The Most Illuminating Subversive Coup of Modern Times
Ken Knabb
misappropriating the funds of the Strasbourg Student Union.
Indeed, they openly admit to having made the union pay
nearly 5000 francs for the printing of 10,000 pamphlets, not
to mention the cost of other literature inspired by the
'Situationist International.' These publications express
aims and ideas which, to put it mildly, have nothing to do
with the purpose of a student union. . . . Rejecting all
morality and legal restraint, making sweeping denunciations
of their fellow students, their professors, God, religion,
the clergy, and the governments and political and social
systems of the entire world, these cynics do not hesitate to
advocate theft, the destruction of scholarship, the
abolition of work, total subversion, and a permanent
worldwide proletarian revolution with 'unrestrained
pleasure' as its only goal."
--Judge Llabador, Strasbourg District Court (1966)
The situationists' notorious Strasbourg pamphlet "ON THE
POVERTY OF STUDENT LIFE" -- the prelude to the May 1968
revolt in France -- has been translated into more than a
dozen languages and reprinted in over half a million copies.
A new English translation, more accurate than any of the
previous versions, is now online at
http://www.slip.net/~knabb/SI/poverty.htm
Chapter 1 of the pamphlet is a scathing denunciation of
every aspect of student life, "economic, political,
psychological, sexual, and especially intellectual." Chapter
2 examines the positive features and limits of rebellious
youth currents of the sixties (delinquents, Dutch Provos,
American New Left, East European dissidents, British
antibomb movement, Japanese Zengakuren). Chapter 3 is the
best summary ever written of the lessons to be drawn from
the failure of the old revolutionary movement and of what
needs to be done to develop a new one.
The site also includes new translations of the situationist
articles "Our Goals and Methods in the Strasbourg Scandal"
and "Beginning of an Era" (on the May '68 revolt). There is
also a brief discussion of the scandal in chapter 2 of "The
Joy of Revolution."
* * *
The Bureau of Public Secrets website, which has received
over 30,000 page hits from some 6000 visitors during its
first five months, features Ken Knabb's translations of
French situationist texts as well as many of Knabb's own
writings, including "The Joy of Revolution," "Confessions of
a Mild-Mannered Enemy of the State," and an assortment of
comics, leaflets and articles on Wilhelm Reich, Kenneth
Rexroth, Gary Snyder, the sixties counterculture, radical
women, Chinese anarchists, socially engaged Buddhists, urban
"psychogeography," the Watts riot, the Iranian uprising, the
Gulf war, and the recent jobless revolt in France. New texts
are being added every few days.
BUREAU OF PUBLIC SECRETS
http://www.slip.net/~knabb
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Perceptor
This is my kind of site.
History written by those who were there.
barrett john erickson
>BUREAU OF PUBLIC SECRETS
http://www.slip.net/~knabb/
be careful folks, the analysis and critique of the Situationist
International can be a dangerous to your complacency.
see also:
http://www.nothingness.org/SI/index.html
http://www.panix.com/~notbored/
-- barrett
bar...@MagneticFields.org
http://www.MagneticFields.org/
"Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of
the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and
future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be
perceived as contradictions."
...André Breton
Perceptor
> Ken Knabb wrote in message <78ibso$cjk$1...@owl.slip.net>...
>
> >BUREAU OF PUBLIC SECRETS
> http://www.slip.net/~knabb/
>
> be careful folks, the analysis and critique of the Situationist
> International can be a dangerous to your complacency.
>
====================================
Excerpy from:
An Introduction to the
Situationist International
http://www.panix.com/~notbored/intro.html
=========================================
As recently as the 1940s, art forms which shared punk's ugliness,
dissonance, and bohemian roots -- dada and surrealism in the visual
arts, existentialism in philosophy, and serialism in music, to name
but a few -- were considered scandalous and offensive by
middle-class culture. Whatever notoriety these art forms attained in
their day, they were suppressed for being attempts to destroy
aesthetic, political and moral values. Since then, middle-class
culture has come to regard these works of art as "classics," as
"realistic" perspectives on society, things to be studied in the
universities and copied -- minus their critical edge -- by the
advertising industry. As a result, our generation (I am 25) has
grown up with the mistaken idea that these gestures of opposition
are reified monuments to a dead culture, rather than starting points
in our efforts to create a world without alienation or boredom.
barrett john erickson
Perceptor wrote in message <36AD24F5...@optonline.net>...
>====================================
>Excerpy from:
>An Introduction to the
> Situationist International
>http://www.panix.com/~notbored/intro.html
>=========================================
>
>As recently as the 1940s, art forms which shared punk's ugliness,
>dissonance, and bohemian roots -- dada and surrealism in the visual
>advertising industry. As a result, our generation (I am 25) has
>grown up with the mistaken idea that these gestures of opposition
>are reified monuments to a dead culture, rather than starting points
>in our efforts to create a world without alienation or boredom.
>
thanks for the quote, Don.
for further context, we should note that those who began the SI felt a
need to break away from "surrealism" because of this perceived absorption
("recuperation") by the existing order (the Society of the Spectacle) --
they
felt it _had already_ become a kind of static shrine to "gestures of
opposition" past.
i don't think i'd argue with that assessment of the "surrealism" of the
mid-50's to early 60's. this was, in my opinion, a period in which very
little of
interest was happening beyond the fractures (except, of course in the USA
where
the beats were laying the foundations of surrealist resurrection).
[but contrast the SI's position with those who've expressed the need to
break
from "surrealism" today, due to frustrated religious inclinations, or so as
an adopted nihilist posture of simple opposition (dada envy), or consider
"Andrea's" various "neu" scenarios of passionless manipulations,
homogenization
and apathetic alienation from flattened desire (post-modernism) -- all of
which
clearly (to anyone who's familiar with the SI critique) _reinforce_ The
Spectacle.]
by the mid to late 60's the SI had developed a social analysis which was far
more astute than any the surrealists had achieved. unfortunately, it had
also felt the need to dismiss art as a hopelessly compromised activity.
while it was never _about_ art -- and has always denounced mercenaries like
avida dollars -- "surrealism" has never lost sight of the critical
importance of art
as a liberating exploratory activity. creative exploration has always been
at the
core of the surrealist project.
although it has (re)integrated many of the SI's concerns and analysis, and
regained some of its lost vitality it often seems to me that the
disagreements
i have now or in the past with "surrealism" (as well as all of my failings
on a
personal level) are all directly measured by the degree to which this
(re)integration is incomplete.