatismreigns both East and West, especiallyin the domain of culture and customs.This conservatism is overt in Moscow,which has revived the typically petty-bourgeois attitudes of the nineteenthcentury. In Paris it is hidden, disguisedas anarchism, cynicism or humor.Although both of these ruling culturesare fundamentally incapable ofdealing with the real problems of ourtime, relevant experimentation hasbeen carried further in the West. Inthe context of this sort of culturalproduction, the Moscow zone

functions as a region ofunderdevelopment.

In the bourgeois zone, where anappearance of intellectual freedomhas generally been tolerated, theknowledge of the movement of ideasand the confused vision of themultiple transformations of the socialenvironment tend to make peopleaware of an ongoing upheaval whosemotivating forces are out of control.The reigning sensibility tries to adapt

itself to this situation while resistingnew changes that present newdangers. The solutions offered by theretrograde currents ultimately comedown to three main attitudes:prolonging the fashions produced bythe dada-surrealism crisis (which crisisis simply the sophisticated culturalexpression of a state of mind thatspontaneously manifests itselfwherever previously acceptedmeanings of life crumble along withprevious lifestyles); settling into

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mental ruins; or returning to thedistant past.

In the first case, a diluted form ofsurrealism can be found everywhere.

It has all the tastes of the surrealistera and none of its ideas. Its aestheticis based on repetition. The remnantsof orthodox surrealism have arrived atthe stage of occultist senility, and areas incapable of articulating anideological position as they are ofinventing anything whatsoever. Theylend credence to increasingly crudecharlatanisms and engender others.

Setting up shop in nullity is the

cultural solution that has been mostvisible in the years following WorldWar II. This solution includes twopossibilities, each of which has beenabundantly illustrated: dissimulatingnothingness by means of anappropriate vocabulary, or openlyflaunting it.

The first of these options has becomeparticularly famous since the adventof existentialist literature, which hasreproduced, under the cover of a

borrowed philosophy, the mostmediocre aspects of the culturalevolution of the preceding threedecades and augmented its mass-media-based notoriety by doses offake Marxism and psychoanalysis andby successive announcements ofmore or less arbitrary politicalengagements and resignations. Thesetactics have generated a very largenumber of followers, avowed orunacknowledged. The continuingproliferation of abstract painting andits associated theories is anotherexample of the same nature andscope.

The complacent affirmation of totalmental nullity is exemplified by therecent neoliterary phenomenon ofcynical 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 themost durable, because its indefensibleposition in the domain of culturalcreation seems to be supported by itsappeal to the conclusions of a

revolutionary movement. At the 1948conference of Soviet musicians,Andrei Zhdanov(1) revealed the stakeof theoretical repression: Havent wedone well to preserve the treasures ofclassic painting and to suppress theliquidators of painting? Wouldnt thesurvival of such schools haveamounted to the liquidation ofpainting? Faced with this liquidationof painting and with many otherliquidations, and recognizing thecrumbling of all its systems of values,

the advanced Western bourgeoisie isbanking on total ideologicaldecomposition, whether out ofdesperate reaction or out of politicalopportunism. In contrast, Zhdanov with the taste characteristic of theparvenu recognizes himself in thepetty-bourgeoisie that opposes thedecomposition of nineteenth-centurycultural values, and can see nothingelse to do than to undertake anauthoritarian restoration of those

values. He is unrealistic enough tobelieve that short-lived local politicalcircumstances will give him the powerto evade the general problems of thisera, if only he can force people toreturn to the study of supersededproblems after having repressed allthe conclusions that history haspreviously drawn from thoseproblems.

The form (and even some aspects ofthe content) of this Socialist Realism is

not very different from the traditionalpropaganda of religious organizations,particularly of Catholicism. By meansof an invariable propaganda,Catholicism defends a unitaryideological structure that it alone,among all the forces of the past, stillpossesses. But at the same time, in aparallel operation designed torecapture the increasingly numeroussectors that are escaping its influence,the Catholic Church is attempting totake over modern cultural forms,

particularly those representing

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complicated theoretical nullity(spontaneous painting, forexample). The Catholic reactionarieshave the advantage over otherbourgeois tendencies of being able to

rely on a permanent hierarchy ofvalues; this inalterable foundationenables them all the more freely topush decomposition to the extreme inwhatever discipline they engage in.

The crisis of modern culture has led tototal ideological decomposition.Nothing new can be built on theseruins. Critical thought itself becomesimpossible as each judgment clasheswith others and each individualinvokes fragments of outmodedsystems or follows merely personalinclinations.

This decomposition can be seeneverywhere. It is no longer a matter ofnoting the increasingly massive use ofcommercial publicity to influencejudgments about cultural creation. Wehave arrived at a stage of ideologicalabsence in which advertising hasbecome the only active factor,overriding any preexisting critical

judgment or transforming suchjudgment into a mere conditionedreflex. The complex operation of salestechniques has reached the point ofsurprising even the ad professionalsby automatically creatingpseudosubjects of cultural debate.This is the sociological significance ofthe Franoise Sagan phenomenon(2) inFrance over the last three years, anexperience whose repercussions haveeven penetrated beyond the culturalzone centered on Paris by provoking

some interest in the workers states.The professional judges of culture,seeing such a phenomenon as anunpredictable effect of mechanismswith which they are unfamiliar, tend toattribute it to mere crude mass-mediapublicity. But their professionnevertheless obliges them to come upwith bogus critiques of these bogusworks. (Moreover, a work whoseinterest is inexplicable constitutes therichest subject for bourgeoisconfusionist criticism.) They naturallyremain unaware of the fact that the

intellectual mechanisms of criticismhad already escaped them long beforethe external mechanisms arrived toexploit this void. They avoid facing thefact that Sagan is simply the

ridiculous flip side of the change ofmeans of expression into means ofaction on everyday life. This processof supersession has caused the life ofthe author to become increasinglymore important than her work. As theperiod of important expressionsarrives at its ultimate reduction,nothing of any possible importanceremains except the personality of theauthor, who in turn is no longercapable of possessing any notablequality beyond her age, or some

fashionable vice, or some picturesqueold craft.

The opposition that must now beunited against this ideologicaldecomposition must not get caught upin criticizing the buffooneriesappearing in outmoded forms such aspoems or novels. We have to criticizeactivities that are important for thefuture, activities that we need tomake use of. One of the most serious

signs of the present ideologicaldecomposition is the fact that thefunctionalist theory of architecture isnow based on the most reactionaryconceptions of society and morality.That is, the temporarily and partiallyvalid contributions of the originalBauhaus or of the school of LeCorbusier have been distorted so as toreinforce an excessively backwardnotion of life and of the framework oflife.

Everything indicates, however, thatsince 1956 we have been entering anew phase of the struggle, and thatan upheaval of revolutionary forces,attacking the most appalling obstacleson all fronts, is beginning to changethe conditions of the precedingperiod. Socialist Realism is beginningto decline in the countries of theanticapitalist camp, along with thereactionary Stalinism that produced it,while in the West the Sagan culture ismarking a depth of bourgeoisdecadence beyond which it is

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probably impossible to go, and thereseems to be an increasing awarenessof the exhaustion of the culturalexpedients that have served since theend of World War II. In this context,

the avant-garde minority may be ableto rediscover a positive value.

The Role of Minority Tendenciesin the Ebbing Period

The ebbing of the internationalrevolutionary movement, whichbecame apparent within a few yearsafter 1920 and increasingly obvious

over the next three decades, wasfollowed, with a time-lag of five or sixyears, by an ebbing of the movementsthat had tried to promote liberatoryinnovations in culture and everydaylife. The ideological and materialimportance of such movements hascontinually diminished, to the pointthat they have become totallyisolated. Their action, which undermore favorable conditions was able tolead to a sudden renewal of theclimate of feeling, has weakened to

the point that conservative tendencieshave been able to exclude them fromany direct penetration into the riggedarena of official culture. Once thesemovements have been deprived oftheir role in the production of newvalues, they end up serving as areserve pool of intellectual labor fromwhich the bourgeoisie can drawindividuals capable of addinginnovative nuances to its propaganda.

At this point of dissolution, the socialimportance of the experimental avant-garde is apparently less than that ofthe pseudomodernist tendencieswhich dont even bother to pretend toseek change, but which represent themodern, media-reinforced face ofaccepted culture. But those who havea role in the actual production ofmodern culture, and who arediscovering their interests asproducers of this culture (all the moreacutely as they are reduced to a

purely negative position), are

developing a consciousness that isinevitably lacking among themodernist representatives of thedeclining society. The poverty of theaccepted culture and its monopoly on

the means of cultural production leadto a corresponding impoverishment ofthe theory and manifestations of theavant-garde. But it is only within thisavant-garde that a new revolutionaryconception of culture is imperceptiblytaking shape. Now that the dominantculture and the beginnings ofoppositional culture are arriving at theextreme point of their separation andimpotence, this new conceptionshould assert itself.

The history of modern culture duringthe period of revolutionary ebbing isthus also the history of the theoreticaland practical defeat of the movementof renewal, to the point that theminority tendencies becamecompletely isolated anddecomposition reigned everywhere.

Between 1930 and World War IIsurrealism continually declined as arevolutionary force at the same time

that its influence was being extendedbeyond its control. The postwar periodled to the rapid destruction ofsurrealism by the two factors that hadalready blocked its developmentaround 1930: the lack of possibilitiesfor theoretical renewal and the ebbingof revolution, developments whichwere reflected in the political andcultural reaction within the workersmovement. The latter factor is directlydeterminant, for example, in thedisappearance of the surrealist group

of Rumania. On the other hand, it isabove all the first of these factors thatcondemned the RevolutionarySurrealism movement in France andBelgium to a rapid collapse. Except inBelgium, where a fraction issuing fromsurrealism has maintained a validexperimental position [the LvresNues group], all the surrealisttendencies scattered around the worldhave joined the camp of mysticalidealism.

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Some of the Revolutionary Surrealistswere among those who formed theExperimental Artists International(1949-1951), which includedparticipants 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 haveunderstood that such an organizationis necessitated by the complexity andextent of present-day problems. Buttheir lack of ideological rigor, thelimitation of their pursuits to mainlyplastic experimentation, and above allthe absence of a comprehensivetheory of the conditions andperspectives of their experience led to

their breakup.

Lettrism, in France, had started off bytotally opposing the entire knownaesthetic movement, whose continualdecaying it correctly analyzed.Striving for the uninterrupted creationof new forms in all domains, theLettrist group carried on a salutaryagitation between 1946 and 1952. Butthe group generally took it for grantedthat aesthetic disciplines should take

a new departure within a generalframework similar to the former one,and this idealist error limited itsproductions to a few paltryexperiments. In 1952 the Lettrist leftwing organized itself into a LettristInternational and expelled thebackward fraction.(4) In the LettristInternational the quest for newmethods of intervention in everydaylife was pursued amidst sharpstruggles among different tendencies.

In Italy with the exception of theantifunctionalist experimental groupthat in 1955 formed the most solidsection of the International Movementfor an Imaginist Bauhaus the effortstoward avant-garde formations haveremained attached to the old artisticperspectives and have not evensucceeded in expressing themselvestheoretically.

During the same period the most

innocuous and massified aspects ofWestern culture have been massively

imitated all over the world, from theUnited States to Japan. (The US avant-garde, which tends to congregate inthe American colony in Paris, livesthere in the most tame, insipidly

conformist manner, isolatedideologically, socially and evenecologically from everything elsegoing on.) As for the productions ofpeoples who are still subject tocultural colonialism (often caused bypolitical oppression), even thoughthey may be progressive in their owncountries, they play a reactionary rolein the advanced cultural centers.Critics who have based their entirecareer on outdated systems ofcreation pretend to discover engaging

new developments in Greek films orGuatemalan novels an exoticism ofthe antiexotic, the revival of old formslong since exploited and exhausted inother countries; an exoticism whichdoes, however, serve the primarypurpose of exoticism: escape from thereal conditions of life and creation.

In the workers states only theexperimentation carried out by Brechtin Berlin, insofar as it puts into

question the classic spectacle notion,is close to the constructions thatmatter for us today. Only Brecht hassucceeded in resisting the stupidity ofSocialist Realism in power.

Now that Socialist Realism is fallingapart, we can expect much from arevolutionary confrontation of theintellectuals in the workers states withthe real problems of modern culture. IfZhdanovism has been the purestexpression not only of the cultural

degeneration of the workersmovement but also of theconservative cultural position in thebourgeois world, those in the EasternBloc who are presently revoltingagainst Zhdanovism cannot do so whatever their subjective intentions merely in the name of a greatercreative freedom la Cocteau, forexample. A negation of Zhdanovismobjectively means the negation of theZhdanovist negation of liquidation.Zhdanovism can be superseded onlythrough the real exercise of freedom,

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which is consciousness of presentnecessity.

Here, too, the recent years have atmost been a period of confused

resistance to the confused reign ofreactionary imbecility. There werentmany of us really working against it.But we should not linger over thetastes or trivial findings of this period.The problems of cultural creation canbe resolved only in relation with a newadvance of world revolution.

Platform for a Provisional

Opposition

A revolutionary action within culturemust aim to enlarge life, not merely toexpress or explain it. It must attackmisery on every front. Revolution isnot limited to determining the level ofindustrial production, or even todetermining who is to be the masterof such production. It must abolish notonly the exploitation of humanity, butalso the passions, compensations andhabits which that exploitation hasengendered. We have to define newdesires in relation to presentpossibilities. In the thick of the battlebetween the present society and theforces that are going to destroy it, wehave to find the first elements of amore advanced construction of theenvironment and new conditions ofbehavior both as experiences inthemselves and as material forpropaganda. Everything else belongsto the past, and serves it.

We now have to undertake anorganized collective work aimed at aunitary use of all the means ofrevolutionizing everyday life. That is,we must first of all recognize theinterdependence of these means inthe perspective of increased freedomand an increased control of nature.We need to construct new ambiencesthat will be both the products and theinstruments of new forms of behavior.To do this, we must from the

beginning make practical use of the

everyday processes and cultural formsthat now exist, while refusing toacknowledge any inherent value theymay claim to have. The very criterionof formal invention or innovation has

lost its sense within the traditionalframework of the arts insufficient,fragmentary forms whose partialrenovations are inevitably outdatedand therefore impossible.

We should not simply refuse modernculture; we must seize it in order tonegate it. No one can claim to be arevolutionary intellectual who doesnot recognize the cultural revolutionwe are now facing. An intellectualcreator cannot be revolutionary bymerely supporting some party line,not even if he does so with originalmethods, but only by workingalongside the parties toward thenecessary transformation of all thecultural superstructures. Whatultimately determines whether or notsomeone is a bourgeois intellectual isneither his social origin nor hisknowledge of a culture (suchknowledge may be the basis for acritique of that culture or for some

creative work within it), but his role inthe production of the historicallybourgeois forms of culture. Authors ofrevolutionary political opinions whofind themselves praised by bourgeoisliterary critics should ask themselveswhat theyve done wrong.

The union of several experimentaltendencies for a revolutionary front inculture, begun at the congress held atAlba, Italy, at the end of 1956,presupposes that we not neglect three

important factors.

First of all, we must insist on acomplete accord among the personsand groups that participate in thisunited action; and this accord mustnot be facilitated by allowing certainof its consequences to bedissimulated. Jokers or careerists whoare stupid enough to think they canadvance their careers in this waymust be rebuffed.

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Next, we must recall that while anygenuinely experimental attitude isusable, that word has very often beenmisused in the attempt to justifyartistic actions within an already-

existing structure. The only validexperimental proceeding is based onthe accurate critique of existingconditions and the deliberatesupersession of them. It must beunderstood once and for all thatsomething that is only a personalexpression within a frameworkcreated by others cannot be termed acreation. Creation is not thearrangement of objects and forms, itis the invention of new laws on sucharrangement.

Finally, we have to eliminate thesectarianism among us that opposesunity of action with possible allies forspecific goals and prevents ourinfiltration of parallel organizations.(5)

From 1952 to 1955 the LettristInternational, after some necessarypurges, continually moved toward asort of absolutist rigor leading to anequally absolute isolation andineffectuality, and ultimately to a

certain immobility, a degeneration ofthe spirit of critique and discovery. Wemust definitively supersede thissectarian conduct in favor of realactions. This should be the solecriterion on which we join with orseparate from comrades. Naturallythis does not mean that we shouldrenounce breaks, as everyone urgesus to do. On the contrary, we thinkthat it is necessary to go still further inbreaking with habits and persons.

We should collectively define ourprogram and realize it in a disciplinedmanner, using any means, evenartistic ones.

Toward a SituationistInternational

Our central idea is the construction ofsituations, that is to say, the concrete

construction of momentary ambiences

of life and their transformation into asuperior passional quality. We mustdevelop a systematic interventionbased on the complex factors of twocomponents in perpetual interaction:

the material environment of life andthe behaviors which that environmentgives rise to and which radicallytransform it.

Our perspectives of action on theenvironment ultimately lead us to thenotion of unitary urbanism. Unitaryurbanism is defined first of all as theuse of all arts and techniques asmeans contributing to the compositionof a unified milieu. Such aninterrelated ensemble must beenvisaged as incomparably more far-reaching than the old domination ofarchitecture over the traditional arts,or than the present sporadicapplication to anarchic urbanism ofspecialized technology or of scientificinvestigations such as ecology.Unitary urbanism must, for example,determine the acoustic environmentas well as the distribution of differentvarieties of food and drink. It mustinclude both the creation of new forms

and the dtournement of previousforms of architecture, urbanism,poetry and cinema. Integral art, whichhas been talked about so much, canbe realized only at the level ofurbanism. But it can no longercorrespond to any of the traditionalaesthetic categories. In each of itsexperimental cities unitary urbanismwill act by way of a certain number offorce fields, which we can temporarilydesignate by the classic termdistrict. Each district will tend

toward a specific harmony distinctfrom neighboring harmonies; or elsewill play on a maximum breaking upof internal harmony.

Secondly, unitary urbanism isdynamic, in that it is directly relatedto styles of behavior. The mostelementary unit of unitary urbanism isnot the house, but the architecturalcomplex, which combines all thefactors conditioning an ambience, or aseries of clashing ambiences, on thescale of the constructed situation.

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Spatial development must take intoaccount the emotional effects that theexperimental city is intended toproduce. One of our comrades hasadvanced a theory of states-of-mind

districts, according to which eachdistrict of a city would be designed toprovoke a specific basic sentiment towhich people would knowingly exposethemselves. It seems that such aproject draws appropriate conclusionsfrom the current tendency todepreciate randomly encounteredprimary sentiments, and that itsrealization could contribute toaccelerating that depreciation. Thecomrades who call for a new, freearchitecture must understand that this

new architecture will primarily bebased not on free, poetic lines andforms in the sense that todayslyrical abstract painting uses thoseterms but rather on theatmospheric effects of rooms,hallways, streets atmosphereslinked to the activities they contain.Architecture must advance by takingemotionally moving situations, ratherthan emotionally moving forms, as thematerial it works with. And the

experiments conducted with thismaterial will lead to new, as yetunknown forms.

Psychogeographical research, thestudy of the exact laws and specificeffects of geographical environments,whether consciously organized or not,on the emotions and behavior ofindividuals, thus takes on a doublemeaning: active observation ofpresent-day urban agglomerationsand development of hypotheses on

the structure of a situationist city. Theprogress of psychogeographydepends to a great extent on thestatistical extension of its methods ofobservation, but above all onexperimentation by means of concreteinterventions in urbanism. Before thisstage is attained we cannot be certainof the objective truth of our initialpsychogeographical findings. But evenif those findings should turn out to befalse, they would still be falsesolutions to what is nevertheless a

real problem.

Our action on behavior, linked withother desirable aspects of a revolutionin mores, can be briefly defined as theinvention of games of an essentiallynew type. The most general goal must

be to expand the nonmediocre part oflife, to reduce the empty moments oflife as much as possible. One couldthus speak of our enterprise as aproject of quantitatively increasinghuman life, an enterprise moreserious than the biological methodscurrently being investigated, and onethat automatically implies aqualitative increase whosedevelopments are unpredictable. Thesituationist game is distinguishedfrom the classic notion of games by its

radical negation of the element ofcompetition and of separation fromeveryday life. On the other hand, it isnot distinct from a moral choice, sinceit implies taking a stand in favor ofwhat will bring about the future reignof freedom and play.

This perspective is obviously linked tothe continual and rapid increase ofleisure time resulting from the level ofproductive forces our era has

attained. It is also linked to therecognition of the fact that a battle ofleisure is taking place before our eyes,a battle whose importance in the classstruggle has not been sufficientlyanalyzed. So far, the ruling class hassucceeded in using the leisure therevolutionary proletariat wrested fromit by developing a vast industrialsector of leisure activities that is anincomparable instrument forstupefying the proletariat with by-products of mystifying ideology and

bourgeois tastes. The abundance oftelevised imbecilities is probably oneof the reasons for the Americanworking classs inability to developany political consciousness. Byobtaining through collective pressurea slight rise in the price of its laborabove the minimum necessary for theproduction of that labor, theproletariat not only extends its powerof struggle, it also extends the terrainof the struggle. New forms of thisstruggle then arise alongside directly

economic and political conflicts. It can

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be said that up till now revolutionarypropaganda has been constantlyovercome within these new forms ofstruggle in all the countries whereadvanced industrial development has

introduced them. That the necessarychanging of the infrastructure can bedelayed by errors and weaknesses atthe level of superstructures hasunfortunately been demonstrated byseveral experiences of the twentiethcentury. It is necessary to throw newforces into the battle of leisure. Wewill take our position there.

A rough experimentation toward anew mode of behavior has alreadybeen made with what we have termedthe drive: the practice of a passionaljourney out of the ordinary through arapid changing of ambiences, as wellas a means of psychogeographicalstudy and of situationist psychology.But the application of this striving forplayful creativity must be extended toall known forms of humanrelationships, so as to influence, forexample, the historical evolution ofsentiments like friendship and love.Everything leads us to believe that the

essential elements of our research liein our hypothesis of the constructionof situations.

A persons life is a succession offortuitous situations, and even if noneof them is exactly the same asanother the immense majority of themare so undifferentiated and so dullthat they give a definite impression ofsameness. As a result, the rareintensely engaging situations found inlife only serve to strictly confine and

limit that life. We must try toconstruct situations, that is to say,collective ambiences, ensembles ofimpressions determining the quality ofa moment. If we take the simpleexample of a gathering of a group ofindividuals for a given time, it wouldbe desirable, while taking into accountthe knowledge and material meanswe have at our disposal, to study whatorganization of the place, whatselection of participants and whatprovocation of events are suitable forproducing the desired ambience. The

powers of a situation will certainlyexpand considerably in both time andspace with the realizations of unitaryurbanism or the education of asituationist generation.

The construction of situations beginsbeyond the ruins of the modernspectacle. It is easy to see how muchthe very principle of the spectacle nonintervention is linked to thealienation of the old world.Conversely, the most pertinentrevolutionary experiments in culturehave sought to break the spectatorspsychological identification with thehero so as to draw them into activityby provoking their capacities torevolutionize their own lives. Thesituation is thus designed to be livedby its constructors. The role played bya passive or merely bit-part playingpublic must constantly diminish,while that played by those who cannotbe called actors, but rather, in a newsense of the term, livers, muststeadily increase.

We have to multiply poetic subjectsand objects which are now

unfortunately so rare that theslightest ones take on an exaggeratedemotional importance and we haveto organize games for these poeticsubjects to play with these poeticobjects. This is our entire program,which is essentially transitory. Oursituations will be ephemeral, without afuture. Passageways. Our onlyconcern is real life; we care nothingabout the permanence of art or ofanything else. Eternity is the grossestidea a person can conceive of in

connection with his acts.

Situationist techniques have yet to beinvented. But we know that a taskpresents itself only when the materialconditions necessary to its realizationalready exist, or at least are in theprocess of formation. We have tobegin with a phase of small-scaleexperimentation. It will probably benecessary to prepare plans orscenarios for the creation of

situations, despite their inevitableinadequacy at the beginning. To this

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end we must develop a system ofnotations, which will become moreprecise as we learn more from theexperiences of construction. We willalso need to discover or verify certain

laws, such as that according to whichsituationist emotions depend onextreme concentration or extremedispersal of actions (classical tragedygiving a rough idea of the former,drives of the latter). In addition tothe direct means that will be used forspecific ends, the positive phase ofthe construction of situations willrequire a new application ofreproductive technologies. One canenvisage, for example, televisedimages of certain aspects of one

situation being communicated live topeople taking part in another situationsomewhere else, thereby producingvarious modifications andinterferences between the two. Moresimply, a new style of documentaryfilm could be devoted to currentevents that really are current andeventful by preserving (in situationistarchives) the most significantmoments of a situation before theevolution of its elements has led to a

different situation. Since thesystematic construction of situationswill give rise to previously unknownsentiments, film will find its greatesteducational role in the disseminationof these new passions.

Situationist theory resolutely supportsa noncontinuous conception of life.The notion of unity must cease to beseen as applying to the whole of oneslife (where it serves as a reactionarymystification based on the belief in an

immortal soul and, in the finalanalysis, on the division of labor);instead, it should apply to theconstruction of each particularmoment of life through the unitaryuse of situationist methods. In aclassless society there will no longerbe painters, but only situationistswho, among other things, sometimespaint.

The main emotional drama of life,aside from the perpetual conflictbetween desire and reality hostile to

desire, seems to be the sensation ofthe passage of time. In contrast to theaesthetic modes that strive to fix andeternalize some emotion, thesituationist attitude consists in going

with the flow of time. In so doing, inpushing ever further the game ofcreating new, emotionally provocativesituations, the situationists aregambling that change will usually befor the better. In the short term theodds are obviously against that bet.But even if we have to lose it athousand times, we see no otherchoice for a progressive attitude.

The situationist minority first emergedas a tendency in the Lettrist left wing,then in the Lettrist International whichit ended up controlling. The sameobjective movement has led severalrecent avant-garde groups to similarconclusions. Together we musteliminate all the relics of the recentpast. We now believe that an accordfor a united action of the revolutionaryavant-garde in culture must be carriedout on the basis of such a program.We have neither guaranteed recipesnor definitive results. We only propose

an experimental research to becollectively led in a few directions thatwe are presently defining and towardothers that have yet to be defined.The very difficulty of succeeding inthe first situationist projects is a proofof the newness of the domain we arepenetrating. Something that changesour way of seeing the streets is moreimportant than something thatchanges our way of seeing paintings.Our working hypotheses will bereexamined at each future upheaval,

wherever it comes from.

Various people (particularly amongthe revolutionary artists andintellectuals who have resignedthemselves to a certain impotence)will respond that this situationismseems rather disagreeable; that wehave not created any beautiful works;that we would do better to talk aboutAndr Gide; and that no one will seeany clear reasons to be interested inus. They will evade facing the issueswe have raised by reproaching us for

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using scandalous tactics in order tocall attention to ourselves, and willexpress their indignation at theprocedures we have sometimes feltobliged to adopt in order to dissociate

ourselves from certain people. Weanswer: Its not a matter of knowingwhether this interests you, butwhether you yourselves are capable ofdoing anything interesting in thecontext of the new conditions ofcultural creation. Your role,revolutionary artists and intellectuals,is not to complain that freedom isinsulted when we refuse to marchalongside the enemies of freedom.Your role is not to imitate thebourgeois aesthetes who try to

restrict people to what has alreadybeen done because what has alreadybeen done doesnt bother them. Youknow that creation is never pure. Yourrole is to find out what theinternational avant-garde is doing, totake part in the critical developmentof its program, and to call for itssupport.

Our Immediate Tasks

We must call attention, among theworkers parties or the extremisttendencies within those parties, to theneed to undertake an effectiveideological action in order to combatthe emotional influence of advancedcapitalist methods of propaganda. Onevery occasion, by every hyper-political means, we must publicizedesirable alternatives to the spectacleof the capitalist way of life, so as todestroy the bourgeois idea ofhappiness. At the same time, takinginto account the existence, within thevarious ruling classes, of elementsthat have always tended (out ofboredom and thirst for novelty)toward things that lead to thedisappearance of their societies, weshould incite the persons who controlsome of the vast resources that welack to provide us with the means tocarry out our experiments, out of the

same motives of potential profit asthey do with scientific research.

We must everywhere present arevolutionary alternative to the rulingculture; coordinate all the researcheswhich are currently taking place butwhich lack a comprehensive

perspective; and incite, throughcritiques and propaganda, the mostadvanced artists and intellectuals ofall countries to contact us in view of acollective action.

We should declare ourselves ready torenew discussion, on the basis of thisprogram, with those who, havingtaken part in an earlier phase of ouraction, are still capable of rejoiningwith us.

We must put forward the slogans ofunitary urbanism, experimentalbehavior, hyper-political propaganda,and the construction of ambiences.The passions have been sufficientlyinterpreted; the point now is todiscover new ones.

GUY DEBORDJune 1957

[TRANSLATORS NOTES]

1.Andrei Zhdanov: one of Stalinsmost powerful officials, responsible forpurging the arts and imposing thedoctrine of Socialist Realism.

2. Franoise Sagan phenonomon:the way that this teenage writerbecame a supercelebrity, every detailof her life being considerednewsworthy despite the relativelymediocre quality of her work.Spectacularization of vacuous andtalentless personalities is of coursecommonplace now, but in the 1950s itwas seen as astonishing and theconventional culture critics were at aloss as to how to account for it.

3. Cobra participants included future

SI members Constant and Asger Jorn.

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4. The final break was provoked whenthe radical tendency (includingDebord and Wolman) disrupted aCharlie Chaplin press conference inOctober 1952. The aesthete lettrists,

including the founder of lettrism,Isidore Isou, disavowed this action.The disrupters responded with anopen letter: We believe that the mostimperative expression of freedom isthe destruction of idols, especiallywhen those idols present themselvesin the name of freedom. Theprovocative tone of our leaflet was anattack against a unanimous servileadoration. The disavowal by certainlettrists, including Isou himself, onlyreveals the constantly reengendered

communication gap betweenextremists and ex-extremists.

Lettrist International participantsincluded Henry de Barn, SergeBerna, Michle Bernstein, Jean-LouisBrau, Ivan Chtcheglov, MohamedDahou, Guy Debord, AbdelhafidKhatib, Jean-Michel Mension, PatrickStraram,Alexander Trocchi and Gil JWolman. Those italicized were lateramong the original members of the SI.(Chtcheglov was never an SI member,

though he is listed in Raspaud andVoyers book as a membre de loin a fellow traveler and was perhapsconsidered a sort of honorary memberdue to his important earlycontributions.)

5. The SI subsequently renounced anysuch infiltration of other groups,considering that simultaneousmembership in two organizationstends to lead to manipulation.

Rapport sur la construction dessituations was one of the preparatorytexts for the July 1957 conference atCosio dArroscia, Italy, at which theSituationist International was founded.This translation by Ken Knabb is fromthe Situationist InternationalAnthology (Revised and ExpandedEdition, 2006). No copyright.

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