Suite des informations concernant la section USA de l'I.S.
The Situationists in the United States[1]
“Curious emissaries travel across Europe, and even farther; they meet, carriers of unbelievable instructions.” (IS #5, December 1960).
The Situationist International, which emerged from the Dadaist, Surrealist and Lettrist avant-gardes, was founded on 28 July 1957 in Cosio d’Arroscia, in Italy, a year after the Workers’ Councils in Hungary. In the course of its first period (from 1957 to 1961), this revolutionary movement, positioned at the ultimate outposts of culture, proposed to impassion everyday life by seeking the surpassing of art. Its goal? To create situations. This conquest of everyday life was also a critique of the “everyday life that has been rendered impossible.” From then on, as the SI recalled in 1961, “the different moments of situationist activity until now can only be understood in the perspective of a new appearance of revolution, not only cultural, but social, as well, and whose field of application will immediately become vaster than all previous attempts.”[2]
The publication of “Theses on the Paris Commune” opened the second period of the SI and marked its engagement in revolutionary history. “The Watts Rebellion of 1965 confirmed that proletarian revolution was returning to sight on the broadened bases elaborated by situationist theory.”[3] In this perspective, the situationists worked, “with diverse other forces in the world, at the linkage and theoretical and practical organization of a new revolutionary movement” (IS #9, August 1964).[4] The Strasbourg scandal in the fall of 1966 marked an important qualitative leap in the international distribution of the SI’s theses. The seizure of the local section of the Union nationale des étudiants de France (UNEF) at the University of Strasbourg by pro-situationist students and the publication, at the expense of the UNEF’s Strasbourg section, of Mustapha Khayati’s pamphlet On the Poverty of Student Life, Considered in its Economic, Political, Psychological, Sexual and Especially Intellectual Aspects, and Several Means of Remedying It, made the headlines of the national press. The writings of the situationists became fashionable in the “student movement.”
The SI then observed: “Without completely neglecting the utility that the diffusion of certain summary truths had in slightly accelerating the movement that carried backward French youth towards the awareness of a forthcoming and more general crisis in society, we believe that a much clearer importance is attributable to the distribution of the text, as a factor of clarification, in several other countries in which such a process is already quite a bit more obvious. (…) The theses of On the Poverty of Student Life have been much more clearly understood in the United States and England” (IS #11, October 1967).[5] Khayati indeed emphasized the specific contradictions of the process that is at the heart of the American way of death,[6] since the revolt of American youth “largely remains attached to the two relatively accidental aspects of the American crisis: the Blacks and Vietnam” (On the Poverty of Student Life).
The hot summers[7] set ablaze the Black ghettos of several large American cities. In Watts, violent riots exploded in South [Central] Los Angeles on 11 August 1965. “An incident between traffic cops and passersby led to two days of spontaneous rioting. The growing reinforcements of the forces of order were not able to take back control of the streets. Towards the third day, the Blacks took up arms, pillaging the accessible armories, with the result that they were even able to fire on the police’s helicopters. Thousands of soldiers and cops – the military weight of an infantry division, supported by tanks – had to be thrown into the struggle to confine the revolt to the Watts area; then, to reconquer the area through many street-fights, which lasted several days, the insurgents proceeded to the generalized pillage of the stores, which they then set on fire. According to the official accounts, there were 32 deaths, 27 of them among the Blacks, more than 800 wounded people, and 3,000 people imprisoned.”[8] In the following years, the riots that shook America grew in number. The insurrection of the Blacks culminated with the riots in Newark and Detroit in July 1967.
Thanks to the opposition to the war in Vietnam, troubles also agitated the American universities. Three major events punctuated this period: the occupation of Columbia in April 1968; the agitation at the University of [California at] Berkeley in May 1968, which led to the instauration of a permanent state of emergency in California; and the confrontations between the students and the police at the time of the convention of the Democratic Party in Chicago in August 1968.
The unified critical theory – in the light of which the situationists understood these diverse revolts – aroused a growing interest in the United States, in particular from 1966 on. Several situationist texts, such as “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacular-Market Economy,” the “Address to the Revolutionaries of Algeria and All Countries,” and Raoul Vaneigem’s “Basic Banalities,” began to be distributed there.
The situation [at the time] is excellent.[9] It was in this atmosphere that a Dutch travel-guide named Tony Verlaan arrived in New York in March 1967. This curious emissary, who had been implicated in the Strasbourg scandal,[10] met two comrades, Robert Chasse and Bruce Elwell, the very night of his arrival. That autumn, they created the Council for the Liberation of Everyday Life, a group of situationist inspiration.
The arrival of Verlaan marked the [beginning of the] practical engagement of the SI in the United States. On March 18 [1967], Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, on behalf of the Situationist International, had sent Verlaan an “official document” to be used when there was need of it. The document specified that, “Comrade Tony Verlaan has our complete confidence, and can make all useful contacts, in our name, during his stay in the United States.”[11] In April 1967, Verlaan used his mandate to open an SI post office box in New York (POB 491, Cooper Station, New York, 10003). He translated, rewrote and printed up 10,000 copies of Mustapha Khayati’s pamphlet, On the Poverty of Student Life. In the 11th issue of I[nternationale] S[ituationniste], the journal of the French section, this pamphlet was included in a photograph of the different editions of the Strasbourg text.[12]
Verlaan’s activity during the first six months of his stay in the United States were centered around Black Mask, an anarchist collective founded by the painter Ben Morea. Verlaan publicly took part in its demonstrations. He published an extract from On the Poverty of Student Life – before its complete publication as a pamphlet – in Black Mask’s bulletin. He signed an article in issue #7, August-September 1967, and co-signed “Culture and Revolution” in issue #8, October-November 1967. But immediately afterwards Verlaan broke with Morea, who had solicited the support of the SDS (Student for a Democratic Society)[13] on the day of the great march against the Vietnam War, in the course of which the demonstrators tried to get inside the Pentagon, which was protected by the army.
At the beginning of autumn, Verlaan printed up editions of Ten Days That Shook the University – the Situationists at Strasbourg,[14] “The Totality for Kids,”[15] “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacular Commodity-Economy,”[16] etc. In the same period, the Council for the Liberation of Everyday Life published three texts by Chasse on the insurrections in the ghettos of the United States that took place in the summer of 1967 (under the title “Hall of Mirrors”).[17]
Vaneigem arrived in New York in mid-November as the delegate of all the situationists. They estimated that, after the many translations and especially after the opening of an SI post office box, which obviously engaged their responsibility, it was urgent to establish exactly with whom they would be in agreement and in contact in New York. One fact particularly worried them. Verlaan had gone several months without making the least contact with them. Shortly after his arrival in the United States, the situationists had, in vain, demanded from the SI’s post office box in New York the supplementary copies of On the Poverty of Student Life. Vaneigem’s trip allowed the group to clear up the preoccupying mystery of the American mail. As the American contacts of the SI explained at the time, the letters from the post office box were being systematically captured by the New York Police Department. Debord informed the English situationists Christopher Gray and Donald Nicholson-Smith of this “postal interference” and of the envisioned riposte: “The police have seized all of our packages of journals and documents – and we do not know how many letters. The box office post definitely exists, but up to now nothing of what has been sent there (from the US as well as from abroad) has been delivered; it is always empty. They [the Americans] want to try to slip into their publications a supplementary prospectus that re-routes the mail to our POB in London.”[18]
Vaneigem applied his mandate, notably in his discussions with Chasse, Elwell and Verlaan, who were the most-developed contacts in the United States. On the other hand, he refused to meet Morea, the editor of the Black Mask bulletin, with whom the American comrades of the SI “had been in conflict on almost all the questions that revolutionary action posed and whose intellectual honesty they contested. Moreover, Vaneigem had already refused to speak any further with a certain Hoffman, who had eulogistically developed to him a mystical interpretation of his text ‘Basic Banalities’ and who was at that moment Morea’s principal collaborator: the enormity of this detail justly incited Vaneigem to not even want to discuss the ensemble of our disagreements with Morea.”[19]
As the situationists in Paris wrote to the members of the English section on 28 November 1967, “Raoul’s accord with Robert and Tony was immediately translated [into action] by a series of practical breaks in the best style – indispensible – of the SI elsewhere. This was done in such a manner that the New York scoundrels are, fortunately, disgusted. We can add that the repelled cretins have already begun a campaign of [writing] hostiles inscriptions at Tony’s house.”[20] Vaneigem, estimating that Chasse and Verlaan were already correctly engaged in the situationists’ struggles, asked them if they wanted to become members of the SI. They declared that they did not – at least not yet. To make their adhesion to the SI serious, Chasse and Verlaan felt the necessity of writing at least one important text, which would immediately reveal their appropriation of the critical method of the situationists by applying it to American conditions.
However, in January 1968, Verlaan joined the SI. Benefiting from a trip to the West Coast in the winter and spring of 1968, he published several situationist texts in Helix, an underground journal in Seattle: Ten Days That Shook the University, illustrated by comics, and an original text of his own on the student revolts in Germany, Italy and Poland. During this time Chasse wrote The Power of Negative Thinking, Or Robin Hood Rides Again.[21] He brought it out as a publication of the Council for the Liberation of Everyday Life with Elwell’s help.
During the spring of 1968, disorder came to all the American campuses. Violent confrontations and occupations took place at Southern University in New Orleans, Harvard University in Cambridge, the universities of Berkeley, San Francisco, Saint Louis, and Memphis, the City College of New York and Columbia. In May, the Black students who occupied one of the buildings at Cornell University armed themselves with guns, pistols and knives. Shortly afterwards, their example spread to Denmark University (South Carolina) and the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University at Greensboro.
At Columbia University in New York, which rose up on 23 April, the students opposed the planned construction of a gymnasium on a park in Morningside Heights, near Harlem, after its Black occupants were expulsed. They also questioned the collaboration of the University with the Pentagon’s Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA).[22] This aspect of the struggle verified the analysis that had been formulated in On the Poverty of Student Life: “By revolting against their studies, the American students have immediately questioned a society that has need of such studies. Likewise, their revolt (in Berkeley and elsewhere) against the university hierarchy is affirmed right away as a revolt against the entire social system that is based on hierarchy and the dictatorship of the economy and the State.”
The demonstrations at Columbia ended in the stoppage of classes and the occupation of five buildings on campus. One of them, the Columbia Teachers College, was occupied by several individuals who were not all students, were strangers to the bureaucracy of the SDS and were opposed to the Leninists of all types who rallied around it. They formed the Radical Action Cooperative[23] (RAC). Verlaan engaged in discussion with some of its members and, as a result of this contact, the RAC proclaimed its affinities with the SI. Rapidly, the situationist came to share the communal dwelling of the RAC and to participate in its activities. But shortly before the formation of the American section of the SI, Verlaan undertook to separate himself formally from the RAC. Subsequently, the [journal entitled] Situationist International would return to the defeat at Columbia and the limits of the RAC (in the section “Falsified Opposition”).
The majority of these events, organized by politicians, contributed to the “mythological scenario of spectacular opposition”[24] in the United States. But “class violence sometimes escapes [control by] its manipulators” (Situationist International #1). The wild ventures at Zap[25] and Madison more particularly retained the attention of the situationists. At Zap, the 1,5000 students who came there for their spring vacation, not finding room in the two bars there, got drunk, set fires with all that they could find and stole food. The sacking of the business district provoked panic among the mayor and the State authorities, who appealed to the National Guard to expel the looters. In Madison (Wisconsin), where – thanks to the SDS – around 1,000 copies of On The Poverty of Student Life had been distributed, a hippy[26] festival in the streets was transformed into a battle that involved a thousand students and lasted five hours.
Three weeks after [the events at] Columbia, the Sorbonne [in Paris] was occupied in its turn. Chasse, Elwell and Verlaan welcomed the events of May 68 with an enthusiasm that surpassed their reaction to the insurrections of 1967 in the American ghettos. In response to the requests of their situationist comrades in Paris, they translated and mimeographed the “Address to All Workers” (signed by the SI-Enrages Committee). They distributed it through the mail, as they did with the “Minimum Definition of Revolutionary Organizations” (published in IS #11, October 1967) and an original text, “The Enraged in France,” a short communiqué that retraced the events in their broad lines and that was intended to shred the stupidities spouted on the subject in the United States.
“We are happy to learn of the definitive constitution of your group.” (Letter from the French section of the SI to Robert Chasse, 13 January 1969)[27]
On 23 October 1968, Chasse wrote to the Parisian situationists. He showed his desire to join the SI, if it subscribed to [the idea of] his projected journal and distributed the texts of the Council as publications of the SI. On 4 November, a letter signed by the members of the French section gave their accord to Chasse’s membership. This letter made the following clear: “As soon as Tony and you are in agreement on the membership of Bruce, we will also consider Bruce to be a member of the SI (if he wants to be one).”[28] On the subject of the Council’s texts, it added: “Those of us who have already read ‘Robin Hood Rides Again’ find it to be generally good and say that there is no fundamental critique to be made of it.” And, shortly after the constitution of the American section, the Parisian situationists wrote to Chasse: “Naturally we have no objection to the reprinting of ‘Robin Hood’ under the SI label.”[29]
At the moment that Chasse joined the SI, Elwell prepared a comic strip, “Address to New York Public School Students,” [created] in the vein of the comic-strips detourned by the [European] situationists. He composed these four-page comics with images borrowed from three anthologies of Pogo.[30] The subject of this detournement was the union-led strike of the teachers in New York in the autumn of 1968, of which the Council had made a review in its text “The Newest School Buildings Are Indistinguishable From the Newest Prisons or the Newest Industrial Complexes.” “Many exemplary things were happening in the chaos that so unnerved all the bureaucrats.”[31] These detourned comics appeared on 12 November 1968 as a publication of the Situationist International.[32] At the same time, Elwell became a member of the SI in his turn.
The American section of the SI took form. The distribution lists of the SI and the Council were established. A declaration was prepared, announcing the dissolution of the Council and the appearance of the first issue of Situationist International. In December 1968, this declaration was posted with the last three texts of the Council[33] and “The Great Late Show of Opposition,” Verlaan’s detourned comic-strip that mocked the “International Student Conference” held in New York in September 1968. A text by Chasse about [Herbert] Marcuse[34] was mimeographed and distributed in the form of a tract on the occasion of a soiree to benefit the Guardian. An augmented version was later published in Situationist International under the title “A Doctor of Speculation.”
Shortly afterwards, Verlaan left for California for four months. There, in February 1969, he reprinted Vaneigem’s “Totality for Kids” and “Ten Days that Shook the University” (under the title On the Poverty of Student Life), illustrated by extracts from diverse situationist comics that had appeared in that pamphlet. For his part, Elwell wrote the [text for the] wall poster “Post Mortem Ante Facto,” published in January 1969, on the occasion of the inauguration of President Richard Nixon.[35]
Verlaan returned to the East [Coast] at the end of spring 1969. Meanwhile, Jonathan Horelick approached the American section of the SI. Verlaan had met him through the SDS a year and a half earlier, and they had established friendly connections. In the fall of 1968, Horelick’s critical evolution had led him to write an excellent attack [une excellente charge] upon the stupidities of the SDS. At the moment that the American section was forming, Verlaan evoked the possibility that his friend might quickly join the SI. In the opinion of Elwell and Verlaan, Horelick was, in the spring [of 1969], [solid] on the SI’s positions and had their critical trust. He wrote a critique of the Marxist economists Baran and Sweezy that would be included, under the title “The Comedy of the Reappearance of Economic Tragedy,” in Situationist International #1. In May 1969, the night of Verlaan’s departure for Europe, he became a member of the SI in his turn.
Shortly afterwards, the first issue of Situationist International, the “journal of the American section of the SI,” was completed. Not counting the aforementioned text by Horelick, the first part of the journal was principally drafted by Chasse. “The Practice of Theory” was almost entirely written by Elwell. Verlaan left the United States after starting “The Who’s Who of the Mini-Stars of the Mini-Spectacle (Selected Listing),” which would be completed by Chasse, Elwell and Horelick.[36]
Lacking money, they abandoned a number of anticipated illustrations, which were to appear alongside the translation of Debord’s text “Territorial Planning,” [which was] chapter VII of The Society of the Spectacle, and the article on population control that follows it, in particular. Among these illustrations, one represented the disposition of seats on an airplane, while another a ship carrying slaves.[37]
The journal was sent to the printer in mid-June 1969. The printer promised to fill the order by the end of the month, but he didn’t deliver the copies until the beginning of August. What is more, he increased the number of errors – the majority of which appeared in “The Practice of Theory” – not counting the corrections [already] indicated on the proofs.[38]
Chasse, Elwell and Horelick reunited in New York, dealt with the printer and made plans for the distribution of the journal before their departure for Europe.
“In the [political] parties, one has more difficulty living with those who are in them than acting against those who are opposed to them” (Cardinal de Retz, Memoires).
At the end of September, the three American situationists arrived in Paris and met up with Verlaan there. The reunions were turbulent. Old contentions between Chasse and Elwell, on the one hand, and Verlaan, on the other, forcefully resurfaced. Added to these difficult relations was a new one that would be full of consequences. Horelick and Verlaan announced that they would be traveling across Europe and working together during the months to come – Horelick would remain in close written contact with Chasse and Elwell during this period of time.
Soon after their Parisian meeting, the members of the American section participated in the Seventh Conference of the SI in Venice. “It was constantly surrounded and watched by a large number of spies, Italian or delegates from other police departments. One part of this Conference managed to formulate good analyses of revolutionary politics in Europe and America.”[39] During this period, the American situationists, despite the geographical distance that would separate them in the months to come, agreed to work on several projects: the conception of the second issue of Situationist International, a text about the Workers Councils, and the preparations for a meeting of delegates from the SI in January 1970.
Chasse and Elwell returned to America on 10 October 1969. On 7 November, having received in the meantime only a laconic note from Horelick, Chasse and Elwell – who didn’t know where their two comrades were – concluded that it was no longer possible to suppose that the American section was functioning. There followed an exchange of letters between the members of the American section that was complicated by their geographical dispersion. Chasse and Elwell subsequently summarized their grievances: “Since November 1969, as members of the American section of the SI, we opposed the lack of participation in the projects of the section by the section’s other half, Horelick and Verlaan (then in Europe). We sent them an ultimatum to make clear the seriousness and urgency of the matter. When we got Verlaan’s ‘reaction,’ we excluded him.”[40] On 3 December 1969, the French section reacted in these terms:[41]
“Considering the letters exchanged within the American section since Venice, notably the announcement of an ‘exclusion’ of Comrade Verlaan, and the reaction of Comrade Horelick to this news, as well as the interventions of Comrades Riesel and Sanguinetti in the debate and the circular addressed to the SI by the Italian section[42] on 26 November,"
“Considering that an exclusion of this type, or even one vaguely resembling it, has never occurred in the SI, and that it puts into question all the bases and all the methods on which our accord is founded,"
“The French section categorically rejects this exclusion in its content as well as in its form.”
And the French section concluded that it “regrets that the deplorable internal situation of the American section since its formation was not submitted for discussion at the conference in Venice” and “demands that the examination of the crisis of the American section, and the practical consequences that it obviously must involve, should be the first subject to be dealt with at the meeting of the delegates in Luxembourg.”
In their circular of 3 December 1969,[43] Chasse and Elwell stuck to their positions and declared that they refused [to accept] the circular of the Italian section,[44] which had refused the exclusion of Verlaan. . . . On 19 December,[45] the French section made the following irrevocable decision [tranche sans retour]: “The entirety of the International has already refused the exclusion of Comrade Verlaan by qualifying it as a false exclusion. It goes without saying that those who have pronounced a false exclusion are excluded by this very fact. All that was discussable has been discussed; there is no more.” For their part, Chasse and Elwell, considering that they [too] had nothing to discuss with a section that assumed an executive role, sent a letter of resignation[46] on 28 December.[47]
Soon thereafter, in March 1970, an orientation debate at the heart of the SI began. In his note to all the sections, Debord observed that “the difficulties of the last four months in the American and Italian sections have been particularly regrettable in that they have slowed down the extensive development of the SI, which was almost our only achievement [notre seule réalisation] in 1969 (…) Comrade Verlaan has recently defined quite well what is necessary [for us] to combat, by remarking that ‘where the revolutionary practice of the SI has been lacking, interpersonal relations have inevitably become the only practice.’”[48] Meanwhile, the crisis of the SI, marked by a growing inactivity in theory and in practice, led Debord, Riesel and Viénet to constitute a tendency that was announced by the “Declaration” of 11 November 1970.[49] On 29 December,[50] it was followed by a split between the surviving partisans [le dernier carré des partisans] of the tendency of 11 November (Debord, Riesel, Sanguinetti and Viénet)[51] and the two remaining members of the American section (Horelick and Verlaan). Debord and Sanguinetti later presented this split in these terms: “Beyond the errors that one could note in their practice or their pretentions in our organizational relations, we make it known that their participation in our activities had been at all times too minimal for us to be able to continue to consider ourselves as co-responsible for what they would do. Their split would even prefer to not present itself for long as such and became, under the title Create Situations,[52] an autonomous group in which Verlaan at least pursued an activity principally devoted to the translation into English of the old texts of the SI.”[53]
Whoever wishes to get a more detailed idea of the crisis in the American section will, notably, refer to the following publications, which espouse the contradictory points of view of the diverse protagonists: A Field Study in the Dwindling Force of Cognition Where It Is Least Expected: A Critique of the Situationist International as a Revolutionary Organization, R. Chasse and B. Elwell; [and] “The Practice of Truth: The Crisis of the Situationist International,” Jon Horelick (Diversion #1, June 1973).
To what usage can one put a publication that cannot be placed in any of the categories of intellectual production that the still-dominant society wants to take into consideration, [a publication] that wasn’t written from the point of view of any of the specialized trades that it encourages? At the moment when there has appeared in the United States a vast occupations movement,[54] in which certain participants are overtly inspired by the situationists, such a publication will not in any case be innocent.
All my gratitude goes to Robert Chasse and Bruce Elwell. Putting their confidence in me, they have provided me with a number of documents and pieces of information.
I have drawn the greatest benefit from the commentaries and information furnished by Kyra Revenko and Julien Azam, and by Laurent Claret’s particularly attentive reading of the translation.
(Translated from the French by NOT BORED! 19 March 2012.)
Remake La Société du Spectacle: https://www.furk.net/df/e673cfc685191f42
[1] Unless otherwise noted, all citations come from Guy Debord, Correspondance, Volumes 3, 4 and 0, Fayard. [Translator: since translations have been made of all these citations, we have referred our readers to them.]
[2] Translator: from “Instructions for Taking Up Arms,” IS #6, August 1961.
[3] Robert Chasse and Bruce Elwell, A Field Study in the Dwindling Force of Cognition Where It Is Least Expected: A Critique of the Situationist International as a Revolutionary Organization (1970). [Translator: rather than translating this text back into English, we have relied upon the original version.]
[4] Translator: the text in question is the “Response to a Questionnaire from the Center for Socio-Experimental Art.”
[5] Translator: “Our Methods and Goals in the Strasbourg Scandal.”
[6] Translator: English in original.
[7] Translator: English in original.
[8] “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacular-Market Economy” (IS #10, March 1966).
[9] Translator: detournement of a phrase by Mao Tse-Tung.
[10] Verlaan had taken the side of the SI against the “Garnautins.” The situationists Théo Frey, Jean Garnault and Herbert Holl were “excluded for having lied as a group, with the goal of obtaining the exclusion of Khayati” (IS #11). [Translator: “The Alsatian Ideology.”]
[12] In December 1967, the SI would, nevertheless, demand “the immediate destruction of all the remaining copies of a) the translation of the Strasbourg comics, b) the translation of the pamphlet entitled On the Poverty, because they are truly bad.” [Translator: http://www.notbored.org/debord-5December1967.html.]
[13] Translator: English in original.
[14] Complete English translation of La Misere en milieu étudiant, augmented by notes and the text “If You Make a Social Revolution, Do It For Fun.”
[15] Banalités de base, by Raoul Vaneigem (translation by Christopher Gray).
[16] Translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith.
[19] IS #12 (“The Latest Exclusions”).
[22] Columbia’s military research contracts procured for it non-negligible grants.
[23] Translator: English in original.
[24] R. Chasse and B. Elwell, op. cit.
[25] Translator: according to Wikipedia, “The Zip to Zap riot of May 9–11, 1969 in Zap, North Dakota, was originally intended as a spring break diversion. As a result of an article that originally appeared in the North Dakota State University’s The Spectrum newspaper, and [which] was later picked up by the AP, between 2000 and 3000 people descended upon the small town of Zap, located in Mercer County in the west central part of the state, nearly 300 miles (482 km) from the NDSU campus. A few accounts have also referred to the name of the event as the ‘Zap-in.’ The small country town's resources became depleted, the amiable revelry began to turn ugly, and the residents of Zap asked the visitors to leave. Some complied, but others stayed behind. The event became a full-fledged riot. The National Guard was called in and the crowd was dispersed. The Zip to Zap would go down in history as the only official riot in the history of North Dakota that was put down by the National Guard.”
[26] Translator: English in original.
[30] A favorite of Chasse and Elwell. In the opinion of Elwell, Pogo was the only voice of opposition that appeared regularly in the American bourgeois press in the 1950s and early 1960s.
[31] R. Chasse and B. Elwell, op. cit.
[33] “The Newest School Buildings Are Indistinguishable From the Newest Prisons or the Newest Industrial Complexes,” “Reply to Murray Bookchin Concerning His Theories on the Recent French ‘Revolution,’” and “An Open Letter to [the] Radical Action Cooperative (RAC), Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Students, Faculty, [and] Others Enraged by University Life.”
[36] According to Elwell’s recollections, Chasse and he wrote the note on Bookchin and completed the one on Morea.
[37] These illustrations are probably lost.
[38] The reprinting made in 1993 by Extreme Press is faulty, as is the version proposed on the Internet by [the website called] “Situationist International On-Line.”
[39] Guy Debord and Gianfranco Sanguinetti, The Real Split in the International.
[40] R. Chasse and B. Elwell, op. cit. [Translator: the rest of this sentence reads: “not over any failures of his regarding the ultimatum, but as the expression of the realization that there was no possibility of mutual agreement with him (he turned reality on its head).”]
[42] Translator: it seems that no copies of this circular have survived.
[43] Translator: it seems that no copies of this circular have survived.
[46] Translator: it seems that no copies of this letter have survived.
[47] Debord wrote to Horelick on 6 January 1970: “Bob and Bruce have quite understood that they were excluded: they have sent us a letter saying that they have ‘resigned’ due to the totalitarianism of the French section.” [Translator: http://www.notbored.org/debord-6January1970.html.]
[51] Translator: Raoul Vaneigem resigned on 14 November 1970.
[52] Translator: English in original.
[53] G. Debord and G. Sanguinetti, op. cit.
