Rasmussen - The SI Surrealism and The Difficult Fusion of Art and Politics

mikk
ssen
The Situationist International,
Surrealism, and the Difcult Fusion
of Art and Politics
Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen

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The Situationist International, Surrealism, and the
Difcult Fusion of Art and Politics
This article has two inter-related aims. Firstly, I want to contribute to the
growing debate about the politics and political theories of the Situationist
International and Surrealism. Through a presentation of an episode where the
later situationists distanced themselves from the surrealist favourite Chaplin, I
will attempt to account for the way the surrealists and the situationists
respectively engaged in politics, how they tried to locate themselves on the left
and tried to navigate in a environment dominated by the French Communist
Party. After a discussion of the complicated relationship between Surrealism
and the Communist Party and Trotskyism, I analyse how the situationists after
World War Two attempted to continue the project of the inter-war avant-
garde without repeating what they considered to be failures of Surrealism. I
present the situationists' repudiation of the unconscious and their conscious
effort to leave the art world in favour of ultra-left politics outside the connes
of the Communist Party. Secondly, I want to offer some hypotheses as to why
the Situationist International has been marginalised within theories of the
avant-garde. Through a discussion of Peter Burger's important 1|.c., c |.
+oco.1., I look into the strange omission of the situationists within
accounts of the avant-garde and I unravel the roots of the situationists' and
Burger's categorical critique of the neo-avant-garde.
I
On 29 October 1952, Charlie Chaplin held his nal press conference in Paris
after the successful French premier of his new lm t..!.|.
1
The previous
week Chaplin had been in London, where he opened the European launching
of his new lm. In London, as in Paris and Rome, Chaplin was a sensation, and
at the gala premier, 200 policemen were called out to keep around 10,000
spectators at a distance. The BBC was present and recorded the entire scene,
where long rows of Rolls-Royces and Bentleys dropped off public gures such
as Princess Margaret, Lady Mountbatten, the Duke of Alba, Vivien Leigh, and
Douglas Fairbanks Jr. It was as if everyone of importance in England had
gathered to celebrate the homecoming of the exiled king of lm.
Chaplin was in exile because he had been refused automatic entry to the
United States after his tour in Europe; he had paradoxically become a pawn in
and victim of a political game at a time when he had otherwise retracted his
former controversial political viewpoints and created a melancholic auto-
biographical love lm. While Chaplin had openly expressed sympathy for the
International and domestic communism in the 1940s, around 1950 he began to
resist making political comments and attempted to dissociate himself from his
former viewpoints. Throughout the 1940s, Chaplin had repeatedly aired his
support and admiration for the Soviet Union in interviews, and he had been
active in the left-wing environment in Hollywood that arose among exiled
Europeans like Hanns Eisler and Berthold Brecht. The lm Mc..o. ..1co
from 1947 thus presented a social critique of capitalistic society and, unlike
Chaplin's previous lms, contained few traditional comical elements. Rather,
1. For accounts of the events surrounding the
release of Chaplin's t..!.|, see Charles
J. Maland, c|o!. o1 +....o co!o.. 1|.
ic!o.c c o :o. io. (Princeton University
Press: Princeton, 1989), pp. 221313, and
Kenneth S. Lynn, c|o.!.. c|o!. o1 |. 1..
(Simon & Schuster: New York, 1997),
pp. 47291.
Oxford Art Journal 27.3 # Oxford University Press 2004; all rights reserved OXFORD ART JOURNAL 27.3 2004 365387

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the comedy that it contained was macabre. The lm was also a nancial asco,
and shortly afterward Chaplin began pulling away from his former obvious
political commitment. However, at that time the FBI had already registered
him as a communist sympathiser, and two members of Congress had
demanded that he should be deported from the United States. Even though
Chaplin manifestly played down the political viewpoints he previously
advanced, and despite a major ad campaign focusing on his traditional
character the comical and loveable tramp he became entangled in the
wide-ranging shift in public opinion that took place in the US from 1947 to
1951. Once the enthusiasm after the defeat of fascism in World War Two had
abated, there was a return to the anti-communist atmosphere of the 1930s,
and the Cold War became a reality. After a number of different events the
USSR detonates an atom bomb, the Maoists in China win in 1949, the Korean
War breaks out, Klaus Fuchs, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg are revealed as spies
a xenophobic anti-communist atmosphere achieved a hegemonic status in the
US. Joseph McCarthy, who headed a witch-hunt against assumed communists
from 1949 onward, incarnated an extreme form of anti-communism. It is in
this enamed climate Chaplin attempted to salvage his status as a star, as a
loveable, funny, and hard-working comedian. In interviews, he refrained from
expressing support for the Soviet Union, saying instead: Ì am not political . . .
I am an individualist and believe in liberty. This is as far as my political
convictions go . . . In modern times where everything is being regimented the
artist must more than ever think of the internal life of the individual, of this
unique phenomenon which is a human being, the artist must create for him'.
2
But regardless of these measures, the US revoked his permission to return
after his tour in Europe.
In contrast to the treatment he received in the US, Chaplin was celebrated
like a king in Europe. According to o...,, at the premier in London he
received more applause than Princess Margaret, and a few days after the
premiere he was received in audience by Queen Elizabeth. Nor in Paris was
pomp in short supply. Chaplin was admitted as a member of the Legion of
Honour, received by various public ofcials including the Paris police chief,
and the newspapers were overowing with articles on him. Thus, on 29
October, Chaplin held his nal press conference in Paris at the Ritz Hotel. In
the middle of the session, four men suddenly started shouting and began
throwing yers out over the entire gathering. The yer, an A4 sheet written
on a typewriter, carried the heading `NO MORE FLAT FEET', and read:
Sub-Mack Sennett director, sub-Max Linder actor, Stravisky of the tears of unwed mothers and
the little orphans of Auteil, you are Chaplin, emotional blackmailer, master-singer of misfortune
. . . Because you've identied yourself with the weak and the oppressed, to attack you has been
to attack the weak and the oppressed but in the shadow of your rattan cane some could
already see the nightstick of a cop. You are `he-who-turns-the-other-cheek' the other cheek of
the buttocks but for us, the young and beautiful, the only answer to suffering is revolution . . .
Go to sleep, you fascist insect. Rake in the dough. Make it with high society (we loved it when
you crawled on your stomach in front of little Elisabeth). Have a quick death: we promise you a
rst-class funeral. We pray that your latest lm will truly be your last . . . Go home, Mister
Chaplin.
3
At the bottom of the page were four signatures: Serge Berna, Guy-Ernest
Debord, Jean-L. Brau, and Gil Wolman. The four men had signed on the
behalf of the Lettrist International. The Lettrists argued that Chaplin and his
lm practised a kind of emotional blackmail, merely compensating for a boring
life and not creating the possibility of a new one lled with excitement and
adventure. Chaplin belonged to the past and was an obstacle toward creating a
368 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 27.3 2004
2. Cited in Maland, c|o!. o1 +....o
co!o.., p. 281.
3. `Finis les pieds plats', reprinted in Gerard
Berreby (ed.), c.o. ..!o. o !o c1o.c 1.
!...o.co!. .oo.c.. (E
ditions Allia: Paris,

1985), p. 262.

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new life without alienation and suffering. He signalled passivity and weakness
and a lack of desire to change this situation. His lack of self-awareness was
na ve, making it possible to separate the human from the social and to pin
one's faith on a utopian salvation of mankind. The event did not manage to
create any major debate in the newspapers, and Chaplin did not comment on
the episode in his autobiography. Even so, the episode was signicant since it
was not only the birth of what later became the International Situationist, but
it also heralded a shift in the history of the artistic avant-garde.
On the face of it, the event conrmed the break between Isidore Isou's
lettrist group and the international lettrists who were behind the yer and the
action against Chaplin. Lettrism arose when the Romanian artist Isodore Isou
arrived in Paris shortly after World War Two with a suitcase full of
manuscripts and a megalomaniacal artistic project comprising poetry, painting,
lm, theatre, music, and so on. According to Isou, it was time to honour the
destruction of the artwork that had been undertaken by radical modern art. A
new life should now be constructed on the ruins of the old one. Isou had
developed a theory of history based on the idea that what drives history
forward is the will to create.
4
Creation makes the world possible, makes the
world exist. The sense of human action was to create oneself and the world.
Through the act of creation man became God, according to Isou, who thus
logically called himself the new Messiah. In other words, Isou and Lettrism
radicalised one of the most long-lasting myths in the history of modernity: the
narcissistic idea of autogenesis and complete (self-) mastery. Miraculously,
modern man generates himself out of nothing. i .|.!c, |cc ooc.!o
extrapolates himself. There was nevertheless a logic in the procedure of
creation: according to Isou, all forms thus went through a `phase amplique'
and a `phase ciselant'; that is, rst a period when the form developed, became
meaningful, created its stylistic vocabulary with which it became capable of
expressing more than just its immanent content, then a period when it
disintegrated, imploded, and thus began to concentrate on the forms and
techniques of the medium itself.
Isou applied this grandiose genesis to various art forms, so that, for instance,
within literature it was Victor Hugo who had completed `le phase amplique'
and Baudelaire who had initiated `le phase ciselant'. After Baudelaire,
Rimbaud, and Verlaine, then Mallarme and Valery and nally Tzara and
Breton had destroyed poetic language so that it ended up not meaning
anything: Dada. Now it was up to Isou to reconstruct an entirely new alphabet
consisting of new letters, new basic elements, hence the name of the
movement: lettre-ism. Isou succeeded in convincing the publishing house
Gallimard to publish several of his manuscripts; and with the help of staged
scandals, Isou succeeded in creating awareness of Lettrism in Paris in the 1940s
and 1950s. He gathered a small group of young people around him and
together they created lettrist poetry, music, lm, painting, dance, philosophy,
architecture, and so on and so forth. Basically, the group put all media to use,
subjecting them to either a `phase amplique' or a `phase ciselant' according to
how far the individual medium had reached in its development.
It was this mixture of budding youth culture and avant-garde group that
Guy Debord, Gil Wolman, and the other international lettrists had challenged
by criticising Chaplin. Isou and the other lettrists criticised the attack on
Chaplin in a letter to the editor in cc/o, characterising the four men's action
as òutrancier et confus', and writing that even though the celebration of
Chaplin was marked by hysteria, they in no way wanted to take issue with
Chaplin. `We are not in solidarity with our friends' tract and we join the
The Situationist International, Surrealism, and the Difcult Fusion of Art and Politics
4. See Isidore Isou, i.c1o..c o o. co.!!.
c. .. . o o. co.!!. o.o. (Gallimard: Paris,
1947), M. c... o. !. c... oo.. 1. o.
!o.o. . o. !.o. c. (Cahiers del'Externite:
Paris, 1998).
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 27.3 2004 369

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homage everyone has rendered to Chaplin.'
5
The international lettrists
responded: `We believe that the most urgent expression of freedom is the
destruction of idols, especially when they claim to represent freedom.'
6
Thus
Isou and the lettrists were, according to the international lettrists, no longer
abreast of the times and had themselves become reactionary. Like Chaplin and
all other idols, Isou should be destroyed in order to make room for a new
generation. But not a new generation of artists. As Debord wrote in a response
to Isou: `We have so little interest in the authors and their tactics that the
incident is almost forgotten; it is really for us as if Jean-Isidore Isou had never
existed; as if there never had been his lies and his renunciation.'
7
This was no
longer the time for literature and art. Isou was hanging on to the past while
Debord and the international lettrists had already forgotten everything about
Isou, Chaplin, and literature. That which had previously been the artistic
avant-garde was now impossible. The true revolutionaries had moved out of
and beyond art. The true revolutionaries no longer had anything to do with
art.
II
The idea of the failure of the avant-garde played a pivotal role in the theories
and the practice that rst the international lettrists and later the International
Situationist developed. According to the Situationists' genealogy of the avant-
garde, the period between 1910 and 1930 was the culmination of the 150-
year-long disintegration of art and the artwork. With Dada and Surrealism it
became obvious that the only true art was anti-art, that the authentic artwork
carried its own negation. Dada and Surrealism had each driven art beyond its
limits and carried out the self-transcendence of art. Since then nothing of
relevance had been produced as art. The period after 1930 had been
characterised by an expanding repetition of previous destructions and
experiments. In a report whose title was `Panorama intelligent de l'avant-
garde a la n de 1955', a severe critique of contemporary art, politics, and
philosophy was made:
Poetry: The almost complete disappearance of this activity . . . Cinema: It has been years since
we have seen a lm of even minor novelty . . . Philosophy: IDIOTS, stop being. Read Marx . . .
Visual arts: All abstract painting since Malevitch have been forcing open doors. This activity is
off-course, uninteresting and perfectly mediocre . . . Politics: Nothing new . . . Literature: One is
never without substitutes that can preserve the publishing industry and consumption.
8
Since Dada and the surrealists, modern art had merely repeated itself and had
ended up as a mocking compensation for an alienated life. Modern art was
dead, a death that occurred around 1930. From then on no artistic
experiments had managed to live up to art's demands for a different life. They
had been satised with merely re-presenting already accepted and circulating
forms without understanding the very historical situation and development
that had made it possible to transcend art and integrate it directly into
everyday life.
By criticising Chaplin, the situationists made it clear that the time had now
come to transgress Dada and Surrealism. They made it clear that they
perceived themselves as a cDadaist and csurrealist movement. For the
surrealists had expressed great enthusiasm for Chaplin on several occasions,
culminating in 1927 when they delivered a grandiose defence of Chaplin in
their journal to r. c!o.c :o... o!...
9
Under the title `Hands off Love', the
surrealists defended Chaplin's right to live as he pleased. Chaplin's wife at the
time, Lillita Grey, had applied for divorce and demanded $1 million in
5. `Les lettristes desavouent les insultes de
Chaplin', reprinted in Berreby, p. 147.
6. `Position de l'Internationale lettriste',
reprinted in Berreby, p. 151.
7. Guy Debord, `Mort d'un Commis
Voyageur', reprinted in Berreby, c.o.,
p. 149.
8. `Panorama intelligent de l'avant-garde a la
n de 1955', co, ./c.1 .. .. tc!o.|
(Gallimard: Paris, 1996), pp. 20918.
9. The defence was originally written for the
journal 1.o..c, à monthly magazine
presenting the modern spirit of various
continents to the English-speaking world', which
presented the text as à terric Document
defending Genius against Bourgeois Hypocrisy
and against Modern American Morality'. But the
surrealists were not satised with the
presentation of the text and reprinted it in to
r. c!o.c :o... o!... See Jose Pierre (ed.), 1.o.
o... o!.. . 1. .!o.o.c .c!!.... (:v22:vov)
1c. i (:v22+v) (Le terrain vague: Paris,
1980), pp. 4146.

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alimony. Her attorney and uncle, Edwin McMurray, made public a 40-page-
long indictment in which Chaplin was accused of having affairs, living a
perverted life, and neglecting his wife in favour of his lms. `Plaintiff alleges
with regard to sexual relations heretofore existing between said parties that the
defendant's attitude, conduct and manifestations of interest therein have been
abnormal, unnatural, perverted, degenerate and indecent.'
10
The public did not react in favour of Chaplin, and he came under heavy re
on account of the affair. The surrealists did not react too late and directed a
scathing attack on the bourgeois morality they wanted to get rid of. As Breton
wrote in Mo... 1o o... o!..: à new morality must be substituted for the
prevailing morality, the source of all our trials and tribulations.'
11
They wrote
that marriage was nothing but a prison designed to restrain true passions and
that bourgeois morality restricted the natural freedom of feelings and
suppressed the ability to create. Chaplin was an ideal because he followed his
desire wherever it took him. In the apology, which had even been made the
leading article of the issue, they recalled in admiration how in one of his lms
Chaplin had dropped everything in his hands to follow a woman passing by.
This scene made a considerable impression on the surrealists, to whom desire
was the greatest virtue. Spontaneous actions were an expression of unspoiled
creativity, while consciousness destroyed the fantastic and imprisoned it in the
sterile forms of art. Art and poetry were only relevant to the surrealists insofar
as they were manifestations of the fantastic. Considered formally and
stylistically, art and poetry were without value, but as an expression of the
fantastic they were indispensable. They therefore possessed no immanent
value, but were important as media in which the fantastic was awakened.
Transcending the self was pivotal. Man should allow himself to be subjected to
objective accidental occurrences and to be open to the singularity of
coincidences, where a corner of hidden meaning in life, a higher necessity, was
exposed. For the surrealists, mankind was a sensitive receiver of an already
existing poetic inspiration that it was a matter of setting free. This liberation
could take place on walks through city streets, where encounters with the
objects of yesteryear or strange characters constituted emotional shocks, or
through automatic writing, in which a discursive ux was released.
The surrealists' operations were risky and Breton himself wrote that c|o
o. .o. was an attempt to `write a dangerous book' dangerous not only
to those who allowed themselves to be possessed by automatic writing, but
also linguistically dangerous, in that automatic writing questioned the
authenticity of all other means of communication.
12
Automatic writing was
an attempt to create transparent, total communication without ulterior
motives.
13
Behind the enunciation there was no subject to address a reader. It
took place without author and reader, all alone in the world, and was thus
innocent communication in the absence of intersubjective relations. In
automatic writing, all dialogue faded and turned into monologue. Authentic
communication took place when there was no longer an Ì' addressing a `you',
but when polyphonic `speech' was exposed. Breton triumphantly wrote in
Mo... 1o o... o!..:
SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express
verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner the actual function of thought.
Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any
aesthetic or moral concern.
14
With the collective monologue of automatic writing the surrealists attempted
to reveal a paradoxical community where communication takes place when no
10. Lita Grey's divorce complaint against
Chaplin, quoted in Lynn, c|o.!.. c|o!. o1 |.
1.., p. 310.
11. Andre Breton, Mo..c. c :o...o!.,
trans. Richard Seaver and Helen Lane (The
University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor,
1969), p. 44.
12. Andre Breton, Èn Marge des c|o
Mo. .o.', c|o., no. 7, 1970, p. 25.
13.
See Laurent Jenny, to o.c!. .o!.. ..
(E
ditions Belin: Paris, 1990), pp. 14654;

Marguerite Bonnet, +1.. i..c :o.o.. 1.
!o.o.. o... o!.. (Jose Corti: Paris, 1975),
pp. 16097.
14. Breton, Mo..c. c :o...o!., p. 26.

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one expresses himself. Automatic writing made it possible for the subject to
disintegrate in an authentic process of communication, to obliterate oneself in
order to allow a real community to appear beyond any social and psychological
alienation. Walks through the city were supra-textual versions of automatic
writing, a pure automatism exposed in life. Walking and automatic writing
were to the surrealists what the divan was to psychoanalysis: a place for
transference to take place, a place where the patient and the analyst constantly
switched places until an ìt' appeared and was read by an ùs.'
III
Like the other groups in the historical avant-garde, the surrealists were
sceptical about the institution of art and enthusiastic about the revolutions
taking place in Russia, Hungary, and Germany. The surrealists identied
themselves with the revolutionary wave, seeing it as their task to bring about a
revolution in the people carrying out the revolution. In contrast to the Soviet-
Russian avant-garde, which strived to develop an accessible, egalitarian, and
radical anti-aesthetic production art, where art and industry merged in the
service of the revolution, the surrealists concentrated on the unconscious
dimensions of the subject and on releasing as much creative power as possible.
Whereas production art turned art into technology and science, the surrealists
turned art into a means for the fantastic, wanting to re-mythologise life. The
surrealists were sceptical about the widely-held view that the rest of the world
should follow the model of American industrialisation.
15
Marxists like Antonio
Gramsci were convinced that American industrialisation was the way forward
for the proletariat, which should be streamlined and disciplined.
16
Not just the
bourgeois world, but the worker as well should be reformed according to the
predictable and effective methods of Fordism and Taylorism. The worker
should keep his animal drives in check and afrm a new mechanised life
controlled by rationality and Puritanism. The surrealists were of the opinion
that industrialisation and functionalism created a sterile and dead world. The
surrealists were romantics in so far as they were drawn to the cultural forms of
a pre-capitalist past and rejected the cold and abstract rationality of modern
industrial civilisation. This interest in the outdated and the magical did not
mean however that the surrealists melancholically mourned the passing of time
and worshipped the paradise of the past. Instead they used their nostalgia as a
weapon with which the present world could be transformed.
Despite the opposition toward the contemporary technological and
economic utopia of development, the surrealists considered themselves as
Marxists. But their `Gothic Marxism' was different from the dominant
version, which had metaphysical materialistic tendencies and was contaminated
by an evolutionary ideology of development.
17
Their Marxism was a
materialism fascinated by the fantastic and interested in enchantment. The
magical dimensions of earlier cultures constituted a reservoir for the
revolution of the subject, a revolution that destroyed identity and exposed
the fantastic. The marginalised objects of modern culture were not delusions
that had to be driven away but both potentialities to be mobilised in a
revolutionary battle and ingredients in a re-enchanted life. According to the
surrealists, it was a misunderstanding to believe that politicising and criticising
bourgeois society meant that the revolutionaries had to give up the magical and
the libertine in favour of what they thought was a dilettantish condence in
progress. The trivial objects of modern life should be torn out of their usual
surroundings and rational use and be endowed with a life of their own.
15. For an account of the impact the idea of
industrialisation as historical progress made in
the twentieth century, see Susan Buck-Morss,
..oc.!1 o1 coo.c|. 1|. to. c Mo
uc.o . io o1 P. (MIT Press: Cambridge,
2000).
16. Antonio Gramsci, Àmericanism and
Fordism', t..c :c./cc|, trans. Quintin Hoare
and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (Lawrence &
Wishart: London, 1971).
17. The term `Gothic Marxism' has been
conceptualised by Margaret Cohen in t.co.
i!!o.o.c Po!.. i.o. o1 |. to.. c |.
:o...o!. r.c!o.c (University of California
Press: Berkeley, 1993) and by Michael Lowy in
t. c.!. 1o o. :o... o!.. . o... (E
ditions
Syllepse: Paris, 2000).

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According to the surrealists, the objects and techniques of the bourgeois world
dictated how man should live, thereby transforming the world into a prison.
Man was trapped in an alienating structure he was unable to escape from. By
drawing attention to the marginalised and irrational objects in rationalised
society, the surrealists tried to equip the alienated human being with tools with
which he could break out of his prison and regain freedom.
The peculiar Gothic Marxism of the surrealists meant that they had a
complicated relationship with the established Marxism in France, in particular
the French Communist Party.
18
The Communist Party had come into
existence in 1920 as a fusion of different French militants who, inspired by the
events in Russia, wanted to transfer the Bolshevik experiment to France.
19
The
importation of Leninism from the economically underdeveloped Soviet Union
was mixed with elements from the long French tradition of popular uprisings
dating back to 1789. In the rst years of the existence of the party there was no
contradiction between the Leninist Bolshevism and the French revolutionary
heritage. The theory and practice of Leninism could be synthesised
unproblematically with the different currents of the French left such as
Jacobinism, Syndicalism, and Utopian Socialism. For the French Communists,
the revolution in Russia was just the latest example of the revolutionary spark
that had already exploded in 1789, 1848, and 1871 in the streets of Paris and
Lyon. During this rst period, the Communist Party was characterised by
great diversity and internal doctrinal confusion. This confusion or openness
slowly disappeared during the 1920s, as the party concentrated more and
more on defending the policy of the Soviet Union. By the end of the 1920s,
more or less all the `non-Bolshevik' elements had been excluded from the
party and the party was characterised by conformism and uniformity. The
surrealists experienced the increasing Stalinisation of the Communist Party at
close hand and it eventually made the connection between Surrealism and the
Communist Party untenable.
In the rst year of the group's existence it was only poetry by expressing a
transgression of that which already exists in the direction of the fantastic that
was considered liberating. After a very short time, the group nevertheless
made a political turn and became aware that creating another life also implied
changes in the material basis of life. Events such as the revolution in Russia, the
war in Morocco, and the arrival of Fascism put pressure on the intuitive and
ethical idea of another life that characterised the group, supplementing it with
a need to express the revolutionary demand in political actions. Gradually the
surrealists became politically conscious and found out that most people that
were against nationalism, imperialism, and bourgeois morality were Marxists
of some sort.
The surrealists had become acquainted with the journal c!o.. in 1924, when
the journal, like the surrealists, distanced itself from the widespread national
mourning over the death of the Grand Old Man of French letters, Anatole
France. c!o.. originally started out in 1919 as a humanist and pacist journal
run by the writer Henri Barbusse, but the journal turned leftward and was
oriented toward revolutionary action under the leadership of a group of young
Marxists like Jean Bernier, Eduard Berth, and Marcel Fourrier.
20
The journal
started publishing articles on topics like economy, war, and fascism and
worked with the Communist Party without however becoming an ofcial
organ for the party. Like the surrealists, c!o.. was an avid critic of war,
nationalism, and capitalism, and the two groups started collaborating in 1925
after the outbreak of a new colonial war in Morocco. The two groups issued a
joint manifesto, `La Revolution d'abord et toujours', in which they criticised
18. For an account of the relationship between
the surrealists and the French Communist Party,
see Helena Lewis, 1|. tc!... c :o...o!.
(Paragon House Publications: New York, 1988);
Maurice Nadeau, u.c... 1o o... o!.. (E
ditions
de Seuil: Paris, 1964); Robert S. Short, `The
Politics of Surrealism, 1920-1936', jco.o! c
cc.c.o., u.c.,, vol. 1, no. 2, 1966,
pp. 325; Andre Thirion, r. c!o.co... o
.. c!o.c (Robert Laffront: Paris, 1972).
19. See David Caute, cco. o1 |. t...|
i.!!..oo! :v:.:vo (Macmillan: New York,
1964).
20. For a discussion of c!o.. , see Nicole
Racine, `The Clarte Movement in France,
191921', jco.o! c cc.c.o., u.c.,, vol. 2,
no. 2, 1967, pp. 195208.

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the French government for its imperialistic aggression and saluted Lenin for his
demand for a total disarmament. `We don't think ,co. France will ever be
capable of following the magnicent example of an immediate and complete
disarmament that Lenin gave the world in Brest-Litovsk a disarmament whose
revolutionary value is indenite.'
21
During a short period the two groups
focused on their common enemy bourgeois culture and the imperialist war
in Morocco and even planned the publication of a new joint journal called to
co.... c..!. that however never materialised, because the surrealists were not
ready to abandon the surrealist experiment.
The termination of the collaboration with c!o.. did result in the surrealists
abandoning politics. The question of political engagement remained central
within Surrealism, and the surrealist group experienced several rifts during the
next years on that very question. From 1925 to 1929 the group was marked by
controversies inwardly and outwardly with respect to the Communist Party
and to the different para-communist groups with which they cooperated for a
brief period. The political turn and the concrete collaboration with c!o..
resulted in the formation of three fractions within the surrealist group: one
desired to dialectically sublate the division between idealism and materialism
(e.g. Breton, Aragon); the second refused to subordinate the spiritual
revolution of Surrealism to a political agenda (e.g. Artaud, Desnos); while the
third wished to privilege political activity (e.g. Naville, Peret). These fractions
were an expression of the heterogeneity characterising the practice of
Surrealism, and they demonstrated that Surrealism was not a coherent theory
and practice but rather a eld of overlapping, often conicting, tendencies at
that moment.
For a short while, Artaud was at the centre of surrealist activity. He was at
the head of Le Bureau central de Reserches surrealistes and wrote several
letters published in to r. c!o.c :o... o!.. in which he mocked and provoked
traditional culture and every conceivable institution in the world. In Àdresse
au Pape' the Pope was ridiculed, in `Lettre aux medecins-chefs des asiles de
fous' he demanded all mental patients be released, in Àdresse au Dalai Lama'
he asked the Dalai Lama to teach the surrealists the art of levitation, and in
Òuvrez les prisons, licenciez l'Armee' he ordered the French government to
open the prisons and close down the army.
22
The utopian anarchism of Artaud only dominated the surrealist group for a
short while and, after Artaud had left the group, Aragon, Breton, and Eluard
entered the Communist Party in January 1927. At that time the surrealist
Pierre Naville had already been a member of the Communist Party for a year,
he had joined the editorial board of c!o.. , and had written the pamphlet to
r. c!o.c . !. ..!!..o.! o. .o. o... !. o... o!.. tc..c 1. !o o..c,
in which he tried to fuse Surrealism and Marxism. Surrealism and Marxism
converged naturally, Naville wrote in his pamphlet, because the surrealist goal
of realising freedom necessarily implied a critic of the bourgeoisie. According
to Naville, it was only the proletariat that was able to realise the revolution the
surrealists strove for. Therefore it was necessary for the surrealists to ally
themselves with the Communist Party who, for its part, needed the rebellious
attitude of the surrealists. If the surrealists were not to remain an ineffective
group of intellectuals they had to join the communist movement and `realise
that the spiritual force . . . is intimately connected to a social reality.'
23
Naville's pamphlet raised some important questions concerning the political
engagement of Surrealism and Breton was obliged to respond to Naville's
challenge. In his text `Legitime defense' Breton thanked Naville for raising the
important question of the relationship between Surrealism and communism.
21. `La Revolution d'abord et toujours', to
r. c!o.c :o... o!.., no. 5, 1925, p. 32.
22. Antonin Artaud, Òuvriez les prisons,
licenciez l'Armee', to r. c!o.c :o... o!.., no.
2, 1925, p. 18; Àdresse au Pape', to r. c!o.c
:o... o!.., no. 3, 1925, p. 16; Àdresse au
Dalai-Lama', to r. c!o.c :o... o!.., no. 3,
1925, p. 17; `Lettre aux E
coles du Bouddha',
to r. c!o.c :o... o!.., no. 3, 1925, p. 22;
`Lettre aux medecins-chefs des asiles de fous',
to r. c!o.c :o... o!.., no. 3, 1925, p. 29.
23. Pierre Naville, to r. c!o.c . !.
..!!..o.! o. .o. o... !. o... o!..
tc..c 1. !o o..c [1926] (Gallimard: Paris,
1975), p. 92. For an account of Naville's
position, see also Pierre Naville, t. . 1o
o... .! t.. .o.. o|. o.o. c! : (Galilee:
Paris, 1977).

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According to Breton, the surrealists supported the headlines of the communist
program with enthusiasm, but were unsatised with the cultural policy of the
French Communist Party. The Communist Party was only concerned with the
socio-material aspect of the revolution and had left the question of art and
culture to the bourgeois forces in society. The party newspaper uoo.. was
an example of this tendency and Breton characterised the newspaper as
ùnreadable' and absolutely unsuitable to educate the working class.
24
Breton
was sceptical towards the tendency of the Communist party to focus only on
the material aspects of existence. The revolution was also to be a mental
revolution and this was what the surrealists strove to realise. `There is none of
us who do not wish for the transfer of power from the bourgeoisie to the
proletariat. In the meantime it is according to us necessary that the experiences
of inner life proceeds without outside control even Marxist.'
25
On behalf of
Surrealism, Breton stepped back from the explicit Communist engagement of
Naville and stressed the need for a certain autonomy in which the surrealists
could continue their experiments.
The question of the relationship between Surrealism and communism
remained on the agenda during the fall of 1926 and Breton tried to mediate
between the more explicit political surrealists like Naville and the spiritual
surrealists like Philippe Soupault. Surrealism was for Breton precisely the
fusion of these two tendencies, the spiritual and material revolution. This view
was concretised when several surrealists led by Breton joined the Communist
Party in the beginning of 1927. At that time Naville had already left the party
and had joined a small Trotskyite group. However Breton and the others
stayed within the Communist Party and continued attempting to supplement
the theory of class struggle with the idea of a transcendental mental revolution.
The delicate balance between political action and surrealistic activity was
complicated, since the Communist Party was characterised by a rigid
materialistic idea of reality in which only the ownership of the means of
production was important while the surrealists refused to accept politics as a
separate area. But the criticism of the Communist Party remained mild until
1935, inasmuch as the surrealists believed to have found a means of
revolutionising society with the Communist Party. However, the surrealists
had difculty coming to terms with the centralistic and dogmatic Stalinism of
the Communist Party, which meant that the party's most important activity
was to provide unqualied support to the Soviet Union and to support the
theory of `socialism in one country'. As the Soviet Union started to praise the
bourgeois ideas that the surrealists hated most of all family, nation, and the
political leaders they had more and more difculty uniting their desire for a
global existential revolution, which was to destroy the predominant forms of
representation, with the Communist Party's desire for a material
transformation. Surrealism's determined efforts toward the total freedom of
man did not correspond well with the Communist Party's praise of work,
productivity, and nation. Without leaving communism, the surrealists started
to take an interest in the rival communist movements, which were based on
Leninism but criticised Stalinism for opportunism and for betraying the
Leninist principles.
Leon Trotsky became the centre of attention for the surrealists early on,
and Breton wrote a laudatory review of Trotsky's book on Lenin as early as
1925 in to r. c!o.c o... o!.. no. 5. `Long live Lenin! I salute Leon
Trotsky'.
26
Trotsky had played a leading role in the October Revolution of
1917, becoming the rst Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union, and
as the organiser of the Red Army he played a crucial role in the victory in the
24. Andre Breton, `Legitime Defense', to
r. c!o.c :o... o!.., no. 8, 1926, p. 30.
25. Breton, `Legitime Defense', p. 35.
26. Andre Breton, `Leon Trotsky: Lenine', to
r. c!o.c :o... o!.., no. 5, 1925, p. 29.

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civil and interventionist war from 1918 to 1921.
27
In the battle carried out
against Stalin from 1923 to 1927, Trotsky was defeated, and after having been
deported to Kazakhstan, he was banished from the Soviet Union in 1929.
Before the Russian Revolution, Trotsky was critical of Lenin's military party
structure and fought to construct a democratic, unied party that could
accommodate all the social-democratic tendencies, as he was afraid that the
party would establish its dictatorship over the proletariat, the party leadership
would establish its dictatorship over the party, and nally the head of the party
over the party leadership.
The main idea of Trotsky's theory, which appealed to the surrealists far
more than Stalin's `socialism in one country', was the idea of `the permanent
revolution', according to which a socialistic revolution could not be
thoroughly carried out in Russia alone and therefore had to `jump over' to
the developed countries in order to be completed there.
28
Trotsky
nevertheless adopted Lenin's conception of the party in connection with the
October Revolution, and together they headed not only the conquest of
power, but also the many oppressive measures taken towards those who
thought differently, leading to the creation of the rst totalitarian state in
1921. Pursuing the idea of the permanent revolution, Trotsky severely
criticised Stalin for surrendering world revolution for `socialism in one
country'. It was impossible to carry out a socialistic revolution in the Soviet
Union if the rest of the world remained capitalistic. Left to itself the Soviet
Union would develop in reactionary directions and the party into a
bureaucratic dictatorship that would stand above the classes and take
advantage of these. Trotsky opposed these tendencies as well as the rapidly
growing economical inequality in Stalin's system, but maintained that thanks
to its `socialistic' property system and plan economy the Soviet Union needed
a political revolution rather than a social revolution. In other words, he
considered himself as a loyal opponent to the Soviet Union, which he still
regarded as a workers' state.
Trotsky's theories of the permanent revolution and the world revolution
were not the only aspects of Trotsky's writings that appealed to the surrealists.
Trotsky's considerations on art and art's function in the class war were more
useful for the surrealists than the bleak and rigid dogmas about socialist realism
that the Communist Party advanced at that time. According to Trotsky art
should not be submitted to external restrictions.
29
The freedom of art was a
precondition for creativity. Even if art did not have an explicit revolutionary
content it could serve the communist revolution, Trotsky wrote. If on the
other hand art were made subordinate to censorship or external conditions it
would lose its vital freedom of expression and in the nal instance work against
the revolution. Art did follow the development of the economy but the
relationship between art and economy was so complicated that is was not
possible to dictate an artistic norm or create a certain proletarian style. `[A]
class nds its style in extremely complex ways.'
30
Trotsky's writings on art and revolution made a strong impression on the
surrealists who, even after the expulsion of Trotsky from the Soviet Union,
kept referring to his theories and never stopped paying homage to him.
31
Even
after Trotsky's expulsion from the Soviet Union the surrealists continued to
refer to his theories and praise him as a true revolutionary. But in spite of
attempting to balance between Stalinism and left-wing dissidents (Breton
wrote in :..c1 o... 1o o... o!.. that Stalin and Trotsky represented two
equally valid revolutionary tactics), it became increasingly clear that the
surrealists could not be united with the Stalinism of the Communist Party,
27. For presentations of Trotsky's life and
theories, see Isac Deutscher, 1|. t.c|. +..1
(Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1954) and
1|. t.c|. uo..1 (Oxford University Press:
Oxford, 1959); Duncan Hallas, 1.c|, Mo..
(Pluto Press: London, 1979).
28. Leon Trotsky, 1|. t..o. r.c!o.c,
trans. John G. Wright (Pathnder: New York,
1969).
29. Leon Trotsky, t...oo.. o1 r.c!o.c,
trans. Rose Strunsky (The University of
Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, 1969).
30. Trotsky, t...oo.. o1 r.c!o.c, p. 206.
31. Besides recognising their revolutionary
aspirations in Trotsky, the surrealists were
fascinated by Trotsky, the revolutionary
dissident. `Without a doubt the new generations
does not fell the electrication in this name:
Trotsky, long charged with revolutionary
potential.' i...., :v:+:v2, o.. +1..
to..oo1 (Gallimard: Paris, 1952), p. 190.

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which insisted that art should realistically portray the life and struggle of the
proletariat according to party principles. In the eyes of the Communist Party,
Surrealism was just another modern art movement without connection to the
proletariat, the real agent of transformation. The exploration of dreams and
the unconscious did not go well with the Communist Party who was unable to
see any revolutionary potential in the suspension of one's self. The surrealists
nevertheless remained party members and in 1930 made a new attempt to be
afrmative towards communism when they renamed their periodical t.
o... o!.. oo ..... 1. !o r. c!o.c. During the following years several
incidents occurred in which the surrealists were critiqued by the party for their
suspect behaviour and writings. Louis Aragon left the group after great
disorder and Breton was several times forced to explain himself in front of
party tribunals.
32
In 1933 Breton, Eluard, and Crevel were nally thrown out of the
Communist Party and two years later, when the French Foreign Minister
Pierre Laval signed a military assistance pact with the Soviet Union, the break
was nal. According to the surrealists, the pact betrayed the international
aspirations of communism and turned the French Communists into traditional,
`Jacobian' nationalists. After the failed attempt to work with the Communist
Party, the surrealists formed the Contre-Attaque group with former surrealists
like Georges Bataille and Jacques-Andre Boiffard.
33
Contre-Attaque critiqued
not just the fascist movements but also attacked the Communist Party and the
Popular Front. The end of the troublesome collaboration with the Communist
Party necessitated a new forum in which the surrealists could advance
revolutionary ideas; but following disagreements especially between Breton
and Bataille the group fell apart. Cut off from other French allies, the
surrealists referred from then on to Trotsky's theories, culminating with
Breton visiting Trotsky in 1938 in Mexico, at which point they wrote the text
`Pour un art revolutionnaire independant' and formed Federation Inter-
nationale de l'Art Revolutionnaire Independant.
34
It was the hope of Breton
and Trotsky that F. E. D. I. could become the platform of the anti-Stalinist left
and unite artists and intellectuals in a common ght for freedom and peace.
The periodical and the organisation would not, however, survive the outbreak
of the war.
IV
As when the surrealists were active, the French Communist Party
predominated in the years following World War Two, when the situationists
established their critical practice.
35
Parti Communiste, the French Communist
Party, and their union, Confederation Generale du Travail, played a dominant
role in French political culture after World War Two.
36
After the war, during
which many party members had been active in the resistance, the members of
the Communist Party came out of the war as martyrs and victors. The party
was tremendously popular in the last phase of the war where it was forbidden
and in the immediate phase after the end of the war. A Communist revolution
was a real possibility in 1944. Never had the party been in a better position to
seize power and never again would it be as popular as it was then. More than a
million people were members of the party in 1947 and about 26% of the
population voted Communist in the 1946 election. But a revolution never
materialised, as the leaders of the Communist Party opted for a national
regeneration that would let France regain its great-power status and thereby
limit the hegemony of the Anglo-Saxon powers in the West. The Communist
32. Breton described these internal Communist
tribunals as `police interrogations. . . . Even
though my explications were judged satisfactory
pretty quickly there always arrived a moment
where one of the investigators showed an issue
of to r. c!o.c :o... o!.. and everything was
put into question'. Breton, i...., p. 130.
33. The complicated relationship between
Breton and Bataille has been dealt with in a
number of books and articles, see for instance
Briony Fer, `Surrealism, Myth and
Psychoanalysis', David Batchelor, Briony Fer,
and Paul Wood (eds), r.o!., ro.co!.,
:o...o!. +. i... |. Po. (Yale University
Press: New Haven and London, 1993),
pp. 171249; Hal Foster, cco!.. i.oo,
(MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1993); Denis
Hollier, to t... 1. !o cc.c.1. io. o. c.c..
ioo.!!. (Gallimard: Paris, 1974). In this
connection it is important that the surrealists
like the people around the journals to c...o.
c..o!. and c.o. were disillusioned with the
Communist Party and tried to put a lid on
former disagreements in the attempts to form
an alternative to fascism, communism, and
parliamentary democracy.
34. For discussions of the meeting between
Breton and Trotsky, see Alan Rose, `For an
Independent Revolutionary Art: Andre Breton's
Manifest with Leon Trotsky', io.c.o :o1..
jco.o!, no. 1, 1985, pp. 5261; Otto Karl
Werckmeister, `The Summit Meeting of
Revolutionary Art: Trotsky, Breton and Rivera
at Coyocan 1938', +.. 1o YYii cc..
i..o.co! 1u.c... 1+., 1992, pp. 15770.
35. See David Caute, cco. o1 |. t...|
i.!!..oo! :v:. :vo; Jeanine Verdes-
Leroux, +o ..... 1o o., t. to.. cco..,
!. ..!!..o.! . !o .o!o.. :v..:vo (Fayard:
Paris, 1983) and t. .. ..! 1o co/o!. t. to..
cco.., !. ..!!..o.! . !o .o!o..
:vo:v (Fayard: Paris, 1987).
36. Robert Gildea, t.o.. ... :v. (Oxford
University Press: Oxford, 1996). For a
fascinating study of postwar French culture, see
Kristin Ross, to co., c!.o ic1..
..c!c..o.c o1 |. r.c.1... c t...| co!o..
(MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1995).

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Party remained loyal to Stalin and agreed to work within the existing political
framework, taking a place in the provisional government. The reconstruction
of France was the main goal of the Communist Party, as was evident in the
new slogan of the party ùnite, ght, work'. But as the Cold War slowly
replaced the anti-racist ght the presence of the Communist Party became a
hindrance for French politics and the Communist ministers were dismissed in
1947. The rejection of the revolution by the Communist Party left a bitter
taste among party rank and le and in the eyes of many militants Communism
had been sacriced to the Soviet desire to stabilise spheres of inuence. But
many stayed in the party and it remained one of the biggest parties in France,
even as it turned Stalinist.
The French Communist Party exercised its inuence by referring to its
support in the working class, and it had an enormous inuence on the para-
academic milieu in which students and intellectuals circulated. Prominent
intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre supported the Communist Party and the
party had a rm grip on Marxist theory and was ready to condemn any attempt
to propose an alternative reading of the Marxist classics or challenge the
Communist version of revolutionary politics.
37
If intellectuals tried to question
the role or conduct of the party they were immediately expelled from not only
the Communist Party but also its many journals, periodicals, and reunions.
There was no room for criticism or self-criticism in the French Communist
Party. If criticism did occur, the perpetrator was immediately isolated,
condemned, and stigmatised as an enemy of the working class. The threat of
exclusion was intense. As the apostate Edgar Morin wrote: `[T]o be outside of
the party was to renounce transforming the world, it was to renounce what
was best for oneself. It was to join the petit bourgeois swamp.'
38
Outside the
party there was no salvation and it was extremely difcult to balance between
the Communist Party supported by the Soviet Union and the pro-American
Social Democratic Party. Critical questions posed to the Communist Party
often forced intellectuals into the ranks of a bourgeois liberalism and resulted
in a harsh abandonment of former revolutionary positions. Although the
Communist Party remained of great importance, its power over French
intellectuals weakened somewhat during the 1950s following a series of
external political events. The Soviet invasion in Hungary and the public
denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth Congress in 1956 impaired the French
Communist Party, which nonetheless tried to keep its position at the centre of
attention for many French intellectuals.
39
The hegemony of the Communist Party was primarily established in
reference to history, to a story of the past and the Russian revolution.
Therefore, all those who deviated from the Communist Party had to create a
counter-history. The dominance of the Communist Party was so great in the
1950s and 1960s in France that most of the `heretical' groups created histories
that reproduced the Communist Party's self-referential logic and made Marx's
historical-materialistic categories transcendent. The situationists, however,
were one of the few exceptions. They found Trotsky's criticism of the
development in the Soviet Union too weak and compromised and instead
turned to the tradition of council communism that had briey ourished in
Russia, Germany, and the Netherlands from 1917 to 1921, before state
capitalism and social-democratism wiped it out.
40
The situationists thus went
back all the way to a dispute that took place at the very beginning of the
October Revolution, thereby creating a strong counter-history of how
Bolshevism in Russia and the Social Democrats in Germany had started the
counter-revolution and betrayed the proletariat. The council communists were
37. For accounts of the role of the Communist
Party in the postwar years, see besides Caute
and Verdes-Leroux Jean Baudrillard, t. t c co
!. o.o1. o.....! 1o c!..o. (Cahiers d'Utopie:
Fontenay-sous-Bois, 1978); Suni Khilnani,
+.o. r.c!o.c 1|. i.!!..oo! t. . tco.
t.o.. (Yale University Press: New Haven and
London, 1993); Claude Lefort, to .c!..o.c
r.co. o. !. .co.. (Fayard: Paris, 1999),
pp. 12137; Mark Poster, i...o! Mo.. .
tco. t.o.. t.c :o... c +!|o.. (Princeton
University Press: Princeton, 1975).
38. Edgar Morin, +oc....o. (Julliard: Paris,
1959), p. 159.
39. The most explicit èffect' of the weakening
of the Communist Party on Marxist theory in
France was perhaps the creation of the very
inuential journal +.o. in 1956. The editors
Edgar Morin, Jean Duvignaud, Henri Lefebvre,
Pierre Fougeyrollas, and Kostas Axelos were all
former Communists who deeply moved by the
events in Hungary wanted to create a non-
dogmatic forum free from the constraints of the
Communist Party in which they could explore
fundamental question that was forbidden in the
party. The journal played a signicant role in
the revision of Marxism in France. The former
surrealist and now leading Trotskyite Pierre
Naville contributed to the journal. +.o.
published a number of texts from the Western
Marxist tradition like Georg Lukacs and Karl
Korsch. Lukacs' analysis of commodity fetishism
and Korsch's analysis of the counterrevolution
were very important for the situationists in the
elaboration of the theory of the society of the
spectacle. Anselm Jappe has analysed the
inuence of Lukacs on Debord in his co,
./c.1, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith
(University of California Press: Berkeley, 1999).
For accounts of +.o., see Gil Delannoi,
Àrguments, 19561962', r.o. .o.o.. 1.
..... c!..o., vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 12745;
Richard Gombin, `Le revisionnisme
philosophique', t. c.... 1o oo.|.. (Seuil:
Paris, 1972), pp. 4971; Louise Soubise, t.
Mo... o.. Mo. (:vo:vo) oo.. o...
1..1. .o. o.. (Aubier-Montaigne: Paris,
1967).
40. For presentations of the council communist
movement, see Dominique Bouchet, to oo.|.
.co.. ..oc|c!!o1o.. 1. c.... o :vo
(A. H. J. M. Ortmans: Rotterdam, 1998) and
Russell Jacoby, .o!.... c ..o ccco. c
P... Mo.. (Cambridge University Press:
Cambridge, 1981). For presentations of the
Situationist International within a political
context, see Richard Gombin, t. c... 1o
oo.|..; Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, ` ``What is to
be done?'' Approaching the Task through
Debord and Negri', iccc!, no. 5, 2002,
pp. 148; Mark Shipway, `Situationism', in
Maximilien Rubel and John Crump (eds), :c
Mo.|. :c..o!. . |. :....| o1 1...|
c.o., (Macmillan Press: Basingstoke, 1987),
pp. 10426.

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sceptical about Bolshevism's privileging of the centrally constructed party as
the institution to carry out world revolution and establish a socialist economy.
Instead, they pinned their faith on the councils that arose spontaneously,
convinced that the councils made it possible to formally transform the
consciousness of capitalistic society and that they were the best framework for
abolishing paid work and money and introducing the voucher system. Society
should be organised in such a way that no one was oppressed. The seat of
power was to remain empty through a exible, rule-discussing organisation in
which the participants' sense of responsibility and creative power were the
driving force. The council communists attempt at revolution suffered defeat.
As Debord wrote in to :c... . 1o :..o.!.: `Between the two world wars the
revolutionary worker's movement was destroyed by the action, on the one
hand, of the Stalinist bureaucracy and, on the other, of fascist totalitarianism,
the latter having borrowed its organisational form from the totalitarian party as
rst tried out in Russia.'
41
The revolution in Russia had already been betrayed
in 1919, and according to the council communists and later the situationists,
Trotsky's defence of the repressions of, among other things, the sailors in
Kronstadt and Machno's anarchistic peasant partisans, was unforgivable. Due
to this politico-historical defeat, when the left-wing radical Marxist
communistic utopia succumbed, the realisation of communist society was
postponed and replaced by two kinds of capitalism or societies of spectacle:
diffuse capitalism in the West and concentrated capitalism in the Soviet Union.
`This same historical moment, when Bolshevism triumphed c. ..! in Russia
and social democracy fought victoriously c. |. c!1 c.!1, also marks the
denitive inauguration of an order of things that lies at the core of the modern
spectacle's rule: this was the moment when an .o. c |. c.|. .!o arose in
radical opposition to the working class itself.'
42
The counter-revolution had destroyed the rst proletarian revolutionary
attempt thanks in particular to Stalinism and social democracy. These had
stripped socialism of utopian reality and rendered Marxism banal by means of
state capitalism, thereby making possible fascism and the society of spectacle.
Because of rapid developments in the forces of production in the years
following World War Two, an even greater discrepancy had arisen between
the self-valorising logic of capital and the possible use of these productive
forces. The productive forces were now so developed that mankind could
leave mere survival behind and start to live an authentic life. It merely
demanded destroying the social order. `Signs of a new and growing tendency
toward negation proliferate in the more economically advanced countries. The
spectacular system reacts to these signs with incomprehension or attempts to
misrepresent them, but they are sufcient proof that a new period has begun.
After the failure of the working class's rst subversive assault on capitalism, we
are now witness to |. o.!o.. c .o.o!. o/o1o..'
43
A recreated proletariat
was ready to take up the ght against capital, which had in turn further
intensied alienation by reducing all lived experience to representation. These
representations, making up a false totality, lived their own life beyond the
control of the individual. Mankind had been transformed into a spectator,
renouncing life and developing false needs. `For one to whom the real world
becomes real images, mere images are transformed into real beings tangible
gments which are the efcient motor of trancelike behavior.'
44
41. Guy Debord, 1|. :c..., c |. :..o.!.,
trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Zone Books:
New York, 1994), p. 77.
42. Debord, 1|. :c..., c |. :..o.!., p. 69.
43. Debord, 1|. :c..., c |. :..o.!., p. 85.
44. Debord, 1|. :c..., c |. :..o.!., p. 17.

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V
One of the fundamental characteristics of the spectacular-market society or the
society of the spectacle was, according to the situationists, its recuperation of
art whereby formerly experimental and radical art was integrated and
instrumentalised by the established taste.
45
In the period between 1850 and
1930, the artistic avant-garde had been engaged in a critical project in which
traditional forms were destroyed or altered in the attempt to create new forms
worthy of modernity. From Baudelaire to Surrealism art refused to be the
ctive language of a non-existent community. This destruction-process in
which the avant-garde challenged the dominant visions of man, society, and art
came to a halt around 1930 when the society of the spectacle came into being.
Since then the self-destruction of art didn't have revolutionary meaning. The
dissolution of forms and the impossibility of art were now regarded as a
positive thing detached from the revolutionary signicance it previously had.
The poverty of modern life had been portrayed in the art made since 1930 as
an unchanging fact of life instead of as a reason for revolt and destruction. The
tradition of modern art had been a useful and necessary lesson for the avant-
garde, but now art was nothing but a form of alienation. Henceforth art had to
be denied o1 realised in the radical critique of society. In the opinion of the
Situationist International theory had superseded art as the critical weapon of
the avant-garde.
According to the situationists, Surrealism had been the most important
artistic avant-garde and any future avant-garde had to work through the
surrealist inheritance.
46
Surrealism had played a positive role in the attack on
the bourgeois civilisation through its attempt to `change life'. Besides creating
a space for the active creation of another life, Surrealism had tried to ally itself
with dialectical materialism. Although Surrealism chose the compromised
Stalinist French Communist Party, they at least showed an understanding of
the need to transgress art. The demands Surrealism had advanced were a
minimum, however, and Surrealism now had to be surpassed by a truly
contemporary avant-garde uniting the critique of art with the critique of
politics. Not only Surrealism but also Dada had been of extreme importance
for the necessary destruction of art, but they had both failed. Dada was
characterised by critically revealing the compensatory status of art yet
remaining an abstract negation of art, whereas Surrealism was characterised by
wanting to transgress art but without being aware of the fact that Dada had
already negated it. The revolutionary potential present in the period from
1916 to 1930 had not been released, and with the rise of an Americanised
consumer society the conditions of possibility of the revolution had changed.
Now, Surrealism's realisation of art in life possessed no revolutionary meaning
at all. In fact, according to the situationists, Surrealism's enthusiasm for the
unconscious, the magical, and the wonderful had made it impossible for
Surrealism to ally itself with the contemporary revolutionary proletarian self-
consciousness as it was expressed in the revolutions from 1917 to 1921.
From a fortress open to every wind blowing in from the old world, it began after the fashion of
the Romantics reinventing an idyllic Middle Ages, complete with valiant knights, in the very
shadow of the stock exchanges, banks and factories to entertain the fantasy of a powerful
myth, stripped of any religious overtones, that would combat the poverty of the spectacle and
that would draw its strength from a reconsecration of human relationships modelled on the
reconsecration of art.
47
Surrealism's interest in the magical and the primitive was a regression with
respect to Dada's negation of the artwork, a regression that paved the way for
45. For accounts of the situationist theory of
art, see Mirella Bandini, t....c .! c!...c 1o
cc/.o o!!i..o..co!. :.oo..c.o (Ofcina
Edizioni: Roma, 1977); Mario Perniola, i
:.oo..c.. i! c..c .|o |o .c....oc !o
:c...o 1.!!c .o.c!c (Castelvecchi: Roma,
1998).
46. The situationists discussed Surrealism
repeatedly in their texts and documents. One
example will sufce: At the founding meeting of
the Situationist International in 1957 Debord
presented the text `Rapport sur la construction
des situations et sur les conditions de
l'organisation et de l'action de la tendance
situationniste internationale' in which he
discussed the interwar avant-garde and the role
of Surrealism. In it he wrote that `[t]he reason
for the failure of the Surrealist ideology is the
belief that the unconscious was the great power
of life'. Debord, `Rapport', in Gerard Berreby
(ed.), c.o. ..!o. o !o c1o.c 1.
!i..o.co!. .oo.c.., p. 611.
47. Jules-Francois Dupuis (Raoul Vaneigem), +
coo!... u.c., c :o...o!., trans. Donald
Nicholson-Smith (AK Press: Edinburgh, 1999),
pp. 1056.

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the counter-revolution's use of myths and consumer society's visual forms of
dominance. Their loyalty to the unconscious had the consequence that
Surrealism was recuperated. The surrealists had remained too attached to
romantic ideas and conceptions and thereby involuntarily equipped capitalism
with new material. Capitalism had no problem accepting the irrational and
unusual objects of Surrealism. If only the objects of Surrealism could be
separated from their historical and social context they presented themselves as
a much-needed renewal of the commodity.
The proposition that `the eye exists in its savage state' was self-glorying in two equally
unjustied ways. In the rst place, this was a time when advertising and news media (not to
mention the fascist `happenings' of the moment) already knew perfectly well how to manipulate
clashing images, how to milk `free' representations for all they were worth; it was therefore
quite predictable that the ruling system would co-opt the new way of looking that Surrealism was
so busily promoting. Secondly, it should have been plain to any avant-garde worth the name at
least that the organisation of social passivity, in its concern to minimise the recourse to
police and army, was bound to foster the consumption of increasingly lifelike and increasingly
personalised images, the aim being that the proletarians should move only to the extent
required for the contemplation of its own inert contentment, that it should be rendered so
passive as to be incapable of anything beyond infatuation with varied representations of its
dreams.
48
Surrealism had not been able to expand the self-destruction of art into a total
critique of capitalist society, the situationists argued. The surrealist failure was
caused by the suspect reliance on the liberating powers of the unconscious. In
the eyes of the situationists the unconscious was not really able to liberate
much imagination, and automatic writing was just plain monotone. The
conclusion was clear: the inter-war avant-garde experiments were outdated; it
was now time to realise the potential of art directly in life. Historical
developments had not merely made the anachronistic forms of art unsuitable
to the contemporary historical moment, it had also made the organisation and
channelling of human desire in art outmoded. New forms of desire had arisen
that could not be expressed in the old-fashioned art forms, but that required
art to be realised outside its institutions, i.e. in people's everyday lives. In the
jargon of the situationists, history had simply surpassed art as a separate
discursive sphere. It no longer made sense to create art except as an integrated
part of a total practice carried out in everyday life. `We are trapped, in the
cultural sphere o!c, by relations of production that stand opposed to the
necessary development of productive forces. We have to demolish these
traditional relationships, along with |. o.o. o1 /.|o.co. |o |.,
c..'
49
Art now actually prevented people from relating creatively to life.
This is why the situationists constantly criticised all of those who still used
outdated identities like àrtists', `politicians', and `philosophers'. These
identities blocked the way to the activity that they had formerly indicated.
That is why the situationists abandoned art. They negated and destroyed art to
liberate its original critique of the deterministic rationality of capitalistic
society. A liberation that should redeem all of the potential that art contained,
but that had so far only been virtual and had not had an effect in everyday life.
Ònly the real negation of culture can inherit culture's meaning. Such negation
can no longer remain .o!o.o!. It is what remains, in some manner, at the level
of culture but it has a quite different sense.'
50
The situationists began their
practice after art became unable to express anything besides alienation. The
source of art had been poisoned, and it was no longer possible to drink its
water without spreading the poison.
48. Dupuis, + coo!... u.c., c :o...o!.,
pp. 956.
49. Guy Debord, Èncore un effort si vous
voulez etre situationnistes', co, ./c.1 .. ..
tc!o.|, p. 274.
50. Debord, 1|. :c..., c |. :..o.!., p. 146.
51. Debord, 1|. :c..., c |. :..o.!., p. 136.
52. For an account of this theme within the
situationist theory, see Giorgio Agamben,
`Marginal Notes on cc.o... c |. :c..., c
|. :..o.!.', M.o .|co i1, trans. Vincenzo
Binetti and Cesare Casarino (University of
Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2000), pp. 7389.

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Spectacular consumption preserves the old culture in congealed form, going so far as to
recuperate and rediffuse even its negative manifestations; in this way, the spectacle's cultural
sector gives overt expression to what the spectacle is implicitly in its totality the
communication of the incommunicable. Thoroughgoing attacks on language are liable to emerge
in this context coolly invested with positive value by the ofcial world, for the aim is to promote
reconciliation with a dominant state of things from which all communication has been
triumphantly declared absent.
51
Experimental art had not understood that its once revolutionary refusal to be a
ctive language for a non-existing community was, after 1930, simply
welcomed by a social order that celebrated the impossibility of communication
and attempted to change this impossibility into a trans-historical principle.
The society of spectacle thus not only designated the expropriation of man's
productive activity, but the alienation of man's communicative skills and
language.
52
There was no longer any connection between occurrence and
truth, ascertainment and understanding. According to Debord, the negation of
the artwork carried out by radical art was in other words transferred into a
generally distributed substitution that pursued Dada and Surrealism's anti-art
as entertainment and sterile social behaviour. This artistic counter-revolution,
carried out by the society of spectacle, stemmed the tide of the historical
realisation of negated art. In other words, the situationists found themselves
confronted with a substitute revolution that preventatively recuperated the
potential that the situationists wished to realise in life. The various kinds of
formally experimenting art after 1930, such as `le nouveau roman', absurd
theatre, `la nouvelle vague', or happenings, prevented history from
disintegrating the social order. `The end of the history of culture manifests
itself under two antagonistic aspects: the project of culture's self-
transcendence as part of total history, and its management as a dead thing
to be contemplated in the spectacle. The rst tendency has cast its lot with the
critique of society, the second with the defence of class power.'
53
Anticipating the argument of Peter Burger in his seminal study of the avant-
garde from 1974, the situationists argued that the artistic avant-garde was
dead, that it had not survived fascism, Stalinism, and the rise of the consumer
society.
54
The true avant-garde thus no longer consisted of artists, as these
merely registered the impossibility of authentic communication. It was no
longer sufcient merely to create self-negating works that thematised the
impossibility of making art. `What is called the avant-garde of absence is
nothing but |. o/... c ooo.1.'
55
Now artistic alienation should be
overcome through the conscious intervention of social criticism in life. The
true avant-garde the avant-garde that was boosted forward by the invariable
logic of history took the negation of art as a prerequisite for a revolutionary
activity made up of equal parts transcended art and politics. The transcended
avant-garde was not `the avant-garde of pure absence, but always the staging of
the scandal of absence in favour of a desired presence'.
56
Art should, in
Debord's characteristic Hegelian jargon, /. o/!o.1, i.e. be negated and
preserved, in revolutionary theory and practice. The sublation was not the
result of disparate activists' expectations, but rather a demand from the
historical |.. . o. The situationists were thus not just interpreters of
historical developments, but an essential part of them. They were the critical
consciousness of the recurring revolution. This was what remained of the
former avant-garde practice, the claim of comprising the most advanced part
of human progress. The situationists were the avant-garde distilled down to
the ultra-extreme claim of being the true movement, a movement abreast of
historical necessity.
53. Debord, 1|. :c..., c :..o.!., pp. 12930.
54. Peter Burger, 1|.c., c |. +oo.1.,
trans. Michael Shaw (The University of
Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1984).
55. `L'avant-garde de la presence',
i..o.co!. .oo.c.., no. 8, 1963, p. 15.
56. `L'avantgarde de la presence', p. 19.

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According to the situationists, historical necessity should take place in the
construction of the situation, where a revolutionary self-consciousness would
be created. Art and politics sublated in revolutionary practice. Since the
situation had the negation of art as its prerequisite, it was not merely art
realised in life. It was the abolition of art realised in a transformed life, which
made possible a life of play, freedom, and community here and now in this
world, not in the vague future of a utopia or in another world. The situation
was a means by which the new historical forms of desire, which the society of
spectacle attempted to freeze and compensate for with an unending ow of
images, could express themselves and create a world adequate to their needs.
Rather than being a goal in itself, these moments of elated and conscious
behaviour were passages to a new life. As such, the constructed situation was
not an image of the future, but the demand of historical logic on contemporary
society. The channelling and strengthening of the new desire by the situation
undermined the social and economic structures that limited and froze the new
forms of desire. Political action, daily life, art, and theory were all
transformed in the situation.
We replace the existential passivity with the construction of moments of life, doubt with playful
afrmation. So far philosophers and artists have only interpreted situations; the point now is to
transform them . . . Since the individual is dened by his situation, he wants the power to
create situations worthy of his desires.
57
Unfortunately the situationists were not able to transform the situation in the
radical manner in which they had envisioned. It was not possible to realise the
situationists' grand and abstract expectations. The appropriating event of the
situation abruptly removed from the spectacle never materialised. The clean
break never occurred and, as time progressed, fear of being recuperated
forced the situationists to abandon art and made it increasingly difcult to
locate the difference between critique and recuperation.
The situationists subjected the contemporary avant-garde which according
to the situationists merely repeated Dada's destruction of the artwork and
Surrealism's realisation of art to severe criticism, and tried to radicalise the
avant-garde's project by paradoxically equipping it with a subversive edifying
effect. `Dadaism sought to abolish art without realising it, and Surrealism
sought c ..o!.. o. .|co o/c!.|. .. The critical position since worked out
by the situationists demonstrates that the abolition and the realisation of art are
inseparable aspects of a single transcendence of art.'
58
It was not possible to
create something new as art. The artwork and even the anti-artwork were only
capable of reecting life in the society of spectacle. Rather than criticising,
they could only consolidate the prevailing order with its impotent forms. This
was also the judgement of Peter Burger when about ten years later he
formulated his 1|.c... 1.. +oo.1. and concluded that the postwar-avant-
garde destroyed the project of the interwar-avant-garde by institutionalising
the avant-garde as art. The dismissal of visual art was widespread among leftist
intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s, although it was rarely formulated as
authoritatively as the situationists did. But the distrust of art and of the image
was in the air. Following the take-over of mass communication by television
intellectuals like Daniel Boorstein critiqued the image and argued that the use
of images in politics led to manipulation.
59
The theory of the society of the
spectacle was a radicalisation of this critique of the image.
According to the situationists the only merit of art was demonstrating its
impotence and inertia, for then it revealed itself as part of a historical
movement that had made art impossible. On the other hand, it was possible to
57. `Le Questionnaire', i..o.co!.
.oo.c.., no. 9, 1964, p. 24.
58. Debord, 1|. :c..., c |. :..o.!., p. 136.
59. Daniel Boorstin, 1|. io. + co.1. c |.
t.o1ci. . +....o (Vintage: Vintage,
1961). As the title suggests, Boorstin argued
that America was living in an age of
`contrivance', in which simulations and
fabricated images had become a dominant force
in society staging phoney political events.

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carry out a condensed avant-garde effect that was thus neither art nor politics
but rather an expression of the proletariat's self-consciousness. With this
historico-philosophical idea of the death of art and the subsequent historically
necessary realisation of art in life, the situationists clearly differentiated
themselves from most contemporary art. Practically all artistic groupings and
practices be they happenings, uxus, the Independent Group, Nouveau
Realisme, La Nouvelle Vague, or Le Nouveau Roman were characterised by
an ironic interest in the objects and images of the new mass culture.
60
These
artistic practices `did not see the late 1950s through the evils of consumerism
but through the opportunities it presented, rarely through the memory of the
Holocaust but more often through a joy at being alive'.
61
They identied
themselves with the iconography of mass culture in order to liberate artistic
practice from the still active inuence from bourgeois high culture. They
embraced the escalating consumerist public and attempted to interfere with
the cultural logic of the circulation of products by creating semi-autonomous
universes of self-dening objects without authors. They thus alternated
between an anti- and pro-capitalistic rhetoric that was very different from the
situationists' authoritative condemnation of contemporary society.
The situationists' continued insistence on being a post-Dadaist and post-
surrealist organisation in a world where art could not serve as a tool for
revolution made them stand apart in a world where other artists experienced a
feeling of freedom from past kinds of social control. Interestingly it has not
been the situationists but these other artists and artistic groups who
collectively worked toward suppressing the terrible historical events in
connection with World War Two and afrmed the rapid development of
consumer culture in the post-war era who have been assigned an almost
hegemonic status within art history of the post-war era. The activities that
mainstream art history has selected and privileged are, interestingly enough,
those that refrained from investigating the (im)possibility of historical
experience at a point in time characterised by the suppression of political
history and the rise of a consumer society.
62
The situationists differentiated
themselves from almost all other neo-avant-gardes through their radicalised
negation of art by declaring it dead. It was no longer possible to use the
artwork as an arena for critique, the situationists thundered. The model that
the former avant-garde had developed and used turned out to be insufcient in
a late-capitalistic consumer culture, and any attempt to follow this model
would result in the avant-garde enthusiastically acquiring the role of cultural
claqueur, expected to celebrate the new consumer society. In other words, the
situationists `politicised' themselves upon encountering the new conditions of
production of the image, reaching the conclusion that the visual sphere, the
`spectacular', was the arena in which the battle over the formulation of life
should take place. Both the political foundations and the art forms were
changing. This resulted in a `politicisation' of àrt' turned toward the
predominant visual forms that colonised everyday life and performed a suture
on a society that, according to the situationists, was characterised by alienation
and boredom. The situationists desperately tried to refuse playing the role of
make-up or internal interference in a gigantic political project consisting of
equal parts social modernisation and amnesia.
VI
Even though the International Situationist was without doubt the organisation
or group that not only most clearly addressed the activities of Dada and
60. For analyses of the relationship between the
neo-avant-garde and the rise of consumer
society after World War Two, see Russell
Berman, `Consumer Society: The Legacy of the
Avant-Garde and the False Sublation of
Aesthetic Autonomy', Mc1.. co!o.. o1 c....o!
1|.c., +., tc!... o1 |. t.o., c |. t.o|o.
:.|cc! (University of Wisconsin Press: Madison,
1989), pp. 4253; Thomas Crow, `Modernism
and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts', Mc1.. +.
. |. ccc co!o.. (Yale University Press:
New Haven, 1996), pp. 337, Andreas
Huyssen, +.. |. c..o ..1. Mc1..., Mo
co!o.., tcc1... (Indiana University Press:
Bloomington, 1986).
61. Michele C. Cone, `Pierre Restany and the
:co.oo r. o!..', 1o!. t...| :o1.., no. 98,
2000, p. 65. Cone is referring to Nouveaus
Realisme but I think the characteristic can be
applied to more or less all the mentioned
groups.
62. See Benjamin Buchloh, `Plenty or Nothing:
From Yves Klein's .1. to Arman's t. t!..',
t.... i..1 :o.. . .oo! +., +..|...o..,
o1 .. .c t.o.. :v:vv (Guggenheim
Museums Publications: New York, 1998),
pp. 8699.

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Surrealism after 1945 but developed a coherent theory of the avant-garde as
well, they have not been part of the reception and discussion of the avant-
garde and the neo-avant-garde.
63
In Peter Burger's book 1|.c... 1.. +oo.1.
from 1974, the International Situationist is not mentioned, while the neo-
avant-garde is generally characterised as a farcical repetition of the historical
avant-garde's heroic defeat.
64
According to Burger, the historical avant-garde's
critique of the institutional status of art the fact that the critique made by art
of social phenomena like the deterministic rationality of capitalism merely has
a compensatory character due to its autonomy and does not break through to
everyday life was reduced to an empty repetition in the hands of the neo-
avant-garde, who thus transformed the critique of the institution to
institutionalised transgression without any link to life practice. `[T]he neo-
avant-garde institutionalizes the ooo.1. o o. and thus negates genuinely
avant-gardiste intentions.'
65
The neo-avant-garde was structural self-
deception. As already indicated, this analysis was strikingly similar to the
one that the situationists advanced from the middle of the 1950s and forward.
But Burger does not mention the situationists and their critique of the
contemporary artistic avant-garde.
As had been pointed out by later art historians like Benjamin Buchloh and
Hal Foster, Burger's analysis of the avant-garde suffer from a number of
problematic assumptions.
66
Burger's theory is based on a teleological
conception of history that fails to consider the fact that the auto-critical
moments of art are often only decipherable after a certain delay. He also
reduces the avant-garde to just one paradigm (the sublation of the false
autonomy of the institution of art). Buchloh criticises Burger for not carrying
out a contextualised analysis of the neo-avant-garde. Only by investigating
different communities' uses and readings of the neo-avant-garde's works is it
possible to attribute meaning to them, writes Buchloh. However, like Burger,
he highlights the close connection between reconstructed bourgeois society
and the neo-avant-garde. `This audience sought a reconstruction of the avant-
garde that would full its own needs, and the demystication of aesthetic
practice was certainly not among those needs. Neither was the integration of
art into social practice, but rather the opposite: the association of art with
spectacle.'
67
Here Buchloh agrees with Burger, who precisely writes that it is
less a question of the neo-avant-garde consciously diluting the critique of the
institution of art than but rather one of escalating consumer society having
changed the conditions of the production and reception of (anti-)art. `This [the
use of anti-artistic intent for artistic ends] must not be judged a ``betrayal'' of
the aims of the avant-garde movements . . . but the result of a historical
process.'
68
For consumer society itself integrated aesthetics and daily life, thus
realising the project of the historical avant-garde, although in quite a different
way than the latter had intended. Interestingly enough, it was precisely this
conclusion that the situationists arrived at and argued for: art and capital had
merged in a higher synthesis: the spectacle. Buchloh also uses the term `the
spectacle', yet without referring to Debord and the situationists.
69
Thus both Burger and Buchloh underline the appearance of the new forces
and relations of symbolic production in bourgeois society that dramatically
changed the conditions for critical art after World War Two. Most post-war
visual art was not engaged in a direct attack on the institution of art and did not
try to ally itself with a social revolution as the historical avant-garde did
between the World Wars. For the most part, artists worked within the
connes of the resurrected i.c!. 1. to.. where abstract painting was covered
with political connotations and presented as the art of the free West. Neo-
63. One of the few exceptions was to
|.!cc|.. 1. !|.c... 1. !o .o!o.. 1o
!ooo.1. .o!o..!!. o..... 1.o. :v. (Guy
Leprat: Paris, 1962) written by the French artist
and cultural sociologist Robert Estivals. Debord
did not approve of the book as he explained in
a letter to Estivals where he proceeded to
present the `real' meaning of the avant-garde.
Debord, cc...c1o.. c! 2 :../..
:vo. ../.. :vo., pp. 1915. For an analysis
of the letter, see Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen,
Èngageret, forceret, kropsls. Hovedlse
bemrkninger om den forsvundne avantgardists
selvforstaelse', to.o.co :|.... c.
xo|.c..., no. 22, 2003, pp. 126148. It
should also be noted that strangely very few of
the analyses of the Situationist International has
attempted to locate the group within the
context of the avant-garde as theorised by
Burger and onwards. To this day most of the
work done on the situationists has not been able
or willing to engage in a historicisation of the
group but have preferred to mythologise
Debord, Jorn, Constant, etc. Among the
exceptions that approach the material form a
historical perspective are Anselm Jappe, co,
./c.1, Mario Perniola, i :.oo..c.. i!
c..c .|. |o .c..oc !o :c...o 1.!!c
:.o.c!c', Simon Sadler, 1|. :.oo.c. c.,
(MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1998); Peter
Wollen, `Bitter Victory: The Art and Politics of
the Situationist International', in Elisabeth
Sussman (ed.), o |. oo. c o . .c!.
|.co| o .o|.. /... c. . .. 1|.
:.oo.c. i..o.co! :v:v2 (MIT Press:
Cambridge, MA, 1989), pp. 2061.
64. Burger, 1|.c., c |. +oco.1., pp. 5763.
65. Burger, 1|.c., c |. +oco.1., p. 58.
66. See Benjamin Buchloh, `The Primary Colors
for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of
the Neo-Avant-Garde', o.c/.., no. 37, 1986,
pp. 4152; Hal Foster, `Who's Afraid of the
Neo-Avant-Garde', 1|. r.o. c |. r.o! 1|.
+oco.1. o |. i1 c |. c.o., (MIT Press:
Cambridge, MA, 1996), pp. 132.
67. Buchloh, `The Primary Colors for the
Second Time', p. 51.
68. Burger, 1|.c., c |. +oco.1., p. 57.
69. Buchloh seems unwilling to consider the
situationist rejection of art and he tries to
endorse an Adorno-inspired understanding of art
and in fact concludes that only by insisting on
its autonomy is art able to challenge society.

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avant-gardist groups like Nouveaux Realisme and The Independent Group
acted somewhat critical towards the institution of art but in a much more
ambivalent manner than the historical avant-garde. The Situationist Inter-
national, on the other hand, explicitly referred to the avant-garde of the inter-
war period and the situationists engaged in politics to the point where they
abandoned art as a separate activity in favour of revolutionary actions and the
writing of a dismissive theory of capitalist society. Yet the Situationist
International is strangely absent in the theory of the avant-garde. Both Burger
and Buchloh tend to repeat the analysis of the situationists in their account of
the possibilities for art after World War Two, but without analysing the
theories and practice of the Situationist International or referring to them even
though they would be the best example of the fact that avant-garde's role
changed radically with the false integration of aesthetics and daily life in
consumer society.
One of the reasons why Burger does not include the Situationist
International in his theory is probably caused by the development of the
(anti-)political movements in the 1960s and 1970s. The exclusion of the
situationists' programmatic renunciation of an alternative artistic plasticity in
favour of developing a radical social critique seems to indicate the signicance
of the historical anchoring of the theories of the avant-garde. It is thus
interesting that Burger directly links Surrealism his most important example
of the historical avant-garde together with May 1968 in his book on
Surrealism written in 1970. Àt the latest with the events in May 1968 the
actuality of Surrealism is evident.'
70
The situationists played a prominent role
in and had considerable inuence on May 1968, which nevertheless did not
satisfy the hopes for a total revolution. The twelfth and nal issue of the
situationists' journal appeared in September 1969 and was rife with
expectations of victory: up and down Europe, especially France and Italy
where the revolt ourished. But even though Italy in particular was the scene
of labour revolts and student unrest for a number of years to come, the protest
movement quickly died out most places in Europe.
71
Already in the beginning
of the 1970s the movement many thought was going to be a global revolution
had satised itself with minor changes and higher wages. This historical
development is the background for Burger's theory of the avant-garde and the
neo-avant-garde. Burger thus wrote his book in 1974, a few years after the
German student movement began to disintegrate, among other things
degenerating into the Red Army Fraction.
72
At the time there were good
reasons for insisting on the necessity of formulating an elaborate theory of
capitalist society and the function of art within it. Without such a theory the
overcoming of art and politics was unlikely to occur and Burger ends his book
by concluding that the integration of art and life could only happen in
connection with a social revolution and on the basis of a consistent theory of
the workings of capitalism.
73
When Burger formulated his theory he was surrounded by the effects of
what he considered to be the problematic consequences of a political
engagement that had not been aware of the capacity of the capitalist society to
absorb critique. That is why he chose to locate the project of the avant-garde in
history and marginalised the Situationist International, preferring to put his
trust in theory. Paradoxically, he thereby repeats the situationists and equips
theory with the ability to denounce false consciousness and create worlds. The
replacement for the historical avant-garde was thus neither the neo-avant-
garde, which merely supplemented the institution of art with material, nor the
new social movements, which have degenerated into terrorism or emotionally
70. Peter Burger, .. .o.c..|. :o...o!.o
:o1.. .o. ooo.1...|. t...oo. (u :.o.
:o1.. ....... +oo/.) (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt,
1996), p. 12.
71. See Paolo Persichetti and Oreste Scalzone's
to ..c!o.c . !.o (Dagorno: Paris, 2000) for
an overview of the situation in Italy.
72. For an account of the political situation in
Germany in the Seventies, see Hartwig
Bogeholz, .. .o.|. o.| 1. x... i..
c|.c.| (Rowohlt: Reinbek, 1995). For analyses
of the new social movements, see George
Katsiacas, 1|. :o/...c c tc!... io.c.o
+occco :c..o! Mc.. o1 |. ..c!c..o.c
c i..,1o, t.. (Humanities Press: New Jersey,
1997); Gianni Statera, .o| c o uc.o 1|.
..!c. o1 ..!.. c :o1. Mc.. .
io.c. (Oxford University Press: Oxford,
1975).
73. Burger, 1|.c., c |. +oco.1., p. 54.
Another reason why the situationists did not
appear in either Burger's or Buchloh's theories
of the avant-garde should probably be sought for
in the fact that in spite of their own analyses,
they desperately desire to maintain the
possibility of critical art and therefore do not
open up for the situationists' radical and
authoritative rejection of art. None of them
really wishes to leave art history and attempt to
write a story about the connections between
modernity, capitalism, critique of capitalism,
and art, a digression that in many ways clearly
pursues the idea of the historical avant-garde as
an attempt to destroy the distinction between
art and life. This broader historical perspective,
which was thus to include both artistic and
political critiques of capitalism or bourgeois
society, could be called `the history of the
anarchistic imagination'. It would pose critical
questions to the former separation of art and
politics as two separate discursive spheres and
would be forced to examine questions of
autonomisation, modernisation, and capitalism in
a historical view from German romanticism to
May 1968 and up to the civil disturbances in
Seattle, Goteborg, and Genoa. I shall prudently
refrain from attempting to establish this history
of the anarchistic imagination, as my aim here is
simply to examine the relationship between the
surrealists and the situationists and to ask why
the situationists do not appear in the various
avant-garde theories. Jochen Schulte-Sasse coins
the term ànarchic imagination' in his text
Ìmagination and Modernity: Or the Taming of
the Human Mind', co!o.o! c...o., no. 5,
1987, pp. 2348. He writes: `Cultural
movements such as Early Romanticism, the
historical avant-garde of the twenties, or the
student movement of the sixties and early
seventies have in common a project of leading
art back in life, or, at least in part, overcoming
the functional differentiation of social realms in
modernity.' (p. 24).

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entrenched identities (as within the ecology movement), but rather the
scientic theorist. Rather than pinning his faith on art and politics, Burger
following Debord and the situationists believed in the sustained class-conscious
critique of ideologically determined objects. Like the Situationist International,
Burger abandoned art. After the defeat of the historical avant-garde modern
art had run idle, Burger wrote, and thereby repeated the situationists'
authoritative dismissal of art.
There was an unbounded faith in theory as the key to the reading and
production of reality in 1|.c... 1.. +oo.1. that was typical of the times and
that, a decade before Burger wrote his book, had characterised the absolutist
claim of the situationists. The intention to avoid a dogmatic base/
superstructure model in which all experiments are held up against the
development in basis resulted in a forced belief in theory. The aim of Burger's
distinction between theoretical and ideological practice, a distinction he
develops based on Althusser, was to justify the pure being of knowledge and
those possessing this knowledge.
74
For if theory constitutes an enclave of
freedom in a world characterised by ideological alienation, there is only one
way to criticise theory, and that is through theory. If everyone is buried in
ideology and illusion, only the muscular, lonely, and heroic theoretician is able
to penetrate false consciousness. Only the theorist (i.e. respectively Burger or
the Situationist International) is able to advance real critique. Paradoxically,
Burger took over one of the Situationist International's most problematic ideas
about the avant-garde; the theoretician as vanguard, as the head of society
leading the headless masses forward out of the miserable situation in which
they are stuck. Now the theoretician as the privileged representative of
Marxist revolutionary science was the avant-garde dismissing all contemporary
art movements as irrelevant.
1|. oo|c. .|. c ..1 |. o....o.c c t... io..., joc :.|, o1 +1..
1.c.!. c. |... ..| o1 .c. c .o.!, 1.o c |. .
74. For a critique of Althusser's distinction
between ideology and theory, see Jacques
Ranciere, to !.. c 1+!|o.. (Gallimard: Paris,
1974). There was a big difference between the
theories of the situationists and the theories that
Althusser and his pupils developed in the 1960s.
The situationists referred to the young Marx and
the theory of alienation while Althusser referred
to the late Marx. In the introduction to the
French translation of o xo.o! Althusser
advised the readers to skip the chapter on
commodity fetishism. This chapter was precisely
the one the situationists favoured. Althusser
wrote: `The theory of ..|. is the last trace
of the Hegelian inuence and this time it is
extremely visible and damageable (because here
all the theoreticians of reication and alienation
has found a base for their idealist interpretations
of Marx's thought).' Àvertissement aux lecteurs
du Livre 1 du co.o!', t. co.o!, trans. Joseph
Roy (Garnier-Flammarion: Paris, 1969), p. 27.
Despite these differences both the situationists
and Althusser regarded theory as the
uncontaminated reservoir of Marxism in a world
characterised by bourgeois ideology. With
theory the theoretician was to destroy the false
world and create a new communist paradise.

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Rasmussen - The SI Surrealism and The Difficult Fusion of Art and Politics

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Rasmussen - The SI Surrealism and The Difficult Fusion of Art and Politics

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mikk

ditions Allia: Paris,

ditions Belin: Paris, 1990), pp. 14654;

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