The American Section of the Situationist International Now in French

The French publishing house Collectif des Métiers De l’Édition (CMDE) has just published, under the rubric “Les reveilleurs de la nuit” (the Night Awakeners), Fabrice de San Mateo’s translations of three documents originally published in the late 1960s by the American section of the Situationist International: Post Mortem Ante Facto; the first (and only) issue of the section’s journal, entitled Situationist International; and the wall-poster entitled “Address to the High School Students of New York.” (Ironically, each of these texts has been out of print in the USA for almost 20 years.) None of these texts has ever been translated into French before, and so the publication of this collection – entitled Ecrits and available for purchase for 13 euros through the publisher’s website – is an important event in France.

The translator’s preface, “Les situationnistes aux Etats-Unis,” offers a succinct history of the American section, which included Robert Chasse, Bruce Elwell, Tony Verlaan and Jon Horelick. Based upon information and documents provided to the translator by Chasse and Elwell, this preface (once translated into English) will be quite helpful to historians of radical movements in America in the 1960s.

We have only one objection, and it concerns A Field Study in the Dwindling Force of Cognition Where it is Least Expected: A Critique of the Situationist International as a Revolutionary Organization, which Chasse and Elwell wrote and published in February-March 1970. Never translated into French, this text was, no doubt, not included in Ecrits because, technically speaking, it is not a publication of the American SI and was, in fact, written after its authors were excluded and/or had resigned from the SI as a whole. Though the SI never responded to it – indeed, the SI never even acknowledged its existence – it is an important text, a fact testified to by the translator’s use of it as a source of reliable information. (It is cited a total of four times in his “Preface.”)

It is for these reasons that the translator’s statement about it – “Whomever wants to get a more detailed idea about the crisis in the American section will, notably, refer to the following publications, which sets out 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)” – is simply insufficient.

First and foremost, as is indicated by the text’s subtitle, A Field Study is not primarily about “the crisis in the American section”: it is a critique of the SI itself. Second, unlike Horelick’s The Practice of Truth , A Field Study is a good critique of the SI as a whole: it is concrete, specific, detailed, and thoughtful. Third, it has never been translated into French (though it has long been available on-line), and so it isn’t clear how someone who is French and doesn’t read English would be able to “refer to it.” Fourth and finally, it does not set “out the contradictory points of view of the diverse protagonists”: it is an internally consistent text and “contradicts” nothing other than the SI’s hermetic view of itself and its final years, especially as this view is presented in Guy Debord and Gianfranco Sanguinetti’s The Real Split in the International, which was published in 1972.

We sincerely hope that the CMDE will someday remedy this deplorable situation by publishing a French translation of this long-neglected text.

See in french

NOT BORED!
13 March 2012

The American Section of the Situationist International

 Post Mortem Ante Facto and Address to the Public High School Students of New York
followed by The Situationist International
the section's first and only journal
(January 2012)

 

The journal of the American section of the Situationist International – the group that best expressed the authentic content of the May 68 revolution – is the first work published by the CMDE in its “Night Awakeners” collection.

The American section of the Situationist International, composed of Robert Chasse, Bruce Elwell, Jonathan Horelick and Tony Verlaan, was formed at the end of 1968.

The writings that we will publish here are all unpublished in French and long ago out-of-print in English. The first of these documents, “Address to the Public High School Students of New York” is a detourned comic-strip in the vein inaugurated by the [European] situationists. The second, “Post Mortem Ante Facto,” a wall-poster created on the occasion of the inauguration of Nixon, is a critique with Swiftian accents of the spectacle of electoral politics. The third, the first and only journal of the American section, is divided into five sections. “Faces of Recuperation” demonstrates that a good appreciation of the works of the Great Soft Heads of the American intelligentsia, from Marcuse, doctor of speculation, to the con artist McLuhan, is superior to these works themselves.[1] “Certain Extraordinary Considerations on the Devolution of Capitalism and the Bureaucratization of Existence,” signed by Robert Chasse, exposes – in the form of theses – a proletarian critique of the bureaucracy and its attempt to pacify existence.[2] The third and fourth articles, "Territorial Planning" (a translation of Chapter VII of Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle) and "Population Control," illustrate how modern capitalism, the bureaucratic society of consumption, attempts to shape all aspects of life by urbanistic methods as well as genetics. The fifth, "The Practice of Theory," exposes in a detailed fashion the activity of the American section (the distribution of situationist texts in the United States; the American reception of Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle and Raoul Vaneigem's Traite de savoir-vivre[3]; the activities of the Council for the Liberation of Everyday Life; the role of American situationists in May '68 and their analysis of the events), provides a portrait of "Cohn-Bendit as Representation" and formulates diverse ad hominem critiques of the representatives of American Leftism in all its variants.

A preface written by the translator retraces the history of the American section, sometimes relying upon unpublished information, and recalls the troubled historical conditions in which its members deployed their seditious activity.

In this time of relative jugglers and contingent contortions,[4] here are authors whom one will not allow oneself to add to the soft paste of false eclectic interest, like the Badious, the Negris and the Zizeks.[5]

The American section of the Situationist International demonstrated how opposition to the existing order is falsified but also rediscovered. At the moment that a vast occupations movement has appeared in America (some of its participants are overtly inspired by the situationists), one will read these writings attentively. They testify to what the situationist adventure in America was.

Portland Occupé !

[Translated by NOT BORED! on 8 December 2011. Footnotes by the translator.]

[1] Cf. Lautreamont, Poésies: “Judgments of poetry have more value than poetry.”

[2] Cf. Guy Debord's letter to Gerard Lebovici dated 29 September 1976 for more about “the bureaucratization of the world.”

[3] Translated in the 1960s as The Totality for Kids and in the 1980s as The Revolution of Everyday Life.

[4] Cf. Lautreamont, Poésies: “Personal poetry has had its day of relative jugglery and contingent contortions.”

[5] Cf. "Nos buts et nos méthodes dans le scandale de Strasbourg,” Internationale Situationniste, #11 October 1967: “On ne pourra pas se permettre de nous supporter, dans la pâte molle du faux intérêt éclectique, comme des Sartre, des Althusser, des Aragon, des Godard.”